What SPECIFICALLY to do about Mozilla? Idk. I don't know the people or personalities or org structures involved. But "hey everyone, switch to aquaferret" or whatever the fork of the day is isn't a sustainable solution.
Fine, I'm on a rant here, so here we go.
"We'll just fork it" is privileged mindset. It means you think you can gather enough clout and like minded people to put up a bunch of unplanned work and time and passion to make a whole new project despite the old one still working "well enough".
Now you can take the same logic to electoral politics. "If you don't like it, move, or win elections".
Minorities know they're going to get clobbered in most of those situations if it's only done half-assed. So you pick your battles and go into it with a plan more concrete than hitting the fork button on GitHub and making a logo.
What SPECIFICALLY to do about Mozilla? Idk. I don't know the people or personalities or org structures involved. But "hey everyone, switch to aquaferret" or whatever the fork of the day is isn't a sustainable solution.
@JessTheUnstill If your goal is to "do something about" it, wouldn't the first step be to find out more about the people and org structures involved? Learning about the area at hand, and learning about the general ecosystems and people involved (including both the gecko and the chromium ecosystems) would be step 0 in any solution.
@JessTheUnstill i have the same feelings! a fork being the solution to this problem is very ingrained in the culture but at the scale of browser development it all feels impossible. even these soft forks that just tweak one feature seem to have trouble keeping up with upstream. on the flipside it doesn't help us that the ladybird browser project is fascist aligned, not that i think they have much chance of reaching parity with ff/chrome anyways
@JessTheUnstill hmmm. It can also happen that the fork gets so popular that almost all users switch to it, leaving the original project without a meaningful user base, see for example OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice.
Another possibility that has happened: the original project resolves its leadership issues, and the fork gets re-merged. As I understood, this happened in OpenWRT vs. LEDE.
But I don't think one of those will happen to Firefox, based on Mozilla's current power in leadership.
@daniel_bohrer OpenOffice was a Sun based product. See my bit listing exceptions to the rule almost entirely based on Sun products?
@daniel_bohrer @JessTheUnstill
The situation has to be understood as a forking of resources, not of users. Users that contribute nothing (money, time, etc) don't really matter at all (which is it's own radioactive problem I'm going to put over *here*)
If the fork contains most of the resources, or a better economic situation then it can supplant the original. Inkscape's 5 hobbiests replaced Sodipodi's 1. But replacing $100m with 5 part timers isn't really forking the resources. Just sporking.
@doctormo @daniel_bohrer @JessTheUnstill Mozilla doesn't have $100m to spend on Firefox dev. They have $100m to spend on executive pay, marketing, making Firefox worse, etc. Only a very small portion actually goes into maintaining Firefox, poorly.
@doctormo @daniel_bohrer The users Do matter, though. It's like "free to play" games. Sure the product is free, and you can bring all your friends to play it too. But one per thousands who gets introduced to the product REALLY likes it and wants to contribute time or money to making it, not simply using it for free.
@JessTheUnstill @daniel_bohrer
*radioactive topic brought back*
Don't misunderstand me. Users matter to users, to social good, to justice. But with the way we have organized Free Software, they do not economically matter to a project's health.
If you are a project lead, you can do a lot more with stuff, money, contributors then you can with responsibility to the unpaid public good.
@doctormo @JessTheUnstill yes, that's what I wanted to say with my sentence about Mozilla (which I still tried to fit into the 50 char limit 馃槄). They have control over all the Firefox development and QA infrastructure, and a lot of developers working full time on it.
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