18 ms·

Mozilla had to be dragged into this acceptance kicking and screaming (metaphorically). They were faced with a hard choice, Not implement EME (HTML5 DRM) and ri

Mozilla had to be dragged into this acceptance kicking and screaming (metaphorically). They were faced with a hard choice, Not implement EME (HTML5 DRM) and risk users moving to other browsers (user loss) or implement EME and risk looking like they are contradicting their core mission (trust loss). They figured a little loss of trust is worth keeping most of the users on the Mozilla platform - which in my view is the correct decision. If users start to abandon Mozilla (FireFox) in droves then they lose their power to influence the development of the open web.

wolfgke 12y ago
For people who want DRM there are already enough browser choices. On the other hand for people who refuse DRM there's only one choice - and soon zero.
- jgraham 12y ago
  That isn't the case. You can choose to not install the CDM component.
  - shmerl 12y ago
    Is there a way to disable all related code in Firefox itself? Just for the sake of it. May be Mozilla can produce clean and tainted builds for that purpose.
    - azakai 12y ago
      The code is 100% open source, so even if there isn't a GUI option for it, it would be easy for people to make builds without it. There are already many forked builds of firefox like iceweasel, etc.
      - shmerl 12y ago
        Yes, I expect such thing to surface, but it would be nice if Mozilla could provide such options on their own too. That would be some small positive gesture towards those who don't appreciate their move and see it as a betrayal of Mozilla's core values. It would as well make this issue more apparent. Doesn't Mozilla care about educating the public on such matters? It surely would be a positive thing for the Open Web.
        azakai 12y ago
        As the blog post mentioned, the EME stuff will be an option that the Firefox user would need to agree to install. That would be an opportunity to educate users on the topic, I think.
        shmerl 12y ago
        I meant it a bit further. Not just disabling the EME external module, but disabling all related code in Firefox itself on the build stage. While functionally it won't make much difference, it would have more of a symbolic nature of making a point. Plus such builds would guarantee that it can't even be enabled at all (without user's knowledge for example). If there would be build switches to disable that, I'm sure Linux distros with similar to Debian policies will ship versions where it will be disabled altogether.
  - wolfgke 12y ago
    Apple has for political reasons disabled the possibility to install a Flash plugin on Safari/iOS. Why doesn't Firefox do the same with a CDM component for political reasons?
    - toyg 12y ago
      Mozila will never have the marketing firepower to pull off such a boycott.
    - renata 12y ago
      The cost to the user of switching off Apple hardware is much greater than the cost of switching from Firefox to Chrome.
      - wolfgke 12y ago
        A few years ago there was a cost involved for switching to the iPhone. The only reason why you see this the other way round is that "no Flash" is now established (at least for mobile). On the other hand: no DRM in browser cannot be considered as established - so we are at the same point where the iPhone was some years ago.
    - chc 12y ago
      Apple disabled Flash for "security reasons." You can certainly read in politics, but the reason they gave was that it was the #1 attack vector on Macs and they had no way of securing it. And more importantly, nearly everybody else was on Apple's side in this fight. Other browser makers had problems with Flash too. Mac users largely hated Flash because it had terrible performance on that platform. Even Adobe was cooling off toward Flash as it became more and more clear that it wouldn't work on mobile platforms. Mozilla's position here is not at all similar to Apple's position then, so their options are not the same.
    - jljljl 12y ago
