fm6's Journal: Irony at Mozilla.org

I've been thinking of tweaking my own version of Mozilla for Windows. Problem: the official build uses the Microsoft C++ compiler (just the command line thing, not the Visual C++ IDE), and I don't feel like buying a copy. The latest release can be built with GCC instead, but the resulting binaries won't run CL-compiled plugins. So no Java!

Mozilla.org seems to be having a hard time staying away from closed-source apps. Training videos are provided only in Real format, which means that Free Software True Believers can't look at them.

I'm not a FSTB, but I do thoroughly dislike Real's software products. (Intrusive, badly designed, tend to fuck up your system.) Hard for me to understand why everybody's so dependent on them. When I worked at SGI, we would watch company meeting MPEG streams on our IRIX workstations. Of course, that was our own technology (since spun off), but it used standard formats. Open source equivalents exist, but none are ready for end-users yet. So everybody uses proprietary Real and Microsoft formats. Too bad!