Re: Firefox "Looking Glass" fiasco

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De: "Adam Williamson"
> I think we should be concerned by this kind of behaviour on the part of
> the supplier of our default desktop browser, and we should express that
> concern to them.

Adam,

We should understand that there is a whole software ecosystem that grew on the Internet and free software, but emphatically does *not* share Fedora values.

For them free software is at best an absurdity and at worst an abomination, and open source is acceptable insofar it offers a ramp to open core or cloud services (which are really the same thing under different guises).

They are here to monetize users one way or another, will collect as much data as possible in the hope of selling it so someone, will make as much a PITA as possible the rebuilding of their software because free software that can only be rebuilt sanely by one org has all the properties of proprietary software without the associated user rejection. They will lobby for 'open source' and 'bundling' and 'container images' because that reduces the actual chance their software can be industrialized by others (ie that severely reduces the SHARE property). Linux distributions in particular are their enemy both because they reduce the cost of deploying their software to zero, and have the capability to remove antifeatures at will.

Those people look closely at how Google managed to build android from open source bricks without letting it escape from its control and dearly wish to emulate that.

They are the same people that thought AIX and Solaris were crushing Linux, because their indicator was the amount of money paid for each system, not how useful it was for the society in general.

A few years ago their indicator switched to the number of users (when people were paying ridiculous amounts of money for websites based on their user count), now the indicator is moving to the amount of data that can be extracted from users (because big data and AI and get rich quick magic), next year it will be something else that will have no relationship with Fedora values.

Is it surprising that the Mozilla foundation, that decided long ago that users were idiots that didn't know what they wanted, and reoriented itself to serve the cloud industry, is increasingly sharing the values of this cloud industry, and only caring about user needs as defined by this industry? I'm sure the people that invented "looking glass" didn't realize (and do not realize today) there was any problem with it. I'm sure they are fuming at the injustice of getting hung high and dry when they were just doing business as usual as defined in those not-really-free-software circles.

This is only the first of many similar incidents, if we continue to think that any one professing "open source" is our friend. Many are not. Free software won the development story but free software values are no less marginal than a decade ago. Maybe even more so, now that the water is severely muddied.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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