On 09/06/15 04:22, Nicholas Nethercote wrote:
> What I'm saying is this: don't mix up the two arguments above. If
> you're really upset by the Pocket integration, it's almost certainly
> because of the first argument above, so don't get side-tracked by the
> second argument.

Right. And the first argument is strange because this is not the first
time we've done this. Most of the bundled search engines, safe browsing
and (until recently) our location service are/were all commercial
third-party services with closed source back-ends.

I know there are people out there who don't want to use any website
whose code is closed source, but I think they are pretty rare, as 99.9%
of websites are closed source. Mozilla has, more than a decade ago, made
a policy decision that linking to or integrating with services whose
backend is closed-source is OK, and that decision is not under review.
Trying to do otherwise would, IMO, make our product seriously
uncompetitive, which would not be good for the mission. (Note that
Mozilla's mission is not to make the entire web open _source_ anyway.)

In creating any feature, Mozilla has to choose between partnering to get
it, or building it ourselves. And we can't build _everything_. A current
example is safe browsing, and a future example of something I think we'd
like to integrate that I doubt we can build is a translation service.

Gerv

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