On 15/05/2014 14:01, Jim wrote:
On 2014-05-15 11:38, Jonas Sicking wrote:
On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Rubén Martín
<nukea...@mozilla-hispano.org> wrote:
* It's not the first time we take decisions because everyone else is
doing it, and we want to keep being relevant.
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.
o Have we lost hope to be enough relevant to avoid these
situations?
It's not a question of absolutes. We don't have anywhere near as much
marketshare that we can call all the shots all the time. But that
doesn't mean that we don't have any influence.
But there was a lot of pressure on the various actors here. And sadly
we don't have enough influence to prevent the badness in this
situation. And we didn't receive enough help from the larger internet
community.
The community received no support from Mozilla.
How would we have been able to support the wider internet community in
this, moreso than we have done?
Mozilla have supported
the W3C and the EME all the way, and are still a member of the W3C.
You can't seriously suggest that leaving the W3C is a viable option if
Mozilla wants to influence the internet of tomorrow, quite orthogonal to
whether or not that internet has DRM or not.
Even
when W3C employees started joking about assassinating EME dissenters
Mozilla was silent. Mozilla have a representative on the W3C TAG and the
TAG produced a draft document on the EME that is a complete joke, just
ask Henri. Mozilla has made no formal objection to the EME at the W3C.
And what would making a formal objection have solved? This was discussed
at length at the summit last year. I can't speak for the people who
would actually have raised the objection, but based on the information I
heard there, a formal objection would not have made a difference.
Even in the unlikely case that we would have succeeded in getting the
EME spec pulled from the W3C, you're being terribly naive if you think
that MS, Apple and Google on the one hand, and content owners and their
representatives (netflix, hulu, whatever) wouldn't have specced and
implemented this outside of the W3C had it not been allowed inside the
W3C. I don't see how that would have improved the situation - it seems
rather like it would have made things worse.
Mozilla sold out for fear of losing market share.
Sorry, where does "sold out" come from? We receive no financial
compensation in any way for this decision, so I strenuously object to
you suggesting we had any motivation except "our users will want this
content" and "we need our users to be able to use Firefox to browse
/all/ of the web, in order to be able to fight another day against DRM
and other anti-openness proposals for the web".
You didn't even try to
make a case to users to stick with Firefox if they were forced to use an
alternative browser to view some media content.
How would we have done this? If we don't support EME, websites that use
it will simply warn the user "don't buy your content in this browser,
because it won't let you view it" - long before we'd be able to notice
that the website intends to use EME and tell the user our view of the
situation. Your suggestion that we would have been able to communicate
better had we not implemented is not based on logic or fact, as far as I
can tell.
Instead, if we do implement this spec, we have a chance to communicate
with users about this EME-protected content they're about to view. From
the perspective of educating user, I expect this solution to be better
than the alternative.
Windows users already
have IE installed and you could have just deferred to IE for content
requiring EME - users have already chosen to use Firefox over IE so see
value in Firefox.
You're assuming users would go back to Firefox as soon as they were done
viewing the EME content. You're also implying switching browsers for
this specific task doesn't cause inconvenience and harm to users. I
dispute both of these assumptions/assertions as being unreasonable.
Furthermore, IE doesn't solve the issue for Linux users, or for Apple
users. Generally, I don't think delegating to a third-party rendering
engine with its own security flaws and other problems is a realistic option.
There was a proposal made at the W3C that would have
further mitigated concerns of losing market share but Mozilla was not
interested.
Can you link to this proposal and explain how it is better than what has
actually happened, and how it was a realistic option, and how we were
"not interested"?
You might all be surprised that the EME is not even about DRM, it's
purpose is to lock users into using proprietary web based media players.
The EME is just a JS API, it is not a media decoder and can not play
content without proprietary JS downloaded from the content distributors
website. Mozilla understood this and insisted on this design.
Why is the need for external JS relevant here?
Where was the internet outrage when Microsoft and Google implemented
this in their browsers? Where was the outrage towards Hollywood
studios asked for this? The fact that people at large simply let them
get away with this silently is ultimately what is forcing our hand
here.
The average web user might not understand how evil this decision is.
And yet you claim that we can explain to them why they need to use IE if
they want to watch content they want to watch, and that they will
happily accept this and that they will continue to use Firefox
afterwards, rather than a browser that doesn't throw up it hands on
certain websites. That is contradictory.
We can't do everything ourselves. As much as I wish that wasn't the case.
Selling out on users control over their own computer is not the right
decision.
Again, I dispute "selling out". As for users' control over their own
computers: the CDM is sandboxed, and we won't be providing cross-site
user identification. I don't think we're taking user control away from
their computer - we're providing content providers with a way to control
the display of their content, which is terrible, I agree, but not as
terrible as letting those content providers control the computers of
users, which is what you're suggesting.
~ Gijs
_______________________________________________
governance mailing list
governance@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
