Sure, anyone could fork the source, but the Foundation do own and control the Mozilla source *repositories*.
These are nice sentiments, but the Mozilla Foundation PR FAQ claims Brendan severed all ties and is not even a volunteer contributor. "A: No. In fact, Board members and senior executives tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another role or to stay actively involved with Mozilla as a volunteer contributor. Brendan decided that it was better for himself and for Mozilla to sever all ties, at least for now." All ties would include being a module owner. But I do take the PR with a grain of salt! I am confident that the project of maintaining and developing the browser will not 'fall into a pathetic heap'. There are many fine people who could fill Brendan's shoes as module owner, including yourself. But I can not think of anyone who can fill Brendan's shoes at the strategic level which will cause failure by being out competed and sidelined. Jim -------------------------------------------- On Sun, 4/6/14, Nicholas Nethercote <[email protected]> wrote: Subject: Re: Back to IE and Microsoft - Mozilla Intolerance To: "Jim Taylor" <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>, "Jorge Villalobos" <[email protected]> Date: Sunday, April 6, 2014, 4:41 PM On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 9:40 PM, Jim Taylor <[email protected]> wrote: > > Alas, this is just wishful thinking. The source code repositories and > branding are owned and controlled by Mozilla Foundation and Brendan no > longer has any legal standing to control these. The Firefox trademark is owned by the Mozilla Foundation. The source code, however, is "owned" by a huge number of people and companies, and licensed in such a way that anyone can create a product from it. That's how variants of Firefox such as IceWeasel and Pale Moon exist. > The Foundation may allow Brendan to decide on many issues, but he is no >longer the 'ultimate authority on Mozilla's source code'. Yes he is. Any technical disputes that cannot be resolved at a lower-level will bubble up to him. In practice this is an authority that is required extremely rarely, but he still has it. As for day-to-day contributions to the code, I don't know if he'll be making any. It's understandable that he wants to take a break for a while. Maybe his absence will cause the project to fall into an pathetic heap, or maybe the project is large enough and has enough talent and momentum to fill the hole his departure has created. We'll see. Maybe he'll even return to doing technical work once some time has passed; I for one would be happy to see that. Nick _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
