3 ms·

My comment wasn't specifically targeted at your blog post, more the general impression I've been getting of Mozilla. And sure, Mozilla is more open than Apple a

by foobar20198 9y ago

My comment wasn't specifically targeted at your blog post, more the general impression I've been getting of Mozilla. And sure, Mozilla is more open than Apple and MS, and probably a bit more open than Google. But fundamentally, Firefox decisions are made by Mozilla employees, to further the goals of the Mozilla company (which makes money from those decisions - sure, to be hopefully reinvested). Firefox isn't like those other large open source projects where the codebase and thus decisions are owned by many independent (and mostly commercial) entities. Outside contributors have very little say in the product, so I wouldn't say its any better for people to contribute to Firefox vs e.g. Chrome. I.e. Mozilla wants their code - but in the many cases that have become publicised it doesn't seem like Mozilla wants their opinions. (This is probably just the reality of end-user facing software projects with major UX components. But it's still sad to see contributors being invited in when they'll be ignored in the decision-making.) // Edit: and it looks like fabrice_d made pretty much the same point while I was writing my comment : )

zbraniecki 9y ago
Yeah, I see what you're saying. I think there's a deeper debate that Mitchell is running over the last few years at Mozilla, and that's how to find a balance between "your voice is heard" and "someone is making a decision". If you voiced your opinion, and the decision has been made that is not in line with it, it's very easy to feel that "my voice didn't matter. Mozilla doesn't want my opinion". I believe that it's a fallacy of communication. So, in total. Sure, as the project grows and priorities change, we get to a more structured way of making decisions. It's getting harder for a casual contributor to steer the decision in a completely different direction. But I do not believe that it's any different from Fedora, Wikipedia, Gnome, KDE, Wordpress or any other open source tech. When you're a 10-person github project, it's easy to say that anyone can file an issue and change the course of it. When you're a multihundred million users project with 20 years of legacy code, and thousands of contributors, it is harder to see the connection between your opinion and the result. But I do believe that if you gain trust in the community, and use the right forums (and I realize that finding the right forum to voice your opinion is not easy), you do have an impact. Even if the final decision is not in line with it, which will happen, unless you and the decision owners are always 100% correct.

zbraniecki 9y ago

Yeah, I see what you're saying. I think there's a deeper debate that Mitchell is running over the last few years at Mozilla, and that's how to find a balance between "your voice is heard" and "someone is making a decision". If you voiced your opinion, and the decision has been made that is not in line with it, it's very easy to feel that "my voice didn't matter. Mozilla doesn't want my opinion". I believe that it's a fallacy of communication. So, in total. Sure, as the project grows and priorities change, we get to a more structured way of making decisions. It's getting harder for a casual contributor to steer the decision in a completely different direction. But I do not believe that it's any different from Fedora, Wikipedia, Gnome, KDE, Wordpress or any other open source tech. When you're a 10-person github project, it's easy to say that anyone can file an issue and change the course of it. When you're a multihundred million users project with 20 years of legacy code, and thousands of contributors, it is harder to see the connection between your opinion and the result. But I do believe that if you gain trust in the community, and use the right forums (and I realize that finding the right forum to voice your opinion is not easy), you do have an impact. Even if the final decision is not in line with it, which will happen, unless you and the decision owners are always 100% correct.