      Apple also did this for performance and usability reasons. And when Apple did it, there were no smartphone alternatives that provided a sufficiently good Flash experience. And before you say Android had Flash, I had an Android device that could run Flash in 2011. It was a pretty useless feature.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  no. drm will still be an add-on, just like it is today. The DRM add-on will just change from flash/silverlight. DRM is a very real thing in todays web.
  - wolfgke 12y ago
    > no. drm will still be an add-on, just like it is today. Flash is not an add-on, but a plugin. And there is a good reason why plugins have a bad image and browser developers and users prefer to get rid of them.
    - higherpurpose 12y ago
      Watch Netflix, the champion of "HTML5 DRM", go back to a plugin in order to use P2P streaming within the next 18 months.
      - lern_too_spel 12y ago
        P2P streaming can be built on top of WebRTC fairly easily.
- nullc 12y ago
  I'm not sure that thats quite fair— Firefox won't run the CDM without user consent. You can still say no. Having a choice doesn't magically resolve the issues, it doesn't prevent content providers from making things formerly available unavailable, it doesn't help us (as users) make better more considered decisions rather than clicking yes a lot to get things done, etc. But it does retain the choice to not run this stuff, choice which is not retained in the current closed source alternatives.
  - saganus 12y ago
    The problem is that no one can guarantee that the "opt-out" choice will continue to be there in the foreseeable future. What will happen when, suddenly Mozilla starts "feeling the pressure" to remove that option? What then? The problem is the building's foundations, not the decoration.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - kbuck 12y ago
      This seems unlikely, and in fact, Firefox has been moving in the opposite direction with other binary components (Flash, Java, Silverlight). Newer builds of Firefox require you to explicitly confirm that you'd like to allow <site> to execute plugin code. I doubt this will change any time soon. I'd rather have a (albeit stupid) DRM executable that only performs encryption/decryption than Flash, Java, or Silverlight, which are the current solutions for this. All three of these offer APIs for doing things other than decrypting DRM content, and these APIs have been proven time and time again to be vulnerable to attack, no matter how much time is spent trying to sandbox them properly.
    - marcosdumay 12y ago
      The proposal has an inherent opt-out choice. Content providers provide media within DRM containers, users can choose if they get the media or not. It's not like anybody can force you to watch the last Hollywood stuff.
- mmanfrin 12y ago
  People don't want DRM, people want content. That content is demanding DRM (via Youtube, Netflix). If Mozilla denied the DRM, Firefox users would be denied Youtube. In response to this, some of you might say 'well then people would go elsewhere for their content', to which I would ask: did people leave Netflix because of Silverlight?
  - spacelizard 12y ago
    >did people leave Netflix because of Silverlight? They did, actually. If not by their own doing then by the fact that Netflix is just not available on certain devices and operating systems. As long as Netflix is a DRM platform, this trend will likely continue. The irony here is that Mozilla is apparently being badgered into supporting DRM for "compatibility reasons" when the whole point of DRM is to strictly limit compatibility with whatever arbitrary restrictions the publisher wants.
- mongrol 12y ago
  Nonsense. http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/ http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
howeyc 12y ago
Right, they are using "their power to influence the development of the open web" by supporting DRM. What's the point in having this power if you immediately cave?
- GuiA 12y ago
  Ding ding ding! You've hit the nail on the head. Mozilla has no real power over the web. Google, Microsoft, and Apple have the power (look at the names associated with EME DRM - what a surprise). Mozilla has an illusion of power, which is tolerated by the other actors because it makes everyone happy. But no one should mistake it for real leverage.
  - toyg 12y ago
