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I feel the complete opposite about this -- it's a really good example of management not just making a conceptual decision but diving into the details and making
by ath0 11y ago
I feel the complete opposite about this -- it's a really good example of management not just making a conceptual decision but diving into the details and making a call, but with respect for all involved. Note that:
* The chairperson joins in and speaks with authority. This isn't a VP of eng making a call about two repos.
* It's not a binary decision - "cancel development, fire the people affected, leave the product to wither on the vine" - but a nuanced one: don't make decisions that make Firefox worse, I don't pretend to have all the details but will give you an example of one decision that I have an opinion on and who you should look to for advice (the platform and infrastructure teams)
* Recognizes that it's not just a technical call but has legal and community issues, and tells you who will be sorting those out as well.
Management is hard -- you can't just make a blunt statement and expect people to fall in line, especially in open-source projects. Would you have preferred a harder line? Do you think that would've been better for the community in the long run?
- bshimmin 11y agoI think I probably would have preferred something brief and written in plain English. Its author was previously a lawyer, and it shows. I'm sure it's very measured and careful and so forth - but really everyone here can read between the lines that Mozilla want rid of Thunderbird because it's tying up their development resources and it's not their core focus. I'm sure everything is complicated at Mozilla because there's a Foundation and a Corporation and they work on open-source projects and do "research" stuff (like Servo) and no doubt the lines between all of these things are confusingly blurred (at least to an outsider like me, but maybe internally too), and perhaps that necessitates a hundred line missive from a lawyer about laser focus... but really, does any of it need to be that complicated?