Comment Just make it inert (Score 1) 106
It's a lot cheaper and safer to make an inert nuclear weapon... Just don't tell anyone :)
Yes, you ~should~ dump a lot of the projects that go on, and get back to the core project of making a usable cross-platform web browser that doesn't suck.
Maybe/probably, to be honest I suspect prioritizing projects at Mozilla isn't trivial.
I mean when your goal is to improve the open web, how do you measure impact of your projects?
Number of users, etc. is certainly a metric... But so are specs implemented by multiple vendors.
Translation: Our core business (browsers) is so ridiculously profitable and since our mission is open ended we can spend it on almost any pet project we like.
I don't speak on behalf of Mozilla; let's be very clear about that.
Anyways, if you wanted to do a startup, or a small and focused group, you can certainly find more lucrative opportunities (also open source), than writing a web-browser. Granted I don't touch much gecko code, but it's my clear impression from co-workers (and the few patches I've done) that moving it forward is not easy.
By the way, a lot of things still is happening in Firefox. Try out the latest nightly, it comes with process isolation (e10n); it still extremely buggy, but it's nice to see it happening.
A lot of us do. More than you would guess.
Hmm... I don't think that's enough... The problem here is in large the adversarial nature of your justice system.
With cops being allowed to lie during interrogation, the state offering plea bargains if you confess, etc...
Cases like this were someone after hours of interrogations breaks and "admits"
'You’re telling me you have a video, so I guess it happened but I have no memory of it.'
The only reason that guy isn't rotting in prison, is because he could afford 200k in legal expenses.
Lesson being, don't talk to the police in America. Doing so is a liability most people can't afford.
That is a lot of money. What could they possibly be spending it on because it certainly isn't firefox. I mean... it is a nice browser... but.... 314 million?
Disclaimer I work at Mozilla... There is obviously a lot of development, not just Firefox and FirefoxOS, but also research projects like rust, servo (new browser engine), daala (video codec). Followed by an end-less line of smaller projects, services and what not. For example I work on a project called TaskCluster which runs tasks (currently only docker containers on AWS spot nodes); the goal of this project is to make our CI infrastructure faster, cheaper and easier to configure (more self-serve; and more cloud based).
But this is only the development things... Mozilla does things ranging from lobby work (net neutrality to name one); to education and campaigns for this (See webmaker parties). Sometimes I'm surprised to see all the things that goes on at Mozilla.
A lot of what Mozilla does yields little obvious results... A lot of it is high risk (from a business perspective)... A lot of it has no business perspective at all. But Mozilla is not about money, it was we should really dump a lot of the projects that goes on
Yahoo knew this, and probably offered them $150 million a year (Google may even have declined to make an offer of renewal
From the official blog post you'll see that all the options, including a renewal of the Google contract, had stronger economic terms (for mozilla).
To spell it out: Google offer to renew the contract and to pay more than they currently do.
I see this partly as a way to diversify revenue, by having different partners in different geographical regions. And as a strategy to avoid a fostering a global search mono-culture.
Why would Google want to crush Firefox? What motive does it have?
No, but the way Google is creating a mono-culture, creating chrome-only services (only porting to other browser later), and increasingly rolling features out to the web around the standard bodies (I hangout a guy who works on web components at Mozilla); maybe Google is increasingly becoming a problem for the open web... (maybe not intentionally, but still going too big)
Mono-cultures are bad. With different default search deals in multiple geographical regions, Mozilla is not only diversifying it's revenue stream, it's also not supporting a single global mono-culture.
But I think Google cut Mozilla out of some revenue sharing thing. It doesn't look like there was much choice.
This is not the case... I was the internal meeting at Mozilla earlier today, and it was made very clear that all options (including Google) had stronger economic terms (than the current deal).
So it wasn't because Google cut Mozilla out.
See the official announcement too:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/...
Personally, I see how this can only foster more competition, less monoculture and thus a better web.
Why should the government prevent competent adults from entering into an agreement that includes a rebate? Sure, the companies are hoping that many will not claim it, but that's the customer's choice./quote>
Because as you say the companies are actively planning to make the advertised price/rebate not possible, or very complicated for the customer to get. Most rebates only serves to confuse the customer, so they can't see the real cost. This is not honest business.
For the customers to compare products, with such complicated pricing schemes is just not feasible; it would take days to evaluate. In many cases it is fraud, just very hard to prove intent when companies claim institutional incompetence.
Either way, it is a government issue to promote and ensure a transparent market that facilitates competition.
If you're relying on the MTA to keep your email communications secure, you're doing it wrong. If data is important enough to encrypt, encrypt it at the sender side first.
Security holes and poor security does not make it legal to take advantage of suck security holes.
This seems like it should be a violation of the DMCA. It probably isn't but it sure seems close.
Isn't this just hacking, in the criminal media-defined sense of the word.
With recent additions from patriot to fraud act, this smells a lot like "conspire to commit" at the very least. It certainly seems like unauthorized access, as you forced access to information you were not authorized to access.
Just because the internet protocols have lots of holes does not mean they can be legally exploited.
Is this a crazy thought?
That's a far cry from learning what it takes to create quality software.
Sure, that doesn' t mean they are useless... Sure, if you pay them a regular tech-salary...
But can you have second-class developers in a company?
For example writing tests, or internal web applications based on rock solid automation APIs. Or web-based dashboards for presentation of metrics collected and exposed through a stable APIs...
I 50-75 % of study points for my MSc in CS comes from or is related to large group projects. As someone who is smart and skilled, I quickly learned how to isolate parts of the project and hand out smaller isolated pieces. Typically, just implement a strategy pattern, then tell someone write a strategy or two that filled the interface of my strategy. In the meantime I could rely on a strategy with a bare minimum implementation, for example hard code input instead of loading from file, accepting memory leaks, accepting poor performance.
It's not always easy to use people with limited skills, but it's not impossible. Though you obviously don't get the same results.
On the other hand, I have an MSc and is super generalist, and sometimes I'm wasting my time writing simple things in node.js, not that everything in node is simple
I point out the fact that the majority of R&D into this comes from America,
Okay, I might have that link wrong... It's not unbelievable,but [citation needed] still stands...
Note, without building something... ie. applying technology you're not getting a big energy sector with private R&D.
Work without a vision is slavery, Vision without work is a pipe dream, But vision with work is the hope of the world.
