On 04/12/2015 20:43, R Kent James wrote: > I think that you are seeing what is the common experience of people who > are trying to work with Mozilla technologies. That is, there are rumors > and statements about plans to deprecate some feature or technology, but > rarely any concrete schedule. Often these things take years between > rumor and implementation, and the rumor starts before there is any > concrete replacement. But the rumor is enough for us to be on notice, or > so the expectation goes, so someone can get the urge to really make it > happen, and quite quickly the rumor becomes reality. If you are trying > to rely on Mozilla technologies, there is this constant threat of a > sudden technology change that will leave you and your major application > unusable.
This has always been one of the major issues of the community: "everything is in bug ###" is not enough as a message for us embedders and users. And there were no blog post about any plan. There are "desires", "opinions" but where's the plan? When was it discussed or at least presented to us embedders? When was the impact on us evaluated and how since we were never pinged about it? This does not feel like the normal behaviour of a community, and it costs me an arm to write it, as we say in french. I am therefore asking for a "council" or "committee" gathering the main embedders/users of the Mozilla platform where we could, together, have a better vision of the future of the platform - even if we have to sign a confidentiality agreement - and discuss what it means to everyone. This does not exist today. Or maybe we don't count at all - and I can live with it - but we have to officially know it _now_. > What this does is leave people with the solid understanding that Mozilla > is not a reliable technology partner. > > As far as I understand the official Mozilla position, the only > application that is encouraged to use the Mozilla platform is Firefox. > Anybody else is on notice that their needs will not be considered in > future technology planning, and "Go Fast" initiatives mean that > technology deprecation will go faster than anybody can reasonably keep > up with. In that environment it would be great if there were "no earlier > than" schedules for deprecation of key technologies like XUL, XPCOM, and > XBL, hopefully with years of warning. > > I think it is fair to say that those of us who have major investments in > Mozilla technology do not think this is the right approach for Mozilla. > Of course we are terribly inconvenienced by it, to the point of > existential threats to our existence as viable products and communities. > But beyond that, many of us are loyal Mozillians who are not excited > about being driven to things like NodeJS to get any real work done. > Today's inconveniences like Thunderbird could be tomorrow's web > innovation. Just look how AJAX and XHR originally arose as attempts to > make better email clients in GMail and Outlook. Yet we are pushed away > and isolated, so that Firefox can "Go Fast". > > Another restatement of my current understanding of the Mozilla position > is, "We will try to be nice about it, but please everybody but Firefox > stop using the Mozilla platform as rapidly as possible". As loyal > Mozillians, we'll fall on our swords and strongly consider migrating to > NodeJS-based platforms. Is that really what Mozilla wants? Unfortunately, I have to agree totally with the above. As I already said, companies very deeply relying on the Mozilla platform are left in the dark and it's supposed we can cope with any transformation of that platform, whatever the depth. It's not going to happen that way for multiple reasons: cost, strategy, and more. I should also mention trust, yes trust. But overall, there are technical reasons why a Mozilla platform moving to the OWP won't be suitable any more to our projects: we will not be able to express all we do or use because html-based apps are just not at that level yet. I have gathered a list of all the interfaces BlueGriffon uses in its JS code. Since it's quite long, please ping me to get it, I don't want to paste it here. A rewriting of BlueGriffon based on html would require a replacement for all of them. In terms of cost, BlueGriffon is a 2.5 years project from scratch to v1. Let's be clear, we won't have the finances to rewrite it. I am then asking for a real strategy for a smoother transition plan, and I consider it as only fair. Again, I feel VERY sad writing all of that. I have a been a faithful and loyal member of the community for fifteen years - and even more if you consider my years of faithful supporter of Netscape (ask Vidur Apparao...). I pushed Gecko to countless organizations in Europe, US and Asia. Seeing that Mozilla gives us so little information about moves that put whole businesses (including mine) at risk is heart-breaking. I am discussing here a death knell on my company and some of my customers, and the reply is just "follow us at our speed" w/o really caring about our capacity to do it. This feels so totally wrong. </Daniel> _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
