Jason Bassford wrote:
> 1. I understand the thinking behind it, however I believe that,
> looking at a computer's filesystem at an overall level, it
> accomplishes very little. Most everything on a computer these days is
> NOT random. Perhaps Mozilla can be seen to "lead the charge" towards
> a fully randomized filesystem
What Gerv said.
> 2. When dealing with systems that have a large number of user profiles
> on them, and working with setting up certain customized settings for
> every user, it is a lot easier to do so if you always know where the
> directory is - rather than having to deal with a random directory
> immediately after its creation.
As I told you already, you can change the system defaults. This is even
much easier than the solution you want to use.
> One sentiment expressed was that if I wanted things to change, I
> could pay this person's company to do so.
Of course. If you contact Beonex, don't be surprised that Beonex offers
its services.
And I maintain that this is your best bet to get this feature.
> 1. It cannot be the case that when anybody in the world wants to see
> something different about Mozilla all they have to do is pay money to
> one of the people on the development team, or to that person's
> "real-life" company for which they work when they are not contributing
> to Mozilla on their own time. Not only would this raise some serious
> business practice issues, but it would also lead to various forms of
> anarchy.
As Gerv pointed out, I have to convince Mozilla module owners that the
change makes sense to be in the main code base. In this case, I have not
much doubt that it would go it.
> Had they said, "Thank you for your suggestion,"
If you compare Mozilla to Microsoft's business pratices, just because it
doesn't let you make your browser more insecure, don't expect a
(serious) "Thank you".
> instead they, in a round about way, suggested that my "wish list" item
> could be implemented if I paid his company money. This doesn't speak
> well for the Mozilla community at large, which surely is an open
> source community effort based on common feedback, agreement, and an
> idealistic conception of software development rather than individual,
> and capitalistic, "rogue" membership.
Actually, Mozilla is more the latter than the former. As I told you,
there is no central entity which decides where people should work on.
Rather, it is driven by individual contributors and their needs and
visions (and those of the module owners). Note that this is no different
than most open-source projects. Only that more corporate contributors
work on Mozilla than individual ones.
In any case, I think, you have a misconception about open-source. It is
driven by actual work. I find it only fair that you pay for a certain
feature you want, given that many people worked long time to give you
most of the code for free. (If somebody implements also your favorite
feature for free, all the better for you.)
