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Leaving Mozilla

blog.unitedheroes.net

301–310 of 346 posts

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#301
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it. (Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)

It's not like you couldn't create an IRC-client with better UI than discord. Not as many features, but whatever strength discord has it is not UI. Email really could have been great, but html and bad actors have made it so much worse than it needs to be.

>It's not like you couldn't create an IRC-client with better UI than discord

No, you cannot. You cannot, because you need a team for this, and they need salaries, and unless you push ads into people's throats, there won't be any.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"He resigned and declined Mozilla's offer to remain in another C level position." At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.

It was.

I don't believe that for one second, and neither should you. Every single CEO who gets fired is made to "voluntarily" resign.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects. Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I…

Can you explain what crime and exploitation you feel Mozilla is committing that should make them "criminally prosecutable" ?

I wouldn't say Mozilla has reached this stage of fraud or exploitation directly yet (to my knowledge), but the decisions they make consistently indicate they are on the path to that level of corruption and enshittification, and history has taught us there are zero guardrails in place to effectively prevent it.

In the Reddit example I gave, the crime is essentially a form of "bait-and-switch", false advertising, or charity fraud; scamming volunteers into donating their time and labor to build a product under deceptive and misleading pretences then, once achieving a certain threshold of success, changing the value proposition to a state where they would not have donated their time or labor to begin with. The same applies to an open source product which switches to closed-source. When you change the value proposition on volunteers like that, you have transformed their time and labor from a donation to unpaid wages, as they literally built your product and company for free, and are the reason your product exists at all. If you do not pay them out or backpay them in some way, or you can't, you are no different to any other white collar ciminal scammer, exploiting charity for profit.

Allowing this type of fraud to succeed, and become an accepted business practice, is socially corrosive and destructive. It's a strong indicator of corruption to the rule of law in the legal, political, and economic system.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#304
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects. Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I…

> I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. Thunderbird is no longer owned by the Mozilla corporation, so now you can donate directly to them.

From their about page: "Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the not-for-profit Mozilla.org. This structure gives us the flexibility to offer optional paid services to sustain Thunderbird’s development far into the future."[0]

The whole "Thunderbird Council" approach sounds good in theory, but I don't see any assurances that my donation would not fund for-profit service or feature development that could be locked behind a paywall, or that the whole product can't be sold off or transitioned to some closed offering at any time.

The core problem is not Mozilla specific. It's that our legal and political systems are now corrupted and offer no safeguards to prevent this type of fraud from taking place. Tech companies from the very beginning have been given carte blanche to lie, cheat, and pivot any way they please; to betray user/customer investment and change their entire value proposition on a dime. That was the growth and funding model of tech startups; build users by offering product for free (at a loss) until they become dependent on your product, then bait-and-switch. When companies are consistently rewarded for this, and there are no meaningful financial or legal reprecussions, I see no reason to believe that this will change any time in the near future.

[0] https://www.thunderbird.net/ach/about/

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, we have the evil Microsoft empire :) Or the Apple alternative. Maintaining a browser engine including patching the latest vulnerabilities when someone points Mythos at your code is a really hard problem, my feeling is you need a certain size of organization and funding as your table stakes. Someone should convince the EU to look into funding a new browser, maybe.

What if the EU bought some big chunk of Mozilla, something like Mozilla EU, and then ran it? Would the US then cry out against EU buying US companies and start to fund Mozilla?

There's a sort of precedent for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_Bridge

State won't fund your bridge repair? You can always ask the Soviet Union.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#306

Respect. This is what Firefox could have been. In the real world, in the same line as the article suggests, there was a brief time when the "puts you back in control" browser needed you to change the following about:config settings to disable the force-pushed ai: browser.ml.enable, browser.ml.chat.enabled, browser.ml.chat.sidebar, browser.ml.chat.menu, browser.ml.chat.page, extensions.ml.enabled, browser.ml.linkPrevi…

You're complaning that the browser that "puts you back in control" ... put you back in control of which AI features you want to enable/disable? How horrible! What? They didn't make these 10 distinct features one single all-or-nothing button? They let you switch them on or off individually?? How dare they?!? What? They shipped new features to the browser...turned on?!? Instead of spending all those development hours a…

The irony here is that after enough negative user feedback, they did make that one button, as an actual button not a config option. You can still change those options if you want AI but not in the sidebar, for example.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I agree - firefox was losing market share long before AI was a thing. I meant to use that as a recent example of the kind of decisions that Mozilla leadership repeatedly makes, that don't match up what their users want.

How do you know what their users want ? Firefox may not have a massive market share but it's a much larger group than just the vocal ones here on HN

I'm going mainly off the OP, but Mozilla connect is the place I'd look:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message...

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the EU bought some big chunk of Mozilla, something like Mozilla EU, and then ran it? Would the US then cry out against EU buying US companies and start to fund Mozilla?

There's a sort of precedent for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_Bridge State won't fund your bridge repair? You can always ask the Soviet Union.

Interesting! Though maybe these days we could ask China instead.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Netsplits It's not inherent to the protocol. https://ergo.chat/ does not have netsplits (from having a single server) and https://github.com/Libera-Chat/sable replaces the server-to-server protocol to eliminate netsplits as well. And even when not eliminated entirely, they are infrequent and barely visible on well-managed networks like Libera.Chat. Many chat platforms have more (and longer) outages than Libera has…

So... Usually it's claimed that one of the advantages of IRC is that it doesn't depend on a single server, so using a single server feels a bit like cheating. Replacing the server-to-server protocol sounds a lot like it's not really IRC protocol any more. The chathistory link says "This specification may change at any time and we do not recommend implementing it in a production environment." right on top. And yes, Ni…

> Replacing the server-to-server protocol sounds a lot like it's not really IRC protocol any more

There hasn't been a standard server-to-server protocol in like three decades. Even RFC 2813 only specifies one of the protocols in use at the time (IRCnet's). Each implementation has its own (some of them forked from the original)

> The chathistory link says "This specification may change at any time and we do not recommend implementing it in a production environment."

True. Ratification of the final spec is stuck on some details, unfortunately.

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