It's the same BS I remember reading on slides from graphics card vendors excusing some other way of selling the user down the river.

Content can adapt to reach their customers. Bend here and the web itself is under threat.

Mozilla needs a social contract like Debian, since it seems clear they can't rely on leadership for backbone.

Don't bend here and Mozilla itself could be under threat.

DRM exists, many major content providers have shown little interest in releasing their material without a mechanism for preventing casual copying (and you can hardly blame them), and accessing multimedia downloads is an increasingly important function of the Web. Denying that reality isn't going to achieve anything useful.

As much as Mozilla might like to take a principled stand, the fact is that they aren't important enough to force this issue. If someone can't access content in Firefox, they don't not access the content, they just use another browser. The content provider still served their content, the user still watched it, and it was still DRM'd. The only practical difference is that Mozilla lost a user.

You fight the battles you can win. There is no way Mozilla could win this one.

Except, if Mozilla had committed "ritualistic suicide" over EME, it wouldn't have taken EME with it. Users would move to every other browser with HTML5 DRM implemented, Mozilla would die accomplishing nothing.

A world with entrenched HTML5 DRM & Mozilla strikes me as strictly preferable to a world without Mozilla in which HTML5 DRM is just as entrenched.

EFF: Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the open web? Dude. This is it. Let's take that hill!

Mozilla: what's the point, man? why should I die on this hill?

EFF: it's a fucking important hill dude. Unchecked DRM aggression.

Mozilla: what about my browser market share?

EFF: What the fuck are you talking about? Browser share is not the issue here, Dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT...

Mozilla: Well, the problem is... They're gonna kill my browser share! Man!

Donny is the open web I guess. His death was predestined by circumstances and certainly not the Dude's fault. Also, I think it would be best if no one tells the EFF how DNS works.

EFF: I'm sorry, it was an accident.

Mozilla: What was that shit about the open web? What the fuck does anything have to do with the open web?

EFF: Dude, I'm sorry...

Mozilla: What the fuck are you talking about?

EFF: Dude, I'm sorry...

Mozilla: Fucking... fuck, EFF.

EFF: Come on, dude. Hey, fuck it, man, let's go bowling.

And I know my family who is not tech savvy will just have to move to a browser that allows Youtube, Netflix, and whatever else requires this DRM.

I don't like it but I don't think firefox would make it otherwise.

Microsoft sacrificed backwards compatibility with Vista and look where that got them...

How can Mozilla kill it? It simply doesn't have the power, faced with Google, Microsoft and Apple implementing EME.

Yes, Mozilla could have taken a pure, principled stance and avoided EME. Perhaps some thoughtful people would use Firefox for that reason. But those same thoughtful people would have boycotted Chrome and Internet Explorer when they started to ship EME.

There has been no such boycott. If we - the people on the web - wanted to stop EME, that would have been the only way. Mozilla can't do it if the people don't want to.

I don't even know how you arrived at this conclusion. The EFF was fighting this with education of the public, procedural maneuverings within the W3C itself, and with invited commentary to the relevant standards groups. Mozilla was also doing these things, and, contrary to what you might assume living in our tech bubble, has a pulpit with far greater reach than the EFF.

But then they implemented the damn thing--which, by the way, is not a standard yet--in their browser.

But, please, tell me exactly what the EFF is guilty of. They might have failed, but that's a very different thing.

The only way to do that would be to affect their bottom line, such as people refusing to use their browsers if they ship EME.

That would have been the only campaign with a chance of stopping EME. Mozilla couldn't lead it - it would look self-serving ("how convenient, a browser vendor wants us to boycott its rivals"). The EFF as a respected third party could have.

That would have been our only hope.

The only reason Mozilla taking a "we will not do it" approach to EME would be suicide (ritual or otherwise) would be if doing so would fail to derail the adoption of EME. If users would abandon Mozilla over not supporting EME (well, not supporting the sites that require it), then, sure, it would be suicide -- but it would be suicide because the sites demanding EME would be important enough to users that they would abandon Mozilla and Mozilla's usage-dependent revenue stream would dry up.

If Mozilla could derail EME by refusing to implement, that would also mean it wouldn't be suicide.

I can and do blame them and I say: let them die like the dinosaurs they are. The world will be better off without them. Mozilla refusing to implement DRM would have been one nail in the dinosaur's coffin.

WHat would the web gain if Mozilla lost most of its user base? Could we trust Apple, Microsoft and Google to have a moral backbone?

edit: Mozilla needs to cultivate its brand, and set itself apart from the other browsers through actual differences in philosophy. Maybe they need a John Legere...

