4 ms·

I don't have any special insight on these events but I've seen that commit linked a lot. From a pure optics point of view, it looks extremely bad but reading s

I don't have any special insight on these events but I've seen that commit linked a lot. From a pure optics point of view, it looks extremely bad but reading some of the comments, it sounds like that repo is basically a mirror of some upstream project where terms and conditions/faqs etc are stored as pseudo-structured data and that they're migrating parts of that repo to some other project? I feel like a lot of context is missing publicly but if I squint, that seems to be what this comment is trying to express: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b61939b7f4310eb80c5470e#commitcomment-153027146 https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b... Don't get me wrong, I love bagging on Mozilla as much as the next person but as extremely bad as it looks, I'm not convinced that it's literally what it looks like?

chefandy 2y ago
I also lack any inside info, but that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous. And if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?
- spondyl 2y ago
  > if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous? If a company was being competently "evil"[1] then it probably would look like this! Personally, I don't know that I consider Mozilla competent enough to reach that bar though given a lot of their previous blunders seemed like, well, blunders and not finely crafted acts of trickery. > that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous I suppose in this scenario, if it were innocuous and this is just some automated mirroring thing that someone triggered without realising the optics of, I wouldn't then automatically assume that same organisation would have a level of coordination to recognise or put out a blanket statement about the issue? I mean, you'd think surely some amount of Firefox/Mozilla folks are very online and this would be raised internally but if this is downstream of some process owned by mostly legal and non-internet/chat using folks, it might make sense that they a) take some time to be notified, b) take some time to realise a lot of the internet is saying "What the fuck" and c) take a while to figure out what to do about it (ie; issue a press release to not make it worse? someone higher up acks and is like reverse whatever this mess is?) My only real basis for all this is I've occasionally run into some compliance/legal types in tech and they can have extremely bad mental models of the company and product they work for so I can feasibly believe this all being accidental but in saying that, I dunno who works for Mozilla and this is very much a stereotype I'm applying. Anyway, as above, I'm not saying this isn't malicious, just that personally I think the door is still open that this could all be a complete mess that has no real intent behind it

chefandy 2y ago

I also lack any inside info, but that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous. And if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?

spondyl 2y ago
> if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous? If a company was being competently "evil"[1] then it probably would look like this! Personally, I don't know that I consider Mozilla competent enough to reach that bar though given a lot of their previous blunders seemed like, well, blunders and not finely crafted acts of trickery. > that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous I suppose in this scenario, if it were innocuous and this is just some automated mirroring thing that someone triggered without realising the optics of, I wouldn't then automatically assume that same organisation would have a level of coordination to recognise or put out a blanket statement about the issue? I mean, you'd think surely some amount of Firefox/Mozilla folks are very online and this would be raised internally but if this is downstream of some process owned by mostly legal and non-internet/chat using folks, it might make sense that they a) take some time to be notified, b) take some time to realise a lot of the internet is saying "What the fuck" and c) take a while to figure out what to do about it (ie; issue a press release to not make it worse? someone higher up acks and is like reverse whatever this mess is?) My only real basis for all this is I've occasionally run into some compliance/legal types in tech and they can have extremely bad mental models of the company and product they work for so I can feasibly believe this all being accidental but in saying that, I dunno who works for Mozilla and this is very much a stereotype I'm applying. Anyway, as above, I'm not saying this isn't malicious, just that personally I think the door is still open that this could all be a complete mess that has no real intent behind it