Rubén, thank you for starting this thread.
As a caveat, what follows are all my personal opinions, not official
Mozilla anything.
First off, I'd like to say that I don't know anyone in the Mozilla
project who is happy that we're ending up in a place where we feel like
we have to do this to stay relevant. One of the explicit reasons Henri
(who did most of the legwork on this issue) got involved in it was his
opposition to DRM on the web, which you can see in his posts on the W3C
mailing lists. When he realized that preventing EME from happening was
not viable, he focused on limiting the damage as much as possible. I do
think, personally, that what we're doing here is the best way we have to
advance our mission, given the circumstances. And you can see my own
posts to the W3C lists for my personal views on DRM.
Second, there was in fact a good reason for the lack of previous public
discussion on this. There were a lot of delicate negotiations with
various DRM vendors involved to get to the state where are now (e.g.
being able to sandbox the CDM). Part of our negotiating leverage in
those discussions was the DRM vendors not knowing whether we were going
to do EME at all, and hence not knowing whether we would simply walk
away if their requirements were too onerous. I believe that in fact we
would have done that, by the way. Unfortunately, having a public
discussion on whether we'd be willing to implement EME and under what
circumstances would have removed a lot of that negotiating leverage.
On 5/14/14, 11:10 AM, Rubén Martín wrote:
o This worries me the most looking at the future, since we are
going to be always the only ones with completely different
values to the rest of the players in the browser ecosystem.
Yes, this is a serious worry for all of us, I think. :( This also came
up with the H.264 situation, and we can probably expect other such
situations to come up in the future. We should try to address them
proactively before they get to the point where we feel like we have no
choices.
In both this case and the H.264 case we've tried to do things as much in
line with our values as we can (e.g. by providing ways for downstream
redistributors of Firefox to provide the same functionality the
mozilla.org builds do), but that's small consolation...
o Have we lost hope to be enough relevant to avoid these situations?
I don't think we have, but there's a lot of work to be done to make sure
we stay relevant.
Note that we do feel we're relevant enough to do the DRM thing in a way
that is quite different from our competitors in various ways:
* Not shipping it by default.
* Requiring explicit user content before downloading the CDM.
* Insisting on a CDM that is sandboxed so it can't do things that
we don't allow it to do: no phoning home, no persistent user
tracking, etc.
* Working to make it possible for others to support the
functionality while still compiling their own Firefox. Builds
provided by Linux distributions are the obvious target here.
I also think we are relevant enough to keep working on making DRM less
relevant in the future (e.g. by pushing forward watermarking as an
alternative), and will do so.
* We want to get rid of plugins but we implement something that always
depends on an external and proprietary module.
Indeed. This module is a bit less user-hostile than current plug-ins,
due to the sandboxing, but is fundamentally not all that different in
terms of things like access to source, say.
That said, I think different people want to get rid of plug-ins for
different reasons, and the sandboxing does address some of those reasons
(stability issues, user privacy issues, etc)...
o It won't be impossible to access the full web using open source
bits, since if we also agree on this, even people not using DRM
right now are going to switch to it eventually.
I'm not sure whether your worry here about 1) users who are not using a
DRM-enabled UA switching to one that does, 2) video providers who are
not using DRM now starting to use it, or 3) non-video content starting
to use DRM.
I think in practice for #1 users are currently using DRM in the form of
Flash pretty much across the board. For #2 this is a serious worry, but
I suspect that if it happens it would have happened even if we did not
ship EME. Our response to that should continue to be working on
technical alternatives that make people less likely to feel like they
have to use DRM.
For #3, I think market realities are very different for other sorts of
content than they are for video, and we will continue to oppose DRM for
those situations. In particular, I think we have more time to develop
alternatives to DRM before DRM becomes entrenched there.
I hope all of that helps your state of mind at least a little.
-Boris
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