How does new F7 schedule affect Firefox

[Christopher Aillon]

Bojan Smojver wrote:
> Now that the planned release date for F7 is 24 May 2007 (a month after
> EOL for FF 1.5)

Apologies for the delayed response, I was on vacation.

EOL is misleading here.  The Mozilla Corporation will be transferring 
maintainership away from themselves simply because they do not have the 
resources to continue pushing out builds for it.

     <aside>
     With over 40 officially supported language locales on the 3
     platforms, with installer, non-installer, "update" and source,
     there's a rather large number of files that need to built and
     then put through testing (I think I managed to remember all the
     variants, but I might have missed one or two.)  This gets done
     many times in the days leading up to the release.  I don't
     blame them for wanting to stop doing releases for it.  That's
     even before they start playing around with the various
     extensions.
     </aside>

If Firefox were closed-source, it truly would be EOL when the entity 
controlling it decides it is.  Since it isn't, then the nature of open 
source takes over.  When Mozilla.org stops supporting it, others in the 
Mozilla community will.  I've already announced that Red Hat will take 
on this responsibility at least until 3.0 is released.  Prior to Robert 
O'Callahan leaving Novell, he also mentioned he would assist with that. 
  Whether or not this is still the case, I cannot say, but Red Hat's 
commitment is still intact.  Red Hat has already successfully 
demonstrated this with past Mozilla branches, such as Mozilla 1.4.