When people talk about wanting Firefox to have an open structure that treats Mozilla and non-Mozilla people the same, they are talking about things like https://github.com/gregglind/addon-wr/issues/36 …. There is no good reason why "sideloading an ad to FF" needs to be a thing Mozilla Corp is able to do.
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I have no objection to comarketing in principle and think things like search deals are healthy. I'm objecting to the fact that it seems MoCo management has full control over the entire technical infrastructure and can bypass the project's leadership to secretly ship things.
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That is just empirically what happened here, and I think it's not a very extreme position, nor an attack on a healthy role for MoCo, to say it's a problem.
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I doubt there was anyone in “project leadership” that wasn’t aware and accepting of this.
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If "leadership" literally means the top echelons of MoCo, that doesn't mean anything. But certainly top technical leaders, even within MoCo, were caught off guard.
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People are always caught off guard (internal comms are hard), but it’s usually people not directly involved with Firefox product dev (again I speak from experience)
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I work on projects with cross-company teams (including Rust, a Mozilla project) and these kinds of project structures are not in conflict with keeping things that need to be kept under wraps under wraps.
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I mean, we can keep abstractly arguing about whether "some MoCo control" is needed to "move forward" but that obscures what happened. Why was this particular mechanism needed to "move forward". Why wasn't a website + opt in addon sufficient?
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Why is it a threat to Mozilla's ability to "move forward" to structure things in a more opt in way? Did Mr. Robot demand this structure as a condition of doing the deal. Did MoCo leadership determine that deals precisely like this (forced install) are needed strategically?
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Not my intent! I agree with “someone could’ve thought more about how it’d be perceived”. But, there are downsides to catering too much to the the Mozilla community echo chamber, too. Big picture, folks outraged on Reddit/HN are not as significant as they think. Can be paralyzing.
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You're pattern matching "community" into something I don't intend. I don't care about the Reddit echo chamber. I'm just part of a lot of large open source projects and a larger role for external contributors in leadership than what Firefox has is healthy.
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There was just no good reason why the mechanism they chose here was a good one, even from the perspective of the comarketing deal. You think users understand "installed addon" more than "website"?
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