You know, we at Mozilla have all these people working on this problem and amazingly enough, no-one thought of your idea of using the OS libraries yet! How dumb we suddenly all feel... Clearly, you have more brains than all of us put together.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html

Gerv

Changing the scope of the copyleft has been explicitly named as something Mozilla is not going to do.
http://mpl.mozilla.org/scope/

Gerv

The MPL already allows the bundling of proprietary components, if Mozilla wanted to go down that route. But they don't - as the links you post show. Pay-on-the-door video standards are not good for the web.

Gerv

Er, you can't cite your own comment in support of your comment. You need to provide a citation from Metalab that says they did report it privately first, and (preferably) a citation from Mozilla agreeing that this happened.

My understanding is that Metalab blogged without contacting Mozilla first.

Gerv

They did (privately) report it to Mozilla first. The blog went up after Mozilla ignored them.

Citation needed.

Gerv

Yes it's licensed under the GPL, but not _exclusively_ under the GPL. You can choose your terms from the quoted list of three. So a company - Mozilla or any other - could choose "MPL", and then combine the Mozilla code with proprietary code, whether it implemented video codecs or did something else. The MPL patent language only applies to the code in the final product which is MPLed, and the GPL patent language wouldn't apply at all, because the company's original choice of terms from the three was MPL, not GPL. Netscape is an example of a company which did this, but there are many others who do it today.

Gerv

Lots of current Firefox features started life as addons. That's a normal way in the Firefox community to prototype something. Are you arguing that if a feature _could_ be implemented as an addon, it _should_ be? Because there's a whole bunch of stuff in the browser I'm sure you use regularly which _could_ be addons. But I bet it would annoy you to download Firefox and have to install 10 addons before it was usable.

Firefox 3.6 with Personas is faster in startup and rendering than Firefox 3.5 without them. If speed is your issue, you don't have an issue. If you don't like the feature, don't use it. It's not intrusive.

Gerv

It's right in the founding documents: http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-ca-ct-registration.pdf

"The exempt purpose of the Foundation is to serve the general public by undertaking activities to (1) keep the Internet a universal platform that is accessible by anyone from anywhere, using any computer" (e.g. not just on Windows) "and (2) promote the continuation of innovation on the Internet". (page iii).

Gerv