Ultimately, in all this, what really really chafes me are three very distinct facts.
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This persistant belief that Mozilla is somehow behind this, when in reality, W3C and others stacked their chips behind DRM long ago. Mozilla has always been a browser that tries to implement the standards, and in this case, the standards SUCK. I think Mozilla has chosen to implement the standards in a loud, noticeable way, that will allow users to have maximum control over the software they choose to install. I don’t know what else they can do.
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The belief that DRM is now being introduced into Mozilla’s products when it clearly is not. What is being introduced is a sandbox environment for executing plugins. What we have now is a more porous environment for executing plugins that quite literally was invented by Adobe a long time ago. NPAPI, people forget, was made as a way to embed Adobe’s PDF rendering engine into Mozilla products while allowing Adobe to retain control of key components of the DRM. DRM is NOT new in Mozilla, and Adobe designed the system that we are now currently using. If Mozilla were to disapprove of their new self-created Sandbox (which, yes, admittedly will run Adobe and other’s DRM modules), what would they go back to? Adobe’s initially created system from years ago that is way less security minded and way more focused on Adobe and others…
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This horrible belief that Mozilla is somehow the last bastion of good faith that we can ever have and that they alone are fighting for a perfect and open web, all on their own. Mozilla gets most of their money from Google. Specifically, Google searches and google primacy, based on the number of users using Firefox. If those users drop significantly, those users will cease to be. Yes, Mozilla is an amazing foundation/organization, but they exist because of a competing browser company’s actions. And their existence is paid for by Mozilla users USING that competing company’s resources. This implication that Mozilla is pure as the driven snow and our only hope is a fallacy. They’ve had to make choices to retain funding, and their browser is OPEN SOURCE AND CAN BE FORKED. If it is time to move to an open web that does not involve mozilla, we users and coders can make that happen. No thing is permanent. One of the driving components of Open Source software is the knowledge that when someone makes enough decisions that you disagree with, you can fork their project. Whining and gnashing of teeth and sobbing about the lost internet because a good guy made a decision you agree with is really NOT the open source way.
That’s what bothers me.
That people are blaming Mozilla (and seemingly no one else) for adopting a stupid standard that W3C and even Tim Berners-Lee stood behind, that people think that this somehow is a NEW position for Mozilla on DRM, and that people think there’s nothing that can be done now because a company that receives upwards of 80% of its funding from people USING its browser to google search have to make a tough decision that they believe will help people use their browser.
