david hyatt clarifies his position on forking the netscape and mozilla UIs. it seems so straighforward, that i’m surprised it’s rankled some feathers:
“The Netscape suite and Mozilla suite are constantly at war as features go into the Mozilla tree that Netscape doesn’t want, and Netscape is forced to take byzantine routes to include its own desired user interface because it ends up being blocked by Mozilla. The issue of whether these UI changes are good or bad is completely irrelevant. There is a single fundamental principle that those who happen to disagree with Netscape’s UI decisions overlook: that Netscape has the right to completely and utterly control the user interface of its application and mozilla.org has the right to control the user interface of its suite.
None of the other applications built using Gecko work this way. It’s an insane no-win situation to be in, but we’ve tolerated it in order to make it to 1.0.”