Re: [ox-en] mozilla use of money
- From: "Nadav Har'El" <nyh math.technion.ac.il>
- Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2006 14:00:50 +0300
On Wed, Apr 05, 2006, Markus wrote about "Re: [ox-en] mozilla use of money":
i see. well, the comparison is - imo - not very suitable because mozilla
makes its money from the
time and interest investment of the open source community. imo, this gives
the community some right to have a say
how the money that they generate is being spend.
May I be blunt and ask if you gave any money or invested any work in Mozilla?
If you didn't, you don't really have a "case" - you are not part of the
community that has the "right" to decide how the money is spent.
But if you did contribute to Mozilla, then perhaps you made an error in
judgement: it appears that you think that OpenBSD, or OpenSSH, need more
support than Mozilla. In that case, you should have contributed to them
directly, rather than contribute to Mozilla and then expect them to pass
money to OpenSSH.
please correct me if i am wrong, but to me it seems that there are a lot
of people who do something for mozilla;
yet, all the money that is generated goes into the foundation and nothing
(or very very little) goes back to the community.
Can you please educate the ignorants (like myself) who have no idea how
does Mozilla actually make money? Do they sell anything? Advertisement?
Donations? If Mozilla is a non-profit-organization, doesn't have some sort
of charter, of what it plans to do with its earnings?
why do you trust the mozilla foundation? it has been set up by aol. on
basis of which actions do you trust them? when i look
at the actions of the foundation, i cant help but distrusting them.
Ok, then, the solution is simple: don't help them. Don't work on their code,
and work on (say) Konqueror instead, or on something else. Don't go to their
site, or do anything that makes them money - and instead help others whom
you do trust, to make money.
One of the beauties of free software, as I mentioned in a previous email,
is that you can fork more than just the code of a project: you can also
fork its work process. If you don't believe in a certain project's work
process (regardless of the quality of its code), you are free to use another
project, and developers are free to work on another project. In the long
run, the project that "wins" (becomes more popular) is not just the project
that users like the best, but also the project which developers most like
to help - and if Mozilla upsets developers ("the community" that you think
should have a vote on where the money goes), developers will stop helping
them and another project will take over.
in one way or another in the steering of the community/instution. while
there are drawbacks, history shows that true democracies
tend to be very stable over the long run. in this respect, what is the
life span of a typical company (which represents only one interest)?
This is *exactly* my point. Mozilla has narrow interests, and so it is likely
that it will only survive a relatively short time (say, a decade or two)
and not forever. But so what? Parts of the Mozilla code could survive longer
(in forms of forks, for example), and new implementations of the same idea
can replace it in the future. This is not a problem, but rather a benefit
of the free-software ecosystem's flexibility.
For example, consider the editor "ed" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed).
About 30 years ago, this was the best editor for the Unix system. Just 20
years ago, I knew a person for whom "ed" was his favorite editor, and he
wouldn't switch it to the newer editors that had recently been invented -
vi, emacs and sam). Today, nobody ever uses ed any more. Why? You might
say that it's because the developers of Ed weren't open to change. They
kept their editor as is, with its simplistic features designed in the days
of the teletypes, and didn't add graphics, or even a cursor. You might say
that the ed developers represented a vary narrow interest, and did not
listen to the people like a democracy should. But again, so what? Instead
of developers changing "ed", they started new projects like "vi", "emacs"
and "sam", and the results are probably better than those you could get from
convincing the "ed" developer to change his mind. "vi" and "sam" not only
forked off "ed"'s code (e.g., they took regular expression code from ed),
but also the development process - with completely new developers, and
new development goals. This is free software (or rather, at the time "source
license") at its best. Making a single project live forever is not in the
community's interests.
--
Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Apr 5 2006, 7 Nisan 5766
nyh math.technion.ac.il |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |God created the world out of nothing, but
http://nadav.harel.org.il |the nothingness still shows through.
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