----- Original Message ----- From: "Benjamin Kerensa" <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2014 3:29:11 AM Subject: Re: sponsored new tab tiles - please tell me this is a (bad) joke
I have to say right now on Google+ and on other Social Media networks there are lots of people not taking the announcement well. I would say this is impacting at least a minority of our users feelings about Firefox. ----------- Of course there are lots of people unhappy about this announcement - any time an open source company tries to make money, people are unhappy. There are also a lot of people unhappy that a large percentage of our revenue comes from Google. There are many people who are unhappy because they think that Google controls us. I'll say it again - any time an open source company tries to make money, people are unhappy. By diversifying our income, we can better serve everyone. If we do not have money, we have to tighten up what we do. Lots of people are still unhappy about us putting Thunderbird and Seamonkey on the back burner, but we do not have unlimited funds to pay engineers and infrastructure staff to develop every product we have ever come up with - even the successful one. I wasn't part of coming up with sponsored tiles, but I'm surprised at how very little trust everyone has in the people who did. Do you really think that the concerns that popped into your head within 24 hours of hearing this announced did not occur to the committee of people who brainstormed this idea for *weeks* (if not months)? We're all smart and have unique ideas, but OMG SPONSORED CONTENT! DON'T INVADE PRIVACY! is not unique, and it was stated that the new feature will hold Mozilla's values, which include a commitment to privacy. And really, people complaining about the new feature is probably better than people complaining about why we have it. The last thing I want to see is headlines like OMG MOZILLA HAS NO MONEY! or OMG GOOGLE IS TRYING TO CONTROL MOZILLA WITH MONEY SO THEY ARE DESPERATELY TRYING TO BREAK FREE! Do we have the *potential* to break trust? Absolutely! But we've had that potential for 15 years and we have a damn good reputation for it, with Firefox on the Desktop, on Android, and now with Firefox OS. What I'm not proud of is so many smart colleagues who just assume that an issue as big as this was not thought through backwards and forwards, just because there are potential problems. -Sheeri (PS This response was to Ben, but it applies to everyone thinking this way. It's bullshit and I'm really tired of it, and I'll own my own sensitivity to this kind of issue - I've been dealing with 5 years of OMG THE SKY IS FALLING AND ORACLE IS GOING TO KILL MYSQL....even though Oracle has had ownership of a major component of MySQL - InnoDB - since 2005. Oracle has a reputation of not killing MySQL for 9 years now, and yet, people are still saying Oracle will kill it. I don't love Oracle, but there's no base in the idea that they'll kill MySQL.) _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
