On 17 June 2015 at 13:37, <tucker.mckni...@gmail.com> wrote: > Mike Connor, I really appreciate your replies. > > > The reality is that Mozilla is still a relatively small company, > > and all of our major competitors have a couple of orders of > > magnitude more people and money to back their efforts. To compete > > with those companies we need to maximize leverage, and make > > pragmatic decisions on whether to buy/build/partner for each > > problem we want to solve. > > I understand that this was a pragmatic decision. And I get that Firefox > needs to have great features in order to attract users. I see the conflict > here: Firefox needs users to accomplish its goal, but its goal is to > promote an open and non-proprietary web. It seems like the goal with this > feature was to attract users, which it does at the expense of Firefox's > "master goal." That master goal is inherently difficult, but that's why > Mozilla exists. Overtaking IE6 was difficult; creating a new programming > language is difficult; launching an HTML5 operating system is difficult; > and as a software developer myself, I understand that creating a > Pocket-like service is certainly also difficult. We are all hoping that > this is a stop-gap to reach feature parity with other browsers until > Mozilla implements a more, well, "Mozillian" solution. >
The master goal requires Mozilla to attract and retain users. Without our users we don't have the same influence over standards, public policy, or the direction of how the Web evolves. The master goal is not about every service being open source, but about keeping the Internet open for all, and that explicitly includes for commercial entities. The Mozilla Manifesto [1] even calls this out in Principle 9: > Commercial involvement in the development of the Internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical. Nowhere in the Manifesto does it say proprietary services are inherently bad, or that commercial entities can't innovate in useful ways for users. Nor is it our mission to make open source versions of everything that we could possibly build. We don't have unlimited time or resources, so we have to pick our battles. If a market segment is effectively contended (i.e. there are a number of competitors competing effectively and providing real choice) then the system is working. Users have choices, and there's room for new, better entrants to come in with better offerings. Moving forward, I expect us to continue to balance partnering and building things ourselves. Some things we need to own. In other cases we will serve our users better by partnering with some of the best services out there and leveraging their existing technology and knowledge. I'm not going to promise we'll be 100% open, that's just the nature of negotiations with potential partners, but I think we can and should do better. -- Mike [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