    Mozilla has had real power for a brief period, when both MS and Google had their eyes off the ball. Once Chrome matured, the game was up. It didn't help that it took them ages to fix widespread performance problems in FF... This said, if they go back to their roots as "ayatollah of open web and open source", I might consider them again; but until they're just another ad-backed bureaucracy, I might as well stick to a better one.
    - fabrice_d 12y ago
      Mozilla was never "ayatollah of open web and open source". If it has been, firefox would have never been available on Windows, like some people at the time argued. Google did well technically on Chrome, but investing a huge amount of marketing dollars (like bundling chrome with other nice things like toolbars) didn't hurt them.
      - aylons 12y ago
        Well, even emacs is available for Windows. I guess not even ayatollahs are that extreme. They may concede if they think it will help their great goal.
    - emilsedgh 12y ago
maaku 12y ago
Mozilla's whole argument for using their products rests on trust. They have consistently lost out in terms of performance, usability, and other things users care about. I no longer trust Mozilla, so why should I use their software? How does this not result in loss of trust and users?
- marincounty 12y ago
  They still have my trust, but I feel like I just heard by girlfriend cheated. And yes--I have no life. I never thought I would care about stuff like this, but I do.
revelation 12y ago
Right, the evergreen of explanations by those that betray their principles and users (or, you know, voters). They exercised a freedom of choice they had, and this is the decision they made. This is what we judge them on. No backsies, no "but I didn't want to", just pure "go fuck yourself Mozilla".
- pdpi 12y ago
  Ok, great. Go fuck yourself Mozilla. Now what? What real alternative did they have? Unlike RMS, Mozilla have always played with a more pragmatic strategy. If you want to win this war, you need to educate users. Being that only a handful of people out there actively care about privacy issues and platform openness, you need to produce a compelling product first and foremost, and then push your agenda on top of that. If Mozilla were to not implement EME, they'd cripple their own capacity to reach those users, and the war would be as good as lost.
  - kevingadd 12y ago
    A browser 1% of the internet uses is a browser nobody can use. We already have extensive problems with mobile sites being tuned to only work against webkit - or even worse, only work against safari - if Firefox's share drops into the single percentage points because things like Netflix, Farmville and Youtube don't work, due to the exclusion of proprietary web features like plugins and H264, it will become so insigificant that web developers don't even consider it during development.
    - pdpi 12y ago
      Yes, my point exactly. Battle is lost. There's too much at stake here to cripple the long term for a moral victory.
      - makomk 12y ago
        They haven't just lost this one battle though - they've set themselves up to lose a thousand further battles in the future. This puts Mozilla in a very bad strategic position; once DRM in the form of EME is relied on by a large chunk of the web, they have no way of resisting demands from content providers and their EME module provider to make it more invasive in an attempt to make it more robust. If sites like Youtube start relying on EME, something they will not do without widespread browser support initially, Mozilla will hardly be able to risk losing support for them.
barrkel 12y ago
It is the wrong choice. It's the same BS I remember reading on slides from graphics card vendors excusing some other way of selling the user down the river. Content can adapt to reach their customers. Bend here and the web itself is under threat. Mozilla needs a social contract like Debian, since it seems clear they can't rely on leadership for backbone.
- TylerE 12y ago
  Did you seriously just equate closed source graphics drivers to slavery?
  - valleyer 12y ago
    Can you explain how you came to that interpretation?
    - TylerE 12y ago
      Where do you think the phrase "sold down the river" came from - from slaves being sold to be sent down the Mississippi River to the slave markets in New Orleans.
      - tragic 12y ago
