Between this an putting DRM into firefox, Mozilla seems to be channeling Neville Chamberlain: "My good friends, for the second time this week, a *Mozilla t

Between this an putting DRM into firefox, Mozilla seems to be channeling Neville Chamberlain: "My good friends, for the second time this week, a *Mozilla team member* has returned from *Content Services* bringing *privacy* with *"tailored ads"*. I believe it is *privacy* for our time... Go home and get a nice quiet sleep." Appeasement just cost them them a lot of support. Unfortunately, this was probably inevitable, given that Mozilla was firmly in the "Open Source" camp. A lot of people like to complain about the strict ideological rigidity of RMS and the FSF. As we see here, without the foundation that is focused on the Free (as in speech) ideals and putting the user first, the 'pragmatic" decisions of Open Source allow it to be captured by popular faction. The problem with this situation isn't ads. It isn't even the obvious privacy issues that end up being lampshaded with promises of anymization and servers that never get hacked or changed in future updates. The really damning thing about putting ads into Firefox is the conflicting incentives it introduces. Previously, Mozilla just had a cache problem. Now they have a slightly smaller cache problem and are financially dependent on advertisers. When (not if) those advertisers request something more intrusive, is Mozilla prepared to give up that income source to protect their users? No, that's the problem with paying the Dane-geld[1] - you never get rid of the Dane. [1] http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.html http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.html