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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

The key insight for me is this one: "Popularity is not an end in itself. This is especially true for the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit with an ethical mission."

Even though non-profit organizations like Mozilla do not seek to maximize financial gain (by definition), they often seek to maximize their relevance in the world. As a result, they ARE susceptible to corruption: most if not all are willing to "compromise" -- that is, sacrifice their mission and values -- in order to remain "important" in the eyes of society.

The folks running Mozilla are sacrificing the organization's mission and values because they're afraid of losing market share. They do not want Firefox to become a niche platform.

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It is not as simple as that, because I got the impression THE reason folks at Mozilla do not want Firefox to become a niche platform is popularity is a necessary resource to have leverage in the standard body, not popularity itself. Frankly, I think they will accept Firefox becoming less popular as long as the probability of maintaining necessary market share to have leverage increases, although I don't think such situation is likely.

Great point. The criticism is still valid, however: Mozilla IS sacrificing its mission and values... in order to remain "important" enough, in the eyes of society, to get a seat at the table.

It's a slippery slope.

What's the point in having leverage if you're not going to use it?

This was their moment. They have the second largest audience of desktop users. They have their leverage, and chose not to use it.

> What's the point in having leverage if you're not going to use it?

You act as if the audience is tied for Firefox. It's not. As soon as a user opens up another browser instead of Firefox to get access to the content, they are no longer leverage. And when you look at the audience as those with just Firefox alone, and those with a second browser, that audience dwindles to very few indeed.

You could make the argument that they then don't need to support the DRM because users can easily get around that. But then the problem there is that suddenly users are being punished. The content producers aren't suffering, just the users who are forced to switch browsers.

If you have leverage and don't use it because you're afraid you'll lose leverage... you don't really have any leverage.

That is exactly the point! In this case, Mozilla does not have leverage. Users have leverage. Chrome and IE users could have decided to abandon those browsers when they implemented the DRM measures. They did not.

Mozilla is using leverage, just not to fight the battle you want them to fight.

Mozilla has decided to use their leverage to make DRM more private and secure.

I don't necessarily agree with their decision, but sometimes you've got to choose your battles, as they say. Maybe they weighed the importance of this issue against the decrease of influence in future (perhaps more important) matters that the alternative stance would have brought in terms of userbase, and concluded that it would have been detrimental to their overall mission?

What is your theory as to why they chose to not use their leverage, as you put it? Greed, vanity?

My theory is that they are more concerned about market share and being relevant, then they are about protecting the rights of their users and standing up for what's right.

This is a move from the Mozilla Corporation, not the Mozilla Foundation. Losing users would be a threat to their bottom line. However putting the bottom line above their supposed principles certainly reduces their credibility.`

This was one of many possible moments. How well did it work when they didn't support H.264? They're picking their battles.

and if they choose to battle for privacy and proper DNT it makes a lot more sense than a losing battle against DRM.

The most annoying part of this is that Abobe is providing the plugin. Much rather Mozilla do their own thing.

DNT is a non-starter. It's asking companies to play nice and please please please don't track users. That's never going to be a reliable option.

Blocking third-party cookies by default on the other hand is a good start.

Mozilla can't really do their own thing unless they start writing some closed-source code. And then negotiating directly with various content providers about what the code will do. Probably a few other things I haven't thought of as well.

It's all possible, but it'd be a pretty big difference from what Mozilla does normally and I'm not sure they'd be very good at it. So outsourcing that stuff makes a good bit of sense.

This was the last possible moment. Once the web is full of DRMed content, they're entirely beholden to any demands that their DRM partners and content providers might make, like removing the privacy safeguards and giving the binary DRM module full access to the system so it can make sure code outside the sandbox isn't siphoning off the decoded video, extending the DRM to images or even HTML, etc...

I'd just like to point out that the H.264 issue is way smaller than this. H.264 is a public standard that anyone is free to implement. This is why FOSS encoders and decoders for it can freely exist without any issues (and the FOSS x264 encoder also happens to be pretty much the best H.264 encoder in the world too). The complications arise from the fact that a lot of tech used in H.264 is patented (software) and licensing of said patents is required in many cases to make use of it. But all in all, H.264 is still quite compatible with FOSS (and would be perfectly compatible if software patents didn't exist), whereas DRM is completely incompatible due to its secret nature. This is a far bigger issue for Mozilla to compromise on.

> H.264 is a public standard that anyone is free to implement.

That's correct -- you can implement it. But you have to pay for its usage. See http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsS...

EDIT: guess who is paying for this?

Mozilla is just another nonprofit, disregarding its mission and instead working to promote the salary of its administrators and executives.

I work for Mozilla. I suppose you have evidence I do not.

Didn't you get the memo? They "fixed" the "glitch".

Sorry, couldn't resist.

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