On 12/1/15 12:21 AM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 10:11 PM, Mitchell Baker <[email protected]> wrote:
7. Some Mozillians are eager to see Mozilla support community-managed
projects within our main development efforts. I am also sympathetic to this
view, with a key precondition. Community-managed projects that make the
main effort less nimble and likely to succeed don’t fit very well into this
category for me. They can still be great open source projects -- this is a
separate question from whether the fit in our main development systems. I
feel so strongly about this because I am so concerned that “the Web” we
love is at risk. If we want the traits of the Web to live and prosper in
the world of mobile, social and data then we have to be laser-focused on
this.
Can you comment why you think Thunderbird (or maybe even email in
general) is not part of this Web that we love that is at risk? I've
been wondering whether the focus of Mozilla on HTML and related
technology is a bit too narrow, when a lot of the battle in my view is
being fought around ecosystems (both in terms of app stores and
"cloud" technology) where Thunderbird/Lightning and its ecosystem
might actually be more of an asset.
Communications tools remain key, that's clear. Today the big tools are
WhatsApp, Viber, Line, etc. These are the communications tools that
hundreds of millions of people use as their home, and which are pushing
us away from the Web and into individual proprietary product offerings.
As advocates of open source or public benefit, and / or standards-based
interoperability we have a lot of work to do here. I do not believe an
email centric client like Thunderbird is going to win these people back
to the old model. Mozilla needs to lead in the new model.
I think it makes sense to separate Thunderbird and Firefox more from a
technical perspective, just because loose coupling is a good thing. I
think this is the same promise XULRunner and the Firefox SDK were
going to fulfill, though, and it always looks to me like they were
never really a viable strategy, in part due to a lack of resources
available to make that really a good technical bet.
And because XUL never caught on as an industry standard and became a
mozilla-specific technology. Open source, but not an interoperable
industry standard.
Also, this lack of focus on Gecko being a viable platform is kind of
weird when viewed through the lens of what's happening on the other
side of the fence with the Electron ecosystem, with Atom and Nylas N1
and whatever else is being built on top of that. If Mozilla had
invested more in XULRunner, would we have all of those developers as
part of our community now? There's a lot of noise being made about
participation, but this seems yet another instance where Mozilla takes
the stance that a sizable part of its community is not actually
welcome, and one might wonder whether actions speak louder than words.
Mozilla has both the opportunity and the challenge to have impact at a
large scale. I'm serious about the challenge part. It's hard to do of
course. But the challenge I mean here is that there are plenty of good
open source projects that one wants to see succeed that don't make sense
to integrate into mozilla build or technology infrastructure. I
recognize this is painful for Thunderbird, which is partially integrated
now.
Mitchell
Cheers,
Dirkjan
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