On Monday, November 24, 2014 12:09:21 PM UTC-6, Gervase Markham wrote: > Having been recently in China, and seeing how broken Google's stuff is > (like, everything, including analytics), your choice in China is to ship > a search engine which does what the Chinese government wants, or not > ship one at all. > > Are you advocating we not ship one at all?
I advocate sticking to the principles upon which one's mission is founded. If you compromise them, what do you have left? Utilitarianism does not lead to liberty. > What would you have our policy be? We don't do deals with any company in > a country where the government exercises control over the activities of > those businesses, and has a poor human rights or international relations > record? People from some perspectives might argue that list should > include both the US and UK. There seem to be two separate issues here: 1. Which search engine to ship as the default 2. From whom to accept funding People seem to be missing the point here. Hearing criticism of a government, they leap at the chance to criticize the United States, a popular pastime now. They reply with whataboutism, complaining about the "evil" United States, implying that it's therefore acceptable to be funded by what are effectively arms of the Chinese and Russian governments. Hey, the U.S. government has done many things which were not good. The United States itself was founded upon the premise that governments have great potential to do evil; that's why the U.S. Constitution says what it does. The U.S. government has also done many good things, and continues to do so. The amount of foreign aid money given to nations in trouble is enormous, and the U.S. military is even deployed to help Ebola victims, building wards, testing blood, and flying people around Liberia in helicopters. How easy it is to overlook one side and focus on the other. But all that is beside the point, a distraction from the real problem. Google and Yahoo--despite the existence of things like the NSA and FISA courts--are not de facto arms of the U.S. government. Being funded by them is not equivalent to being funded by the U.S. government. That is not the case in China and Russia. One could make a case for shipping a functional default search engine for a locale rather than shipping none out of protest. One could also argue for shipping none out of protest; would doing so really stop anyone from using the Internet? I think not--but taking a principled stand might eventually contribute to positive change. But all of that pales in comparison to the issue of being funded to the tune of, presumably, millions of dollars per year by the Chinese and Russian governments. That is the real problem here. As I said, I don't see how that could be considered acceptable in light of Mozilla's stated mission and values. Hey, I'm just a "fat and happy" American armchair general who can sit back and write emails from the comfort of my home. But what will people in these countries, who are subject to these draconian laws and ruthless governments, think about Mozilla when they hear that Mozilla is being paid by what are effectively agencies of their oppressors? If the ends justify the means, then we are no better than the governments whose policies and actions we decry, and, in a sense, we have already lost. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
