I took the liberty to fix the formatting while reading it. -- reuben
I've been around Mozilla a long time, but I'm not an employee, what keeps me coming back is my passion. It's also what keeps me frustrated. But needless to say, I have over the years, accumulated my own insights that I believe are overlooked and this comes at a cost to both Firefox and Mozilla. The attitude of Mozilla is that development (coding) rules the roost, but if you look around, how's that working out for you? That's the attitude of a company that is self-sustaining and quite frankly that's not an accolade that Mozilla has to its name. What should be ruling the roost at Mozilla is engagement and that's the one place where Mozilla consistently falls down. One of the fundamental goals of Mozilla is to ensure the web remains free, open and accessible to everyone everywhere. Any individual that wants to create any application that can render standards should be able to access the internet in all of its glory. It's a hard unappreciated road but it's a road that Mozilla walks upon. When Microsoft was subverting the web with Internet Explorer, Firefox was there to fight it back and provide us a better tomorrow, not just for the users on Windows, but Mozilla provided the foundation to ensure that anyone on any platform could access and use the full potential of the worldwide web. Firefox should have given birth to the Mozilla platform. The Mozilla platform should have been a basic UI and a bunch of APIs and any developer should have been able to create an application and plug the guts of that application into the Mozilla platform and have that application run on any OS that the Mozilla platform supported. Thunderbird should have been the shinning example of that platform at work. By switching out most of the functionality of Firefox for Thunderbird, Mozilla should have had a low maintenance application that was a proof of concept of the viability of the Mozilla platform. By virtue Thunderbird should be available for Windows, Linux, OSX and Android. We failed to bring that to fruition. In failing to do so, we failed to create an ecosystem that would bring more contributors to the Mozilla platform and by association Firefox. Imagine things like LibreOffice, Jdownloader, qBittorrent, Corebird, GIMP, etc running on the Mozilla platform. That was how sustainability was supposed to be created, by becoming the bedrock of open source development. Recently Mozilla made a tough call that made many turn their heads. It was the call to support DRM in Firefox. The reality is that this was the right call. It may have sucked and may continue to suck but it remains the right call. We decided to partner with Adobe to ensure that the needs of the evolved internet could be met by users of Firefox. However we've gone about this in the oddest of ways. Instead of creating an API and putting the responsibility on Adobe to ensure that not a single Firefox user is left behind, we have instead decided to create more work for Mozilla and embark on a course that requires us to stagger out what we've recognised as fundamental functionality for the modern day internet with Windows leading the charge. This isn't what we stand for nor what we believe in. Any discussions we had with Adobe should've ensured that all of our users were to get the ability to stream Netflix at once. Firefox is supposed to stand for open. It's supposed to be the counter-measure that ensures that no one corporation is able to manipulate the internet. Yet in attempting to chase that goal in its name, we seem to be throwing the actual nut and bolts of that goal out of the window. Case in point is Firefox for iOS. In our failure to engage a wide enough community, rather than prevent the subversion of Webkit of derivatives by lobbying our parliamentary representatives for an open iOS that would allow Firefox to exist as intended, we've decided to further entrench the dominance of Webkit and its derivatives in the internet. We're literally selling our soul for numbers/users. At what cost? It's our failure to again create and engage the community that sees Google requiring that Chrome is bundled as the default on any Android device that wants to come preloaded with the Play Store. We are horrible at community engagement. We have raised the bar as high as we possible could in order to ensure that our community shrinks as much as possible. We believe that by holding a few summits a few times a year, we're doing something great but in reality, we're an internet company and that's where our strength should lay. The hurdles to become a Mozillian are too high. Everything we do in our home patch is horrible and antiquated. The mailing list as an open and viable means of following anything is gone. It's a remnant of the past. It evolved into forums and yet we have all these mailing lists because apparently we like to make it as hard for everyone as possible. Bugzilla is just 'ugh', you know this, I know this. The separation between discussion of a bug and discussion about a bug is too wide. As a software company, we need to realise that the mailing lists and Bugzilla are two of our first points of contact. They shouldn't be horrible to use and they shouldn't be hurdles. In fact, they should be a single entity. Anybody and everybody should be able to access