Comment by bzbarsky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bzbarsky | Hacker News Reader

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Taking your points one at a time:

1) If PNaCl ever happens and is not directly tied to Chrome's internals (which it is at the moment), the discussion can be revisited.

2) Google is opposed to anyone else being more involved in the process. Other people have tried.

3) Mozilla has no particular concerns about "losing face" if a pragmatic decision is needed. We're a lot more worried about consequences for users and the web than we are about our egos or "face".

4) Calling "NaCL" an "open technology" is about on par with calling Silverlight an "open technology", for what it's worth. Granted, the source is open, but again it's tied to various Chrome-specific stuff that is underspecified and would be incredibly difficult to integrate into any other browser.

Basically, as far as I can tell your argument comes down to saying that Mozilla should be open to implement PNaCl (not NaCl), if it were being developed completely differently and had different goals. We might be, if that counterfactual held. But it sure doesn't, and I don't see any hope of it holding. If that ever _does_ happen, we can revisit this discussion, of course.

> Calling "NaCL" an "open technology" is about on par with calling Silverlight an "open technology", for what it's worth.

Silverlight is closed-source, patent-encumbered, and released by a company with a history of "embrace, extend, extinguish." That someone who appears to be speaking for Mozilla would draw this comparison is, again, disappointing.

> If PNaCl ever happens and is not directly tied to Chrome's internals (which it is at the moment), the discussion can be revisited.

This claim is directly at odds with the public statements of Mozilla's Chris Blizzard, who argues against the very idea of native code delivery to browsers. His arguments aren't against the NaCl implementation, process, etc, they are fundamental arguments against native code in general: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/12/google_native_client...

> Basically, as far as I can tell your argument comes down to saying that Mozilla should be open to implement PNaCl (not NaCl)

I'm not even hoping for that at the moment, at this stage I'm only hoping for them to stop maligning it publicly, like Chris Blizzard saying it will lead to DLL hell, or like with Brendan's slide that desaturates a picture of salt as if (P)NaCl is going to come for your children in the night.

Was the salt crystal image scary? Boo hoo!

It was from Dave Herman, and it was not intended to be scary at all. It's appealing to physics and chemistry nerds. Salt has had a bad rap, to borrow from Montgomery Burns on eggs.

This is descending into silly-season political talk. Google chose the NaCl + Pepper pun. They can take the scary images, if those images truly are scary.

BTW, Chris Blizzard works for Facebook now.

Back to more serious topics...

UPDATE: to be fair to blizzard, he was objecting (as bz reminds me) on behalf of Mozilla to paving the web with x86 or other machine-dependent code, however compiled. Mozilla still opposes more such machine-specific plugin code. Think of NaCl as a safer plugin compiler, nothing more. We believe the Web should not need plugins to fill decade-long gaps from the '90s that real "coopetition" among browsers in standards bodies can fill much sooner, without the problems that plugins bring.

> and released by a company with a history of > "embrace, extend, extinguish."

It's worth considering technology on its merits, not just based on past behavior of companies. In recent years, Microsoft has been much more of a team player in the web space than Google has, for what it's worth.

That said, I didn't claim NaCL was in all respects identical to Silverlight. I said it was comparable. It's more open in some ways (open source), less in others (e.g. no independent reimplementations, and precious little chance of any as things stand). The provenance is equally unpalatable, from my point of view; Google may not be aiming for "extinguish", not least because that's not very likely with the web at this point, but it's certainly aiming for "embrace, extend, coopt", which is not much better.

> That someone who appears to be speaking for Mozilla

In general, people who work on Mozilla speak for themselves. The cases when they're speaking for "Mozilla" are very rare and always marked as such. In this instance, I'm speaking for myself.

> This claim is directly at odds with the public statements > of Mozilla's Chris Blizzard

Chris and I don't always agree on everything. But some of his arguments are certainly valid. I didn't say I'd adopt PNaCl with open arms; just that the discussion should be revisited. As long as we're talking about things that are hardware-dependent, there's just no point having the discussion at all.

> at this stage I'm only hoping for them to stop maligning > it publicly

What you view as "maligning" someone else may view as an attempt to keep Google from pushing hardware-dependent code as part of the web platform, which is what they're trying to do. All a matter of perspective, I suppose.

So this is why my ears felt warm this morning.

Yeah, even though I don't work at Mozilla anymore, I still think {P}NaCl is a bad idea for the web as a whole (and its users, by effect) and also for Mozilla (as one of its most important stewards.)

Carry on.

> or like with Brendan's slide that desaturates a picture of salt as if (P)NaCl is going to come for your children in the night.

Really now. I created that slide, taking the picture from Google's own NaCl web site:

https://developers.google.com/native-client/

I zoomed it in because I thought it looked pretty. Let's all just take a deep breath.

Dave

Mea culpa on that point (the image). I drew the wrong conclusions about its intent.

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