        I do hope you never use the word 'sinister', which of course comes from the old belief that left-handed people are somehow the spawn of the devil. Or refer to someone getting "their pound of flesh", which is Shakespeare's quaint variant on the blood libel. Etc, etc.
  - kylek 12y ago
    at least he didn't Godwin's Law[0] it? [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
  - joaren 12y ago
    No, he used a figure of speech, which you chose to interpret in the least useful way possible.
walden42 12y ago
Can't addons be used to supplement the missing features?
- spoiler 12y ago
  I prefer the sound of DRM over addons/plugins/applets/whatnot, to be honest.
derengel 12y ago
By making that decision there is no reason left to keep using Firefox, since technically, Chrome is a superior browser.
Istof 12y ago
It might be the right choice, but it would be nice if somehow they displayed that the content displayed is protected by DRM (like for encryption, http/https). It might help people choose different sources for information/entertainment/etc..
vpeters25 12y ago
Why does a non-profit worry so much about users moving to other browsers?.
yp_all 12y ago
Mozilla is an organization that has hundreds of millions in revenue but does not pay taxes? How many employees? What are their salaries? Whatever, I don't care about that stuff. Here's my question: Does Mozilla still portend to be "open source"? Because if it was "open source" in the sense to which I am accustomed, then I could simply compile a Mozilla browser without DRM. For example, if I never had any need to watch DRM, then it would make sense that I could compile the browser without the DRM code. One beauty of open source is that the user can modify it. She can trim off what she does not need. Your comment repeatedly refers to "trust". How does one achieve "trust" through closed source (e.g., the binary blob from Adobe)?
- bzbarsky 12y ago
  > but does not pay taxes? What makes you think Mozilla does not pay taxes? It most certainly pays taxes. I'll save you the web searching: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2012.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... is the latest set of financials that are public; see pages 4 and 5. For 2012, the Mozilla Corporation had $311 million in revenue, $208.5 million in expenses, and paid $37.6 million in income taxes. The federal corporate income tax rate in the US is 35%, fwiw, and California's is 8.84%, so it's not like Mozilla is trying particularly hard to evade that tax liability (0.4384 * (311 - 208.5 - depreciation) likely comes out pretty close to 37.6). > then I could simply compile a Mozilla browser without DRM. Sure. And you can and will be able to. > How does one achieve "trust" through closed source (e.g., the binary blob from Adobe)? Don't install it? The blob won't be shipped with the browser by default and will require explicit user action to install.
  - yp_all 12y ago
    "What makes you think Mozilla does not pay taxes?" Corporate structure. (Mozilla Corp. is wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. Only Mozilla Corporation pays taxes.) 2008 IRS audit. 2012 settlement with IRS. Perhaps a better statement would have been that Mozilla tries to avoid paying taxes. Anyway, if what you say is true regarding compilation and exclusion of the DRM code then I'm not sure what everyone in thie thread is complaining about. Now, how easy is it to compile Firefox these days? I have not done it in years. I gave up on X. (Following your exact advice, even with open source: "Don't install it.") I use UNIX with no graphics layer and simpler text only browsers and even simpler TCP clients to retrieve content. Then if necessary I view it on graphical devices running closed source software. The interesting thing is when I want to watch video, the last thing I need is a "browser". The core of the video player software I use is the ffmpeg libraries which have nothing to do with web browsers. I only use HTTP (and other protocols) to transfer content (i.e., to request it), not to watch it. I see no reason why a single application has to support both (request/transfer and playback). Why video players have to support "streaming" or why "web browsers" have to play video are still open questions in my mind. But that's just me. Stuck in the UNIX "one utility, one job" mindset.

