Whither Mozilla?

As an ex-employee but still a Mozillian, the news around Mozilla the past few months has really broken my heart. I remember a summit or all-hands meeting around 2010 where Mitchell had a keynote where she discussed what it would take to make Mozilla a 50 year or 100 year company rather than a tech blip.

Mozilla's acceptance of DRM definitely feels like a threat to that goal. In this article, Glyn Moody shares exactly what I felt when first learning that Mozilla was likely to go along with the W3C on this. If they give in here to save market share, they lose all future capability to make a stand later.

They can continue to try to do good along the way, but when push comes to shove and they take a position that is in opposition to all the other vendors, they can't strike their staff on the bridge and say, "You shall not pass!" because everyone will know that ultimately they will likely cave to prevent losing more users.

Contrast this to the hypothetical scenario where they do continue losing users, potentially even at a greater degree than the current trend, but when some big hoopla makes the news circuit about some horrible atrocity the other browsers are forcing on their users, they would continue to be able to stand up and say, "We don't do that stuff and we never have".