On Tuesday, November 25, 2014 12:07:59 PM UTC-6, Mike Hoye wrote: > On 2014-11-25 12:45 PM, Adam Porter wrote: > > If Google or Yahoo have been complicit in doing so, or coerced to the > > point of being legally unable to resist, then a strong argument could > > be made against Mozilla's making deals with them, as well. Perhaps > > that is a conversation that also needs to be had. > No, it doesn't. > > There are degrees of nuance here, sure, but if we refuse to participate > in places where people's use of the network might be tracked, or refuse > to work with organizations that also, willingly or not, collaborate with > government organizations, that is precisely the same as refusing to use > the modern Internet at all.
I don't see how that's precisely the same at all. Mozilla's producing Firefox and making it available to the world does not depend on collaborating with government organizations. > You're already arguing about degrees of abuse on the one hand and > insisting on ideological purity on the other, but you can't have both. > And, sure, there's nuance here as well. But if Mozilla refuses to engage > with the internet as we find it, where our users find themselves, if we > just washed our hands of the whole thing, it's hard to see how we'll > ever turn this into the internet we want. I don't understand. Are we talking past each other? You say, "if Mozilla refuses to engage with the Internet as we find it...it's hard to see how we'll ever turn this into the internet we want," but does that require taking millions of dollars from Yandex and Baidu? There are many free software projects that have made tremendous impacts on the Internet without being funded by such entities. > Ideological purity is a way to feel smug about doing nothing, and if we > want to change the world for the better, doing nothing isn't an option. One man's "smug ideological purity" is another man's principled stand and refusal to collaborate with, support, and take money from oppressors. You also seem to imply a false dichotomy, that Mozilla must either take money from Yandex and Baidu or else do nothing. This does not compute. Perhaps I misunderstand you, but your position seems to boil down to that the ends justify the means. If so, as I have expressed before, I strongly disagree. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