wolfgke 12y ago

For people who want DRM there are already enough browser choices. On the other hand for people who refuse DRM there's only one choice - and soon zero.

jgraham 12y ago
That isn't the case. You can choose to not install the CDM component.
- shmerl 12y ago
  Is there a way to disable all related code in Firefox itself? Just for the sake of it. May be Mozilla can produce clean and tainted builds for that purpose.
  - azakai 12y ago
    The code is 100% open source, so even if there isn't a GUI option for it, it would be easy for people to make builds without it. There are already many forked builds of firefox like iceweasel, etc.
    - shmerl 12y ago
      Yes, I expect such thing to surface, but it would be nice if Mozilla could provide such options on their own too. That would be some small positive gesture towards those who don't appreciate their move and see it as a betrayal of Mozilla's core values. It would as well make this issue more apparent. Doesn't Mozilla care about educating the public on such matters? It surely would be a positive thing for the Open Web.
      - azakai 12y ago
        As the blog post mentioned, the EME stuff will be an option that the Firefox user would need to agree to install. That would be an opportunity to educate users on the topic, I think.
        shmerl 12y ago
        I meant it a bit further. Not just disabling the EME external module, but disabling all related code in Firefox itself on the build stage. While functionally it won't make much difference, it would have more of a symbolic nature of making a point. Plus such builds would guarantee that it can't even be enabled at all (without user's knowledge for example). If there would be build switches to disable that, I'm sure Linux distros with similar to Debian policies will ship versions where it will be disabled altogether.
- wolfgke 12y ago
  Apple has for political reasons disabled the possibility to install a Flash plugin on Safari/iOS. Why doesn't Firefox do the same with a CDM component for political reasons?
  - toyg 12y ago
    Mozila will never have the marketing firepower to pull off such a boycott.
  - renata 12y ago
    The cost to the user of switching off Apple hardware is much greater than the cost of switching from Firefox to Chrome.
    - wolfgke 12y ago
      A few years ago there was a cost involved for switching to the iPhone. The only reason why you see this the other way round is that "no Flash" is now established (at least for mobile). On the other hand: no DRM in browser cannot be considered as established - so we are at the same point where the iPhone was some years ago.
  - chc 12y ago
    Apple disabled Flash for "security reasons." You can certainly read in politics, but the reason they gave was that it was the #1 attack vector on Macs and they had no way of securing it. And more importantly, nearly everybody else was on Apple's side in this fight. Other browser makers had problems with Flash too. Mac users largely hated Flash because it had terrible performance on that platform. Even Adobe was cooling off toward Flash as it became more and more clear that it wouldn't work on mobile platforms. Mozilla's position here is not at all similar to Apple's position then, so their options are not the same.
  - jljljl 12y ago
    Apple also did this for performance and usability reasons. And when Apple did it, there were no smartphone alternatives that provided a sufficiently good Flash experience. And before you say Android had Flash, I had an Android device that could run Flash in 2011. It was a pretty useless feature.
wodenokoto 12y ago
no. drm will still be an add-on, just like it is today. The DRM add-on will just change from flash/silverlight. DRM is a very real thing in todays web.
- wolfgke 12y ago
  > no. drm will still be an add-on, just like it is today. Flash is not an add-on, but a plugin. And there is a good reason why plugins have a bad image and browser developers and users prefer to get rid of them.
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    Watch Netflix, the champion of "HTML5 DRM", go back to a plugin in order to use P2P streaming within the next 18 months.
    - lern_too_spel 12y ago
      P2P streaming can be built on top of WebRTC fairly easily.
nullc 12y ago
I'm not sure that thats quite fair— Firefox won't run the CDM without user consent. You can still say no. Having a choice doesn't magically resolve the issues, it doesn't prevent content providers from making things formerly available unavailable, it doesn't help us (as users) make better more considered decisions rather than clicking yes a lot to get things done, etc. But it does retain the choice to not run this stuff, choice which is not retained in the current closed source alternatives.
- saganus 12y ago
  The problem is that no one can guarantee that the "opt-out" choice will continue to be there in the foreseeable future. What will happen when, suddenly Mozilla starts "feeling the pressure" to remove that option? What then? The problem is the building's foundations, not the decoration.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - kbuck 12y ago
    This seems unlikely, and in fact, Firefox has been moving in the opposite direction with other binary components (Flash, Java, Silverlight). Newer builds of Firefox require you to explicitly confirm that you'd like to allow <site> to execute plugin code. I doubt this will change any time soon. I'd rather have a (albeit stupid) DRM executable that only performs encryption/decryption than Flash, Java, or Silverlight, which are the current solutions for this. All three of these offer APIs for doing things other than decrypting DRM content, and these APIs have been proven time and time again to be vulnerable to attack, no matter how much time is spent trying to sandbox them properly.
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    The proposal has an inherent opt-out choice. Content providers provide media within DRM containers, users can choose if they get the media or not. It's not like anybody can force you to watch the last Hollywood stuff.
mmanfrin 12y ago
People don't want DRM, people want content. That content is demanding DRM (via Youtube, Netflix). If Mozilla denied the DRM, Firefox users would be denied Youtube. In response to this, some of you might say 'well then people would go elsewhere for their content', to which I would ask: did people leave Netflix because of Silverlight?
- spacelizard 12y ago
  >did people leave Netflix because of Silverlight? They did, actually. If not by their own doing then by the fact that Netflix is just not available on certain devices and operating systems. As long as Netflix is a DRM platform, this trend will likely continue. The irony here is that Mozilla is apparently being badgered into supporting DRM for "compatibility reasons" when the whole point of DRM is to strictly limit compatibility with whatever arbitrary restrictions the publisher wants.
mongrol 12y ago
Nonsense. http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/ http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

howeyc 12y ago

Right, they are using "their power to influence the development of the open web" by supporting DRM. What's the point in having this power if you immediately cave?

