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DisappointingDisappointingPosted Oct 20, 2012 0:25 UTC (Sat) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281)In reply to: Disappointing by paravoid Parent article: Mozilla's web app store debuts in Firefox for Android
> There's no copyright license or free (as in speech) indication shown for the apps
Any app can add in its description what license it has. There doesn't seem to be a special field for it though, that's true, not sure if intentional or a temporary limitation. But the app store is not meant just for open source apps but for all web content that uses open standards.
I wouldn't say that's distancing from the open source community. The fact is, if you want a YouTube app, a Twitter app, a Facebook app, and so forth, none of those are open source, but they are the natural first apps for something like this.
The app store isn't like the addons site or say the mozilla demo studio
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/
which does have a space for a FOSS license to be written. The app store is for web content in general, it just has to be standards-compliant.
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Disappointing Posted Oct 21, 2012 18:34 UTC (Sun) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]
I also wouldn't say that it's "distancing from the open source community." What it *is* distancing from is the *free software* community, which takes issues such as the rights of software users seriously. This is a prime example of the corrosive influence that the opportunist Johnny Come Latelys of the OSI have engendered on the older and more principled Free Software movement.
It is quite clear that Mozilla, in not addressing these issues from the start, cares little for them. Software design involves balancing and prioritizing. The key decisions are visible in the earliest products.
Mozilla, dependent on hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks from Google at this moment (and with little in the way of additional revenue streams) is a victim in many ways of past largesse, and is trapped in and fearful of loss of that revenue stream. It has begun to color every decision they make.
Disappointing Posted Oct 21, 2012 18:42 UTC (Sun) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
As someone that works at Mozilla, that description of it sounds very, very inaccurate.
Yes, there are efforts to maintain revenue, even though Mozilla is a nonprofit. Without revenue, we can't pay salaries for people to focus fulltime on Mozilla-related projects. But does it "color every decision" though? Hardly, for example one of the major Mozilla projects these days is B2G, which one might suspect could annoy Google (as a potential competitor for Android) and risk the revenue stream. Pushing hard on B2G is the opposite of playing it safe and maintaining the existing income. But it is still the right thing to do because it has a shot at promoting openness on the web in the mobile space, which is a matter of *principle*.
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