If you read the chapter that Joel recommends, it talks about the design patterns guys that came in and how the anti-duct tape guys had a role to play in that delay.
Mozilla Firefox was forked from the rewritten Mozilla codebase
> Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta...Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
Re-writing a codebase to spawn a totally seperate application is not the same as when you're doing it to re-release an enhanced version of the same application (with a bumped up version number).
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Maybe Netscape's duct-tape programming had some side-effects though... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
If you read the chapter that Joel recommends, it talks about the design patterns guys that came in and how the anti-duct tape guys had a role to play in that delay.
I haven't read the book yet, plan to get it soon. Sounds awesome.
A consequence of those rewrite side-effects:
Mozilla Firefox was forked from the rewritten Mozilla codebase
> Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta...Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/0.1.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-users@linux-sxs.org/msg067...
You're confusing two different things here.
Re-writing a codebase to spawn a totally seperate application is not the same as when you're doing it to re-release an enhanced version of the same application (with a bumped up version number).