this lobby of Mozilla and discuss anything and everything. Discussion about a bug should take place on the bug. Yes, it seems like it would be messy for people wanting to work on a bug, but there should simply be a toggle that hides non-technical comments. Everyone should be welcomed and embraced in the same place. A pre-requisite for working at Mozilla should be a desire to work within the community and most importantly with the community. If an employee doesn't want to teach or discuss a position/decision they shouldn't be a part of Mozilla. Engaging one person and making one person feel like they are being heard, even if they are wrong, could mean that person contributing something that can further the growth of Mozilla. Yes, in some regards it is tedious, but necessary. I myself am subscribed to bugs where years later people are asking for some implementations to be reversed. However I am not saying that every reply needs an answer or that conversations never expire but I am saying for the time that the conversation is ongoing, anyone that's taken the time to engage an organisation the size of Mozilla should feel like their voice does matter. In regards to Bugzilla, the failure of the software and perhaps our approach is that we recognise coders above all else. Designers and testers be damned! We don't show nearly enough respect to the non-coders and that's saddening. If someone files a bug but a developer has come along and posted some code in another bug, if anyone even acknowledged your bug in the first place, you're going to get it duped over. Code is movable, the fact that patches can't be moved to another bug is a failing of Mozilla, but the fact that someone took their time to engage us and file that bug can't. Those people should always be recognised, in fact those people should be lauded. Because even if it's a utopian train of thought, that bug could be the bug that leads them to learn something that has traditionally been considered tangible by Mozilla, i.e. code. In failing us all, Bugzilla can't merge bugs, can't move patches, can't host discussion, can't produce daily digests, can't produce summaries and most damning at all, can't serve mobile content. Remember what I said about delivering content to everyone. How is it that as a company who's very raison d'être of the flagship product is about providing a window, a platform to consume the content of the internet, we neglect to ensure that the products that facilitate that can be consumed by everyone independent of the device they use. The lack of mobile accessibility at this company is nothing short of damning, whether it's Bugzilla or Planet Mozilla or even Nightly.Mozilla.org. We neglect our very means to grow our reach, our very means to engage. Another example of this is our failure to have enough people triaging bugs, the goal should always be to have no unconfirmed bugs and yet anyone that's been around Mozilla a while will have a large number of unconfirmed bugs, which are simply examples of our inability to show the respect to the efforts of people attempting to engage us. Mozilla should be about providing a platform for people with a passion to embrace those passions. Whether they're designers, coders or whatever. To succeed, we can't want to be or replicate the likes of Apple or Google but rather do it the Mozilla way. We have a contributor that's passionate about both Ubuntu and Firefox, that's great, Mozilla is the perfect marriage. We'll embrace you and grow you and give the platform you deserve to further Firefox on a Ubuntu from a usability point of view and you'll teach us things. The same goes for Windows, OSX and Android. We'll not sit in our ivory tower of Apple products and talk down to you, we'll marry our knowledge to take us all forward. We are the home of a unique set of coders, designers, testers and community officials that want to teach and want to engage. The type of users that aren't particularly suited to the likes of Google or Apple. Design engagement is somewhere we are horrid. We're discombobulated. Take for example 'share', we use a share icon on desktop that is a generic share icon. One that acts as a means to replace the various little buttons sprinkled around the internet. Yet on Android we use that same share icon for Firefox sync services. It doesn't take a User Interaction Designer to tell you that's confusing. There's no need for ambiguity and yet to raise that to the point of actually getting something sorted out is practically impossible. Even if you go as far as to submit alternative artwork. In failing our users in simple and straight-forward things like that, we fail ourselves, we fail Firefox and we fail Mozilla. In order to take Mozilla forward it's time we actually took Mozilla forward. We need more emphasis on all things user-facing. We need to invest more in triage, evangelism and all round engagement. We need to invest in ensuring that the tools we use not only work but are accessible. It's time to put the mailing lists and Bugzilla to bed and come up with something that's easier to use and takes pointers from the evolution of internet based communications systems of the past five years.Planet Mozilla should be more akin to HackerNews or Slashdot. Or we could just continue to stagnate. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