But the facts remain that the vast majority of users don't care about the philosophical differences. When Chrome and Internet Explorer started shipping EME, almost no one switched browser. When Snowden's revelations came out, almost no one switched browser. Etc. etc.

edit: clarified what i meant

Just not, you know, this one.

I understand why Mozilla is making this choice, but it's still the wrong one. I mean, seriously, DRM in the HTML spec, endorsed by Mozilla. I can't think of a bigger WTF.

I'm very much in agreement with Cory Doctorow that all these assertions that Mozilla will lose all its users if it doesn't implement EME have had no evidence to back them up. Almost no one is delivering EME-supported content, and all the cries of "IE and Chrome will leave us behind" fail to mention that's only IE11 and ChromeOS, so any company delivering only EME content would leave many more customers behind than just Firefox users.

At the very least doing this now instead of years from now when it might start mattering (like what happened with h.264) does not exactly demonstrate sticking to their guns.

The reasoning is actually very sound in my opinion. It is true that EME is not a major force on desktop yet. But, Netflix - the most popular streaming video service - has written an EME player. It is moving towards that, and the hollywood studios as well. Those studios will not support anything but EME.

Currently Flash is supported by the studios, to some extent. But even that is problematic - Flash has dropped Linux support and is not present on mobile. Not only is EME being pushed by Netflix, Hollywood, Google and Microsoft, but also Flash is no fallback.

The result is that soon you will need EME to view Netflix. People will not use a browser that does not support Netflix. It's a simple as that. Yes, there are some principled people that refuse to use DRMed content, and those people are already not using EME-supporting browsers like Chrome and Internet Explorer, but look at their market share. The principled people are a tiny minority. That is the problem.

Netflix ended 2013 with 44 million subscribers, by their own numbers [1], with a target of reaching and stablilising at 90 million.

That's it: 90 million out of an online population of around 2.5 billion, or around 4%.

Do you make business decisions on the basis of 4% of your potential ( non-paying ) audience?

1: http://business.time.com/2014/01/22/netflix-number-of-subscr...

2. This is a growing area - we don't need to care just about current numbers but the trend. The trend is clear: Hollywood wants EME DRM on all content.

3. 44 million out of 2.5 billion sounds like a little, but is not the best way to calculate things. Netflix doesn't even sell a service in most of the countries those 2.5 billion are in. In countries like the US, Netflix is large and growing, and especially heavily represented among younger internet-savvy people (who are the heaviest browser users). So your calculation is very much an underestimate.

How have those worked out for us?

Not to well...

Mozilla should do some A/B testing; release a browser with the module and without. See which gets the most traction.

As a flat out statement, that is false. Some people will use a browser that doesn't support netflix, namely those people that don't subscribe to netflix.

The question becomes HOW MANY People will not use a browser that does not support Netflix.

The point is, there was no data provided to use to answer that question.

We can't predict the specific number but we don't need to - we can very reasonably expect it to be large.

Ah, but the flipside:

Doing this now, as opposed to years from now when the technology is established, gives Mozilla more influence over the form that this DRM takes, the protections that are available to consumers and the marketplace in general.

So glad they got in on the ground floor instead of continuing to work to never have it enter the spec at all.

I hope we get more from Mozilla than hardware fingerprints that aren't trackable across services. I hope we get a lot more.

They should put as much energy into propagating their ideas as into redesigning the interface to look like a Chrome knockoff. Cultivate some dial-a-pundits that TV people can count on for an opinion about the Internet. Have a thinktank. Aggressively fundraise. Expanding the userbase is the answer, not chasing corporate behemoths.

More generally, Mozilla's ability to influence the web away from DRM, as well as privacy invasions, stems entirely from the ability of Mozilla to deliver a product that users want. Making sure that users can't watch $YourFavoriteShow would be a pretty dumb move when all other major browsers have taken the necessary steps to make sure that their users have no such limitation.

Cultivating "dial-a-pundits", as you call them, would be nice, and we certainly take every opportunity we can to express our views on just about everything web-related. And this specific battler (DRM in web browsers) has been fought and lost. We need to regroup, cut the losses and reorder to fight the next battle.

If you wish to help fight DRMs, please make as many people as you can aware of the dangers of DRMs. Also, justa s importantly, we need to convince Hollywood that DRMs are costly and unsatisfying. For this, we need to develop and showcase alternatives, that users will use. This is the only way.

Because we can't fight Google + Apple + Microsoft + Netflix + Hulu + Hollywood on the lobbying front. We just don't have the means.

