On Wednesday, June 17, 2015 at 1:56:26 PM UTC-6, Mike Connor wrote: > 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/
I know that the goal is not for every service to be open source, and personally I'm not an open source purist. But in that same sentence you said that the goal is to keep the internet open for all, and yet we still haven't heard anything about being able to integrate other services besides Pocket. I don't think that proprietary services are inherently bad. I think it doesn't make sense to have a user-facing core feature provided by a single third party. It's harder to justify when that third-party is non-free (in both speech and beer). You say that "users have choices, and there's room for new, better entrants to come in with better offerings." But that is more difficult when one of the major browsers exclusively partners with one company. It'll be harder for the read-it-later market to be effectively contended if Mozilla keeps this exclusivity. It's counter to the mission of promoting an open web, and principle 9 shouldn't be used to justify that. Rather, if Mozilla isn't going to develop their own read-it-later service, then allowing multiple service providers (thereby allowing competition) is more in line with principle 9. The undertones of your last paragraph are very concerning; anyone who supports Mozilla should read it. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