GuiA 12y ago
Ding ding ding! You've hit the nail on the head. Mozilla has no real power over the web. Google, Microsoft, and Apple have the power (look at the names associated with EME DRM - what a surprise). Mozilla has an illusion of power, which is tolerated by the other actors because it makes everyone happy. But no one should mistake it for real leverage.
- toyg 12y ago
  Mozilla has had real power for a brief period, when both MS and Google had their eyes off the ball. Once Chrome matured, the game was up. It didn't help that it took them ages to fix widespread performance problems in FF... This said, if they go back to their roots as "ayatollah of open web and open source", I might consider them again; but until they're just another ad-backed bureaucracy, I might as well stick to a better one.
  - fabrice_d 12y ago
    Mozilla was never "ayatollah of open web and open source". If it has been, firefox would have never been available on Windows, like some people at the time argued. Google did well technically on Chrome, but investing a huge amount of marketing dollars (like bundling chrome with other nice things like toolbars) didn't hurt them.
    - aylons 12y ago
      Well, even emacs is available for Windows. I guess not even ayatollahs are that extreme. They may concede if they think it will help their great goal.
  - emilsedgh 12y ago

maaku 12y ago

Mozilla's whole argument for using their products rests on trust. They have consistently lost out in terms of performance, usability, and other things users care about. I no longer trust Mozilla, so why should I use their software? How does this not result in loss of trust and users?

marincounty 12y ago
They still have my trust, but I feel like I just heard by girlfriend cheated. And yes--I have no life. I never thought I would care about stuff like this, but I do.

revelation 12y ago

Right, the evergreen of explanations by those that betray their principles and users (or, you know, voters). They exercised a freedom of choice they had, and this is the decision they made. This is what we judge them on. No backsies, no "but I didn't want to", just pure "go fuck yourself Mozilla".

pdpi 12y ago
Ok, great. Go fuck yourself Mozilla. Now what? What real alternative did they have? Unlike RMS, Mozilla have always played with a more pragmatic strategy. If you want to win this war, you need to educate users. Being that only a handful of people out there actively care about privacy issues and platform openness, you need to produce a compelling product first and foremost, and then push your agenda on top of that. If Mozilla were to not implement EME, they'd cripple their own capacity to reach those users, and the war would be as good as lost.
- kevingadd 12y ago
  A browser 1% of the internet uses is a browser nobody can use. We already have extensive problems with mobile sites being tuned to only work against webkit - or even worse, only work against safari - if Firefox's share drops into the single percentage points because things like Netflix, Farmville and Youtube don't work, due to the exclusion of proprietary web features like plugins and H264, it will become so insigificant that web developers don't even consider it during development.
  - pdpi 12y ago
    Yes, my point exactly. Battle is lost. There's too much at stake here to cripple the long term for a moral victory.
    - makomk 12y ago
      They haven't just lost this one battle though - they've set themselves up to lose a thousand further battles in the future. This puts Mozilla in a very bad strategic position; once DRM in the form of EME is relied on by a large chunk of the web, they have no way of resisting demands from content providers and their EME module provider to make it more invasive in an attempt to make it more robust. If sites like Youtube start relying on EME, something they will not do without widespread browser support initially, Mozilla will hardly be able to risk losing support for them.

barrkel 12y ago

It is the wrong choice. It's the same BS I remember reading on slides from graphics card vendors excusing some other way of selling the user down the river. Content can adapt to reach their customers. Bend here and the web itself is under threat. Mozilla needs a social contract like Debian, since it seems clear they can't rely on leadership for backbone.