(Yeah, I'm a Firefox Dev.)

This is opposite the choice somebody would make if they were philosophically opposed to DRM.

(But I don't agree, that was just to make the larger point.)

You're presenting a false dichotomy: "Either Mozilla doesn't compromise anywhere, or they might as well go away". Things aren't black and white.

Besides, I think the argument is more "Either Mozilla doesn't compromise where it's important not to, or they might as well go away", which is a true statement. Mozilla does need to continue to exist, and compromise is fundamental to the web (it's right there in their manifesto), but this was something that should have been fought tooth and nail. The protest of this mostly involved sternly written emails to W3C lists, when it should have been simply not implementing it and holding that ground until it was clear no alternatives were viable and imminent harm was actually demonstrated.

I was making the point that 1 of 4 is still useful. Obviously it is less useful than fighting 4 of 4 or 3 of 4.

P.S. John Legere is full of shit. He's just rebranding a terrible company in an industry where all of the companies are terrible. Its a matter of survival, not ideology.

The have compromised them because they feel they need to do this to maintain relevancy. Principles are of little use without power.

To those that say: Mozilla changed the web once, they can do it again. I say: Mozilla didn't change the web by resisting change, but by embracing it and finding better solutions.

I think we should be spending less time condemning Mozilla for compromising, and more time finding ways that Mozilla can use their power to solve the huge problems that are created by DRM.

Also chasing popularity is like chasing money. It shouldn't be the goal. Those things follow after doing the right thing, and I believe for an organization with the kind of community and userbase Firefox has around it, not implementing DRM would've been the "right" thing to do.

- do the work to implement the DRM thing but keep it disabled ready to hot patch in once evidence shows that they'll be fucked without it

- display "this is bullshit DRM content you shouldn't support, read more HERE, and click HERE if you really don't care and will use another browser to view this anyway" in place of the DRM content initially

etc.

Immediately giving in is hardly "dragged kicking and screaming".

Also: > - do the work to implement the DRM thing but keep it disabled ready to hot patch in once evidence shows that they'll be fucked without it

So when do we decide that? After we have lost our user base? Or when it becomes evident that just almost everybody is already watching movies on the web using proprietary blackboxes that may or may not use DRM, may or may not identify you and may or may not leak your info? Because that has been the case for quite a few years already.

> - display "this is bullshit DRM content you shouldn't support, read more HERE, and click HERE if you really don't care and will use another browser to view this anyway" in place of the DRM content initially

So, lecture users and invite them to change browser? That doesn't sound like a good strategy.

Diversify your sources and wean yourself off the Google teat. Even if Google does outbid everyone, profit shouldn't be the primary motivator at the Mozilla Foundation.

Wikipedia might not be the most glamorous of sites but they are a shining example of what it means to not compromise on your values. Those people are starving while Mozilla employees go to the bank - that is true courage and power. The power to not let profit be the absolute driver of your ambitions and values.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/326500.html

Damn. Thanks for that, had no idea and have probably used it once or twice. Back into passive vocabulary you go. (Non-native english yada yada)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

What's the point in having this power if you immediately cave?

Mozilla has no real power over the web. Google, Microsoft, and Apple have the power (look at the names associated with EME DRM - what a surprise). Mozilla has an illusion of power, which is tolerated by the other actors because it makes everyone happy. But no one should mistake it for real leverage.

Actually, I decided that hellacious startup times weren't worth it.

All of your hyperbole is a spin-master's way of saying that Chome and Safari beat out Mozilla because, for a significant amount of time, Firefox sucked compared to them.

This said, if they go back to their roots as "ayatollah of open web and open source", I might consider them again; but until they're just another ad-backed bureaucracy, I might as well stick to a better one.

That's FSF. And guess what? Everyone hates it! [0]

Nicest thing about Mozilla is that they have a great balance of ideology and being practical.

[0] Of course not everyone, specially not me. But you get my point.

Google did well technically on Chrome, but investing a huge amount of marketing dollars (like bundling chrome with other nice things like toolbars) didn't hurt them.

They may concede if they think it will help their great goal.

But I'd rather they saved that power for the next fight rather than going kamikaze on this. I'm sure there will be a next fight, and there's a good chance that it will be something smaller, or they'll have another major browser on their side.

That's not right either. It's the users that have the power. Users can pick which browsers they use and which sites they visit.

There was essentially no boycott of EME-shipping browsers (Chrome and Internet Explorer). That shows that we, the people on the internet, did not care enough to fight EME.

