If there are any Mozillians here, I'm curious about how the organization balances its technology development and advocacy functions. Do you think it has been shifting one way or another? Do you think that both roles are represented equally in leadership?
The Mozilla Manifesto
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Re: The Mozilla Manifesto
#22Has the op posted the Icelandic version to get it here as a new post and to make a point? Look, I’m saddened by the layoffs too. And I’m very sad the dev tools and servo teams teams in particular have been hit. And I would like to know why. Yet there are still 750 mozilla employees. The servo stuff was merged into ff already. I’m not saying it’s good that they’ve scaled down their R&D but the narrative that the C-sui…
> The servo stuff was merged into ff already. Really? The project was done? That is at odds to what nearly every person I follow involved with the project has had to say recently.
On another post one of the dev teams said, although it’s not “finished”, a lot of the code has been merged into ff. It has already been useful. He even used the term “winding down”.
Re: The Mozilla Manifesto
#23As someone who has been running my own personal fork off ff for the past half decade because no way the things i want in (and left out) would get adopted due to the conflict of interests at Mozilla, I see these times a great opportunity for more performant adversive additions (and removals of cruft) into browsers directly vs third party addons or custom hacks people may have to do personally now (spoofing data browsers make available to servers/js, noscript, null routing on the fly, etc).
Re: The Mozilla Manifesto
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone is already on board with your ideals of open Internet. I don't think that's the case. Increasingly content is being placed in walled gardens which you don't get full access to that content unless you have an account. Google is still pushing AMP. Chrome is becoming the new IE, and sites that 'work best' or only work with Chrome are not uncommon. Those (and many other) factors don't indicate to me that every…
I think most people can (and do) agree with these ideals stated in the abstract, but still do things that violate them in their jobs / real life because of practical considerations such as pursuing a profit. Not unlike how most people understand the dangers of climate change, but continue to drive cars, fly, use air conditioning etc. Or, stated another way, we are all hypocrites to some extent.
Or, stated yet another way, we all suck at coordinating. It's a problem with our species. If something that requires self-sacrifice starts yielding value only after everyone (or majority) does it, it simply doesn't happen, not spontaneously.
The history of human civilization - of governments, religions and movements, of gangs and corporations and worker unions - can be seen as attempts to surmount our inability to coordinate at scale. Laws, shared beliefs and ideologies, shunning, taboos, money - they're all tools for creating and maintaining coordination in large groups.
A classic essay on that topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
Re: The Mozilla Manifesto
#25>The Internet is an integral part of modern life—a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.
What if Mozilla had used the internet and hadn't spent their billions on bay-area engineers but on hiring young third-world talents and offered them a job that educated them in web- and browser development?
There could be thousands of engineers working on Firefox and servo with the benefit that they would develop content that would be guaranteed to work on Firefox.
Re: The Mozilla Manifesto
#26I wonder if #8 is the issue here
Re: The Mozilla Manifesto
#27Does Mozilla even follow their own Manifesto? > Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional. So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy? > Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource. We are still waiting for Pocket's server source code... > Magnifying the public benefit aspec…
> So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy? That's not their entire approach to privacy. How would you have them exist? There aren't enough people willing to pay for a web browser in 2020. There aren't enough unpaid volunteers to work for free and outcompete Chrome. What would you have Mozilla do? They're trying to develop other services that can actually make them money so they…
> There aren't enough people willing to pay for a web browser in 2020.
As one said, their problems didn't start in 2020. Honestly, Firefox should have fought tooth and nail to be THE embeddable browser. We should not be embedding Blink/WebKit but Gecko or Servo.
It should have fought Google in EU, but kinda hard to do that when you depend on them.
The reason they got checkmated weren't made now, but several years before.
Re: The Mozilla Manifesto
#28Does Mozilla even follow their own Manifesto? > Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional. So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy? > Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource. We are still waiting for Pocket's server source code... > Magnifying the public benefit aspec…
> So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy? That's not their entire approach to privacy. How would you have them exist? There aren't enough people willing to pay for a web browser in 2020. There aren't enough unpaid volunteers to work for free and outcompete Chrome. What would you have Mozilla do? They're trying to develop other services that can actually make them money so they…
It is may look like the reasonable compromise on the surface but it really isn't.
Manifestos are about principles not pragmatic approaches, taking a stance is not free or easy, look at the stance RMS takes on open source and GPL for example. Had RMS and other pioneers in the open source movement did not take such ideologically driven stance at the expense of pragmatism , we may have parts of BSD maybe today but not the GPL driven open source ecosystem that all of us benefit from, even now it costs open source a lot look at linux and zFS .
You can apply the same argument with Google early on, they were hugely influential in reducing the amount and type of ads we were forced to see. They have developed great open source projects and provided a lot of good quality free services all funded by ad revenue, how is it really different from Mozilla then ? so should I see only those contributions and ignore what Google really does on privacy ?
Being uncompromising in the face of great difficulty is the only way of real, sustainable change and revolutionize how things work, had Google stuck to "Do no Evil"(whatever that meant to them) no one would worry about using Chrome, if organizations loose focus they only really exist to make money for employees/ shareholders/ management.
Also this is not sustainable model, that search revenue is going to keep dropping as they keep loosing market share, inevitably they are either going to drop Firefox altogether or going to base it of Chrome and shelve most of the team. If Microsoft cannot afford to develop Edge as separate browser, how long Firefox will last in this structure ?
We are better off forking off in a community funded model before the inevitable happens and try to build a sustainable project around that. There are enough companies who can donate few million dollars a year each to make sure Google is not the only player in town. Wikipedia raises more than $120 M / year, it is not inconceivable, that Moz foundation can raise a reasonable amount to fund the development of the key projects.
Re: The Mozilla Manifesto
#29How does partnering with Pocket promote the open web? How does the iRobot stunt align with the manifesto?
Mozilla use to live and breath the open web, now they are just empty platitudes like Facebook and Google's commitment to privacy.
Re: The Mozilla Manifesto
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So having Google as the default search engine is the right approach for privacy? This and the fact that they signed the deal with Google again makes me lose faith in Mozilla, caring about privacy yet making deals with the devil that is killing them.
I don't like it. I'd rather they moved to DDG. But if I let myself be an optimist for a short while, I can understand the compromise in order to establish a runway while they build up more ethical sources of income.
Id rather they just automatically replace ad units on websites with their own adnetwork making money that way.
Before you have a whinge about that idea, realise that google effectively does this already.
All it would take is for Firefox to say fuck it, you want to serve ads to our users? Fine, but you sell adunits through our network that is focused on privacy, not the network through Google or Facebook.