First: this is an e-mail on personal title. Does not reflect Telenor's opinion.
I started as a fulltime contributor on Firefox OS more than two years ago, and from the moment that it started it was great working together with the people from MozCorp, volunteers and other partners. F.e. we did a joint work week with Telefonica to get up to speed (before the Madrid one), hosted the Firefox OS work week in Oslo, and joined in during the summit. Together with the evangelism team we created training materials, wrote some blog posts, etc. Really pleasurable experience. However, lately I feel like a second class citizen within Mozilla. When the Firefox OS shutdown / reboot / ideation process begun no-one told me. When we wanted to participate in the ideation it felt like we were not allowed. Discussions happened on platforms where you could only join in with a MozCorp e-mail address. Three months later the solution is then formed, and dumped upon us (the partners). To me, this seems crazy, not only do the partners have actual people working fulltime on the Mozilla codebase, they are also module owners, plus they should have an actual idea on what is needed to make Firefox OS a success (at least the engineers). In the past months I have been to Bangladesh, worked with local community, and I think I have a pretty good idea on why we're not selling enough. Now there is also the work week in Whistler approaching, and I figured it would be a great way to align with the people who work on Gaia, talk a bit about how Moz thinks about IoT, and also have some of our new hires work together with the WebRTC team (as we hired 2 people now for that). History has shown that just being together for a week clears the air and aligns people (at least in my memory). Plus, there is no normal Firefox OS work week anymore so I haven't seen a lot of devs that I work with on a day-to-day basis in like a year (!). Getting the invitation for the work week has been *incredibly* hard, and I really get the feeling Mozilla doesn't want any non-MozCorp people there (we'd pay for flight/hotel ourselves anyway). We finally got an 'okish' answer, but: "They won't be permitted to attend our Friday party or the Wednesday dinner and other evenings" For me this boils down to: if you really really really have to, you can come, but you cannot come to the all-hands, to any meetings, anything Mozilla pays for, and you can also not come to any of the social events. Or as a co-worker of mine stated it: "to me this sounds like spending a bunch of money in order to be awkwardly excluded." Mozilla is a community, and MozCorp staff shouldn't be more special in that community than partners or other volunteers, and I lately get that feeling unfortunately. (Disclaimer: this doesn't apply to the engineers. Feedback loops and reviews in bugzilla don't suffer from this problem, seems faster than ever actually, and it also doesn't mean that I'll stop working on Mozilla code, but this has been boiling inside me for a while) _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