EME isn't fought by talking about it and hoping someone like Mozilla will kill it. We would have had to actually do something ourselves, and a successful boycott of Chrome and Internet Explorer would have killed EME very effectively.

Or most users weren't aware of their choices. Mozilla could have campaigned to make users aware of it and go back to Firefox. Instead they chose the other direction. :-(

I've talked about this for a long time and tried to convince people about it. People just don't seem to care. I'm surprised at how much attention this is getting now, all of a sudden!

Or do you think that because of Android or something, Google would be able to stop the DRM when every other browser/device supported it?

It was just a few years ago that Mozilla though so highly of themselves that they thought they could use their market position to force the world to change from h.264 to VP3 (with hopes that Google would gift the world VP8 later on).

They failed at reading the situation then, and are failing again now.

Having a choice doesn't magically resolve the issues, it doesn't prevent content providers from making things formerly available unavailable, it doesn't help us (as users) make better more considered decisions rather than clicking yes a lot to get things done, etc. But it does retain the choice to not run this stuff, choice which is not retained in the current closed source alternatives.

The best option might be to sink this development energy into something that will draw users from other browsers, if they can figure out what...

You say Mozilla should figure out what will draw users from other browsers, but you've outlined what will draw users from Mozilla to other browsers. In the end, people want content. The content providers have more control. If 70-80% of the browsers already support the DRM they want to use, the other 20-30% will follow or be left out. Which is exactly what happened here.

All of that said, yes, of course this is something that will serve as a draw for users away from Mozilla. And yes, of course Mozilla might not be able to find something else that can serve as a better (or even comparable) draw that will not compromise their principles at least as much. I'm not casting aspersions at Mozilla and saying "Gee, they're dumb, why don't they just...". I'm saying "It would be better if they had found X" where I'm not at all sure such an X exists.

The problem is not that Mozilla implementing EME removes leverage to force Netflix into abandoning DRM (this won't happen anyway anytime soon), the problem is that once DRM is readily available without a large technological investment and without losing too many users, virtually everyone will use it for virtually everything, simply because there is little to none incentive not to do it, from a publisher's perspective.

I'd rather have a (albeit stupid) DRM executable that only performs encryption/decryption than Flash, Java, or Silverlight, which are the current solutions for this. All three of these offer APIs for doing things other than decrypting DRM content, and these APIs have been proven time and time again to be vulnerable to attack, no matter how much time is spent trying to sandbox them properly.

Really, come on. You should understand this. Firefox isn't like Chromium, where the 'blessed' Google version, Chrome, has dozens of important features sitting behind proprietary black boxes - the Firefox you download off Mozilla's website is something you could literally compile yourself. I've compiled Firefox dozens of times, sometimes with in-development patches for things like gamepad support added in.

Your fear is pure paranoia.

It's not like anybody can force you to watch the last Hollywood stuff.

In the land of PDF you can find things like random federal agencies slapping the protection bits on complete inexplicable things, even though the content is public domain by law. ... just because the knob is there.

The 'you can not use it' opt-out ignores the cost of actually discovering that you should. The Mozilla proposal is better than that because it will tell you. This still doesn't solve all the issues, but its better than you'll find in other popular browsers.

In response to this, some of you might say 'well then people would go elsewhere for their content', to which I would ask: did people leave Netflix because of Silverlight?

They did, actually. If not by their own doing then by the fact that Netflix is just not available on certain devices and operating systems. As long as Netflix is a DRM platform, this trend will likely continue.

The irony here is that Mozilla is apparently being badgered into supporting DRM for "compatibility reasons" when the whole point of DRM is to strictly limit compatibility with whatever arbitrary restrictions the publisher wants.

Mozilla's position here is not at all similar to Apple's position then, so their options are not the same.

And before you say Android had Flash, I had an Android device that could run Flash in 2011. It was a pretty useless feature.

If there would be build switches to disable that, I'm sure Linux distros with similar to Debian policies will ship versions where it will be disabled altogether.

DRM is a very real thing in todays web.

Flash is not an add-on, but a plugin. And there is a good reason why plugins have a bad image and browser developers and users prefer to get rid of them.

They exercised a freedom of choice they had, and this is the decision they made. This is what we judge them on. No backsies, no "but I didn't want to", just pure "go fuck yourself Mozilla".

What real alternative did they have? Unlike RMS, Mozilla have always played with a more pragmatic strategy. If you want to win this war, you need to educate users. Being that only a handful of people out there actively care about privacy issues and platform openness, you need to produce a compelling product first and foremost, and then push your agenda on top of that. If Mozilla were to not implement EME, they'd cripple their own capacity to reach those users, and the war would be as good as lost.

