On the one hand, standing for the "right to general purpose computation", or however you'd like to phrase the idea, has a strong moral case behind it. Like it o

On the one hand, standing for the "right to general purpose computation", or however you'd like to phrase the idea, has a strong moral case behind it. Like it or not, the philosophies and ideas of RMS and his successors who believe in Free Software and liberated computing have been prescient time and time again. The kind of lock-in that was predicted in the 90s came to pass on smartphone platforms and requires a continual and ultimately wasteful effort on the part of hackers and developers just to enable us to use our privately-owned devices to do what we want to with the bits flowing through them. DRM is one of the biggest challenges to that, and as such has been in the public consciousness for nearly 20 years, with the EFF standing strong against it all that time. Their fight should really be thought of as being as a digital adjunct of the fight for free speech and others that are constitutionally protected in free nations. Walking out of the W3C is a powerful signal, but one that will ultimately not bring about the EFF's victory. In order to maintain the moral high ground, it was a necessary act; they could not stay true to their mission otherwise. However, it remains to be seen what the next concrete step they can actually take on said mission will be. Now, if Mozilla were to join them, what would it mean? Would it mean that Firefox and other Mozilla projects will not support playing video from sites that go ahead with DRM video? If so, the loss will be on Firefox's part if video sites do go ahead with the change. Obviously not all sites will do it, but those that intend to monetize highly popular content will, as they continue to believe that it's worthwhile to spend their efforts valiantly fighting the losing piracy battle. This may be enough to cost Firefox even more share of the browser market, which is going to be a hard sell for Mozilla even as they try to succeed in their own mission for a free Web. I'm not sure walking out is the right idea. Rather, I like the techniques that have shown to work ever since I posted my first comment railing against DRM in the 90s. 1. Separate the non-free from the free, without preventing it from working entirely. Mozilla shouldn't stop DRM from working in Firefox, but they should ship it DRM-free and never make it a compulsory component. 2. Make alternatives that "the rest of us" can use. Friendly tools to encode and share video using free, decentralized tools can undercut the effective monopoly of Youtube and other sharing sites. 3. Personally avoid DRM'd content, and focus on content from producers that understand the freely-distributed, value-for-value model. Support content creators directly rather than forcing them to rely on advertising-based models. This helps make artists more free to produce without worrying about corporate approval, and cuts out a host of parasitic middlemen.