Novell cut off the Copenhagen R&D appartment in order to reduce costs. Unfortunately, this means that one of the most important developers of the XForms extension for Firefox
lost his job, which might be crucial for the survival of the XForms extension project. The engineer is now looking for a sponsor.
Firefox XForms Support in Danger After Novell Engineer Gets Laid Off
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
This is bad news.
Stay away from the Apartment!!! It’s been slashed!!
he should put in for a job @ google…
anony_mouse_cow_herd
how about the community pitch in (no not fund this guy) but help finish the XForms extension. I’m sure the guy can also score some donations to keep working on it, but I think the larger community could do a better job.
that might help the firefox plugin, but in the meantime this guy is more interested in where his next paycheck is going to be coming from, DUH!
I really hope he gets a job and manages to continue working on this critical technology.
We need to set something up to support Abeaufour so he can continue working on this project, if there is already something set up, somebody please point me to it, otherwise we as a community need to employ him so he can continue his firefox work.
if this work is so important to the platform, wouldn’t he be a strong candidate for support from the official Mozilla bodies?
An Xforms extention to Firefox is critical for some large organisations, IBM is probably the best candidate for hiring Allan Beaufour since they make a lot of business with Xforms solutions they sell to the corporate world.
Nevertheless, Xforms is not critical for the Mozilla Fundation which has to focus on core technologies and improvements that benefit most users, of course if they had a lot of money they would probably hire him as well as many other developpers to work on all aspects of the project, but their ressources and limited so they focus on things that benefit most users and developers.
Where is the news about the other 599 souls losing their job at Novell?
XForms is the future of online forms as envisioned by the W3C
i believe W3C is not just one person. or is this ex-noveller the only one with that vision?
OSS!? OSS is “freedom”! OSS is independent! Ha-ha-ha! OSS depends on sponsors!
I’m afraid. It is simply not feasible for any company like Novell to employ lots of people (and whole departments in some cases) hacking on open source software – and sometimes fairly low-level at that. One or two yes, and they must be contributing to software that Novell use in their core products, which is mainly their server stuff.
It’s a bit naive of people to think that this was ever possible, feasible or could last forever. Open source software has to work.
So he gets laid and loses interest in.. of wait. Off!
..and there I ruined my wannabefunny comment by mistyping ‘oh wait’. Sorry for offtopic.
Who said that layoffs wouldn’t affect to the “open source” part of Novell?
I have supported bounties for things that I found important in the past. Mainly Aros… If the communtiy wants to start something in an attempt to sponcer his continued devlopement then I will of course donate what I can. It wouldn’t be a whole lot. But there are enought of us in the world that we can do it. This is just too important to let go…
Firefox XForms Support in Danger After Novell Engineer Gets Laid
Off
Behold the danger of fixed-width tables in HTML!
(edit: Damn, I’m slow! http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=12512&comment_id=55054)
Edited 2005-11-03 20:06