Today, we just lost a battle. In it, the Google funded Mozilla mercenaries were slaughtered, their forces diminished. We could award them a medal for their valiant effort, but you know they are dead. The war in the future isn't won or lost on their actions.

Once Google+Microsoft or Google+Apple or god forbid Google+Microsoft+Apple have decided to do something, there is literally nothing Mozilla can do to stop it. It's too late. If Mozilla manages to slowly build up a larger market share, at that point they may have leverage in those situations. Right now they don't, and pretending to have leverage only further erodes their marketshare.

The only real contender is Netflix but only once the Silverlight plugins reaches EOL. At that point Netflix will have to choose if they want to risk loosing 16% (est.) of their Firefox customers. Of course if Mozilla decides to implement DRM right now it won't be an issue for them.

One thing you might not have thought about, is that at the moment, we have Flash, Java, Silverlight, etc which all periodically are found to have mahoosive security flaws - because they can do general purpose things. If Firefox moves to supporting a plugin which is used for exactly the same thing, but that can only do decryption, then suddenly the browser becomes much more secure. If anything, it's an advantage.

For DRM to work it needs to have direct access to the hardware. Otherwise it's too easy to run the plugin in isolation and capture the output. So while the API surface is smaller it's still problematic because DRM bypasses all the sandboxes. Issues like cross-platform support still aren't resolved because DRM providers don't typically provide linux runtimes. I really don't see where this is an advantage versus no DRM.

As I noted above, this decision doesn't make or break DRM. I think we should just take note that Mozilla would betray their principles for some .5% of market share.

How many employees?

What are their salaries?

Whatever, I don't care about that stuff.

Here's my question: Does Mozilla still portend to be "open source"?

Because if it was "open source" in the sense to which I am accustomed, then I could simply compile a Mozilla browser without DRM.

For example, if I never had any need to watch DRM, then it would make sense that I could compile the browser without the DRM code.

One beauty of open source is that the user can modify it.

She can trim off what she does not need.

Your comment repeatedly refers to "trust".

How does one achieve "trust" through closed source (e.g., the binary blob from Adobe)?

What makes you think Mozilla does not pay taxes? It most certainly pays taxes. I'll save you the web searching: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... is the latest set of financials that are public; see pages 4 and 5. For 2012, the Mozilla Corporation had $311 million in revenue, $208.5 million in expenses, and paid $37.6 million in income taxes. The federal corporate income tax rate in the US is 35%, fwiw, and California's is 8.84%, so it's not like Mozilla is trying particularly hard to evade that tax liability (0.4384 * (311 - 208.5 - depreciation) likely comes out pretty close to 37.6).

> then I could simply compile a Mozilla browser without DRM.

Sure. And you can and will be able to.

> How does one achieve "trust" through closed source (e.g., the binary blob from Adobe)?

Don't install it? The blob won't be shipped with the browser by default and will require explicit user action to install.

Corporate structure. (Mozilla Corp. is wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. Only Mozilla Corporation pays taxes.)

2008 IRS audit.

2012 settlement with IRS.

Perhaps a better statement would have been that Mozilla tries to avoid paying taxes.

Anyway, if what you say is true regarding compilation and exclusion of the DRM code then I'm not sure what everyone in thie thread is complaining about.

Now, how easy is it to compile Firefox these days?

I have not done it in years.

I gave up on X. (Following your exact advice, even with open source: "Don't install it.")

I use UNIX with no graphics layer and simpler text only browsers and even simpler TCP clients to retrieve content. Then if necessary I view it on graphical devices running closed source software.

The interesting thing is when I want to watch video, the last thing I need is a "browser". The core of the video player software I use is the ffmpeg libraries which have nothing to do with web browsers.

I only use HTTP (and other protocols) to transfer content (i.e., to request it), not to watch it.

I see no reason why a single application has to support both (request/transfer and playback).

Why video players have to support "streaming" or why "web browsers" have to play video are still open questions in my mind.

But that's just me. Stuck in the UNIX "one utility, one job" mindset.

That flies in the face of what I'm seeing in the Mozilla Corporation financial statements.

> Now, how easy is it to compile Firefox these days?

It depends on which OS you're doing it on, but there are pretty detailed step by step instructions at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Simple_Firefox_buil... and the things it links to. The biggest hassle is making sure that the various prerequisites (a compiler, some development libraries, autoconf 2.13, etc) are installed. On most modern Linux distros or Mac this is not a big deal. On Windows it's a slight bit more annoying.