Everybody seems to be slagging mozilla these days. mozilla's ultimate released quality aside, it seems to me that mozilla is rather instructive in a challenge that faces all major open-sources projects: it isn't just source that's open, it's the entire development process. From the high profile and loud resignations to flaky preliminary builds, it's all there for the public to pick over. The unfortunate side effect can be that people make up their minds before trying the finished product. Beyond not being open in development, there is really nothing that can prevent these problems, beyond user education - as more people understand the nature of open source development, perhaps these problems will abate.
I think that the next big open source project that will face this problem will be eazel and its nautilus project for linux. It's highly visible, and easily comparable to closed source products. Throw in the presence of several high-profile ex-apple engineers, and it should get very interesting.
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