TylerE 12y ago
Did you seriously just equate closed source graphics drivers to slavery?
- valleyer 12y ago
  Can you explain how you came to that interpretation?
  - TylerE 12y ago
    Where do you think the phrase "sold down the river" came from - from slaves being sold to be sent down the Mississippi River to the slave markets in New Orleans.
    - tragic 12y ago
      I do hope you never use the word 'sinister', which of course comes from the old belief that left-handed people are somehow the spawn of the devil. Or refer to someone getting "their pound of flesh", which is Shakespeare's quaint variant on the blood libel. Etc, etc.
- kylek 12y ago
  at least he didn't Godwin's Law[0] it? [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
- joaren 12y ago
  No, he used a figure of speech, which you chose to interpret in the least useful way possible.

walden42 12y ago

Can't addons be used to supplement the missing features?

spoiler 12y ago
I prefer the sound of DRM over addons/plugins/applets/whatnot, to be honest.

derengel 12y ago

By making that decision there is no reason left to keep using Firefox, since technically, Chrome is a superior browser.

Istof 12y ago

It might be the right choice, but it would be nice if somehow they displayed that the content displayed is protected by DRM (like for encryption, http/https). It might help people choose different sources for information/entertainment/etc..

vpeters25 12y ago

Why does a non-profit worry so much about users moving to other browsers?.

yp_all 12y ago

Mozilla is an organization that has hundreds of millions in revenue but does not pay taxes? How many employees? What are their salaries? Whatever, I don't care about that stuff. Here's my question: Does Mozilla still portend to be "open source"? Because if it was "open source" in the sense to which I am accustomed, then I could simply compile a Mozilla browser without DRM. For example, if I never had any need to watch DRM, then it would make sense that I could compile the browser without the DRM code. One beauty of open source is that the user can modify it. She can trim off what she does not need. Your comment repeatedly refers to "trust". How does one achieve "trust" through closed source (e.g., the binary blob from Adobe)?

bzbarsky 12y ago
> but does not pay taxes? What makes you think Mozilla does not pay taxes? It most certainly pays taxes. I'll save you the web searching: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2012.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... is the latest set of financials that are public; see pages 4 and 5. For 2012, the Mozilla Corporation had $311 million in revenue, $208.5 million in expenses, and paid $37.6 million in income taxes. The federal corporate income tax rate in the US is 35%, fwiw, and California's is 8.84%, so it's not like Mozilla is trying particularly hard to evade that tax liability (0.4384 * (311 - 208.5 - depreciation) likely comes out pretty close to 37.6). > then I could simply compile a Mozilla browser without DRM. Sure. And you can and will be able to. > How does one achieve "trust" through closed source (e.g., the binary blob from Adobe)? Don't install it? The blob won't be shipped with the browser by default and will require explicit user action to install.
- yp_all 12y ago
  "What makes you think Mozilla does not pay taxes?" Corporate structure. (Mozilla Corp. is wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. Only Mozilla Corporation pays taxes.) 2008 IRS audit. 2012 settlement with IRS. Perhaps a better statement would have been that Mozilla tries to avoid paying taxes. Anyway, if what you say is true regarding compilation and exclusion of the DRM code then I'm not sure what everyone in thie thread is complaining about. Now, how easy is it to compile Firefox these days? I have not done it in years. I gave up on X. (Following your exact advice, even with open source: "Don't install it.") I use UNIX with no graphics layer and simpler text only browsers and even simpler TCP clients to retrieve content. Then if necessary I view it on graphical devices running closed source software. The interesting thing is when I want to watch video, the last thing I need is a "browser". The core of the video player software I use is the ffmpeg libraries which have nothing to do with web browsers. I only use HTTP (and other protocols) to transfer content (i.e., to request it), not to watch it. I see no reason why a single application has to support both (request/transfer and playback). Why video players have to support "streaming" or why "web browsers" have to play video are still open questions in my mind. But that's just me. Stuck in the UNIX "one utility, one job" mindset.