My good friend Chris Messina wrote a very interesting article, which in many ways comes down to a large, influential part of the web development community being disenfranchised from Mozilla.

Doom! Of course John Lilly is playing cool on the outside, because they have long fought giants. Mozilla’s ability to combat goliaths, and live with fear and uncertain contribute to them being the best browser development community there is.

Although Mozilla is the best browser community, like Chris Messina, I consider myself part of the disenfranchised community, tired of the Firefox is the web mentality. But I will readily admit nobody has a better track record than Mozilla for open source consumer software development.

As impatient consumers, particularly impatient geek consumers, we all want our pet issues addressed right NOW. One of the greatest achievements of Mozilla these last few years is worrying about the right problems at the right time. And one thing they’ve always gotten mostly right is enabling participation in all aspects of Firefox development, promotion and support.

My instincts tell me that it has slowed them down (a lot), but positions them well for the long game.

In many ways their community, their team, is like the guiding principle of the Internet, they can remove a number of members, and the team will continue to function. Firefox development is highly robust and survivable.

Are leaders like Dave Hyatt, Ben Goodger, Blake Ross, Joe Hewitt, and Mike Schroepfer missed? Of course they are, but these are only a few of the many Mozilla champions.

“We build Firefox with an open development process. At Mozilla people earn respect, authority and decision-making ability by demonstrating their abilities. This allows individual people to become full, equal participants, with both authority and responsibility for building a better Internet. The development process for Firefox demonstrates the type of Internet we want to build. (Not perfectly, of course.)”

Chrome will be the browser built by Google, like Safari is the browser built by Apple. Firefox is the browser built by everyone.

Everyone that can cope in the structured, programmer-geeky rule laden Mozilla open source community. But maybe that is what is required for such a complex and important product.

What track record does Google have in open source development of consumer software? Any?

By extension what track record does Google have in supporting consumer products? Here they do have one, and it’s a poor one. Automation ultimately doesn’t cut it. Also, it’s much more fun when the software is installed, as opposed to a web service that you fix and update any time.

What community leaders has Google assembled for these heady tasks?

What open source tools do these Google leaders have in their arsenals? As great of gifts as the Netscape source code in 1998 were the open source tools to develop and collaborate on development.

Although today using Bugzilla and Bonsai (with Hg Web Viewer a poor replacement) would probably drive me nuts, those are a couple of the tools that makes development of a large, complete product by a large Mozilla community possible.

Google Code seems great for small projects, or non-consumer software projects with small teams, but I’m not convinced that Google Code is up for the challenge of a web browser. But I suspect it doesn’t have to be.

I don’t expect Chrome to become a leader in the browser space. I expect it to be about writing cool code, solving cool engineering problems, and pressuring Mozilla into solving the problems that Google cares about, or someone else will take Google’s code and solve them.

The greatest gift of open source isn’t the right to fork, but the ability to merge. I expect Apple to be the first to incorporate this generously licensed code (third-party software). But Mozilla won’t be that far behind, because with the top teams collaborating on WebKit, the myth of the masses will be eroded. Sure, Mozilla’s development team may be made up mostly of volunteers, but those contributions are often picking at the surface of problems or polishing generally solved problems. The complexity of code necessitates highly skilled, highly focused, full time developers.

Chrome’s technologies will be powerful forces for the Mozilla disenfranchised. Will WebKit one day power Firefox? What other technologies or experiences will we see Firefox adopt from Chrome?

From today forward I will no longer recommend Movable Type as a viable new media blogging / podcasting platform. I will recommend WordPress to any and all that ask my advice.

Todd elaborates in the comments on the experience in WordPress that has contributed to his conversion:

Wordpress does have native support when you are publishing a post you will see add media at the bottom of the page.

If you add your media there and hit publish the media will be included as a enclosure in your RSS feed.

While you will not have all the fancy itunes tags you can manually edit your rss template and add that data to be included.

To make it easy the podpress plugin makes it easy for you to add the itunes data to the feed.

Another thing to consider is that at least you can publish a podcast with WordPress today. You cannot say the same with MovableType Version 4 it is simply not possible to publish a podcast with the current version of the blogging software.

Welcome to the team Todd!

This is a win for both open source and WordPress. Movable Type (MT) is currently only open source in the press release sense — I do look forward to that changing. Todd Cochrane, with his quick mind and wicked tongue, is a very welcome addition to the WordPress team.

The technical details of the problems Todd Cochrane documented are interesting though not as interesting to me as him not feeling supported by the Movable Type community and the company behind MT, Six Apart.

Before WordPress, I haven’t ever been part of a community of this size where people support each other so well, but don’t think that similar problems to Todd’s don’t affect WordPress. There are a lot of people that still feel outside, and we all can do something about this by lending more than our ideas — whatever you are good at or are interested in learning can help WordPress to be a better product and continue to have the best community.

Dan Kuykendall has done just that. He is the the author of PodPress, and he and his collaborators and contributors’ creation PodPress likely increases Todd’s frustration with MT — nothing bugs me as much as knowing that someone’s tool already has a feature I want. I really enjoyed hearing him speak at WordCamp 2007. PodPress is a big reason why people choose WordPress for podcasting.

WordPress is the best blogging software there is, but it will only stay that way if we listen to the Todd Cochranes, welcome the Todd Cochranes, and thank the Dan Kuykendalls of the world.

There are many more Todd Cochrane and Dan Kuykendalls, though they tend to have different names. Are you one? What are your frustrations? How are you contributing? What are the barriers I can help remove?