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10-Day Patch Guarantee Not Mozilla's Policy
narramissic writes "Mozilla has officially backpedaled from a pledge made at Black Hat by the company's director of ecosystem development, Mike Schaver, to fix any critical security bugs in the browser within 'Ten ****ing Days.' On Friday, Mozilla security chief Window Snyder wrote in a blog posting that the 10-day pledge is not Mozilla's policy, saying 'We do not think security is a game, nor do we issue challenges or ultimatums.' And today, the open source browser maker issued a statement retracting the pledge."
And he's already explained how his comment got out of hand and what he really meant by it.
Upon hearing the news of this "flip-flopping," President Bush confidently stepped in for the Mozilla group and challenged the black hats to "bring it on."
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Making that sort of pledge is rather rash. I am not saying it can't be done, but I don't see it as simple to fix anything anytime.
Questions you have to ask are;
Is it really a bug?
Can it really be reproduced?
etc etc
Being timely in bugs is good. But not all crashes are the result of bad software. You have to be sure your fix doesn't turn another thing into a bug. They would soon end up chasing after every little bit of dust and lose sight of their real work.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I don't think that that follows. They've made a few mistakes, and this was one of them. They shouldn't make ultimatums like that. That said, I have a feeling that they'll continue to be a lot more responsive on the patching front than Microsoft, and I think that the point has been made, even if they won't stick to a set time-line.
The Debian thing is not a strike against Mozilla. Their stance is correct and clear. You can't have someone else using your trademark to cover something that they are supporting. If the Debian team introduces a bug or something into their build of Firefox, Mozilla's brand will suffer. That's why Mozilla wanted Debian to rebrand it.
Glad you enjoyed the party, Robert. To clarify, I was making a personal commitment, not a Mozilla one, that you could redeem that card if there was a vulnerability that you believed needed to be turned around in 10 days. I didn't consider at the time that it would be taken as a Mozilla policy statement -- even *I* don't make new policy announcements at late-night parties in Vegas
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
My mayor ran on the promising of "fixing any pothole within 24 hours of discovery." Of course the roads are still filled with potholes. Turns out, it was 24 hours of any confirmed pothole, which is trivially easy as the pothole confirmation team is as slow/backed up as the pothole filling team.
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...we still have companies like Google that can set good examples.
Yeah, that explains why all those Linux(TM) distributions can't use the trademark "Linux" - after all, almost all of them patch the Linux kernel. Or why the distributions have to rename KDE or GNOME. Or any other piece of open source software.
No, the reason Mozilla forced Debian to rename Firefox is even stupider than that. Debian fixed their build process. They didn't actually patch the browser. They simply corrected the build process to work under Debian. That was enough to prevent them from using the name "Firefox".
Personally I can't wait until WebKit and Konqueror finish remerging code. Once Konqueror gets a Windows build, it's game-over for Firefox. It's a better browser - it just hasn't, until recently, run on Windows.
If your post isnt a troll, perhaps it is a poor attempt at humor.
Mozilla welcomes vulnerability information so that it can address them
Mozilla is pretty quick to address vulnerabilities
MS wont even admit to a vulnerability unless enough of a stink has been made that the world already knows about it.
MS has often ignored serious vulnerabilities until they deemed it necessary to resolve them (see previous point for definition of "necessary")
Dont worry, Mozilla has a long way to go before they slip as far as MS...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Most Geeks feel very lucky if they get laid once a month or so. Therefore ten fucking days is about ten months or so. Should be able to roll out a patch in that time, especially since we get so many days to work on software rather than having sex.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
to hold up to the 10-day pledge but in the end, if something major holds back a fix, are we all going to bash them for missing the 10-day pledge? I doubt it. After all, we are not talking about Microsoft. These people are trying to do the best job possible and don't have to consider how the browser fix would interfere with some feak'n gumball machine driver that has IE code in it.
But she's right in that they really shouldn't be making statements like that without having discussed this with their team and doing so could be considered a challenge to others. Not something you want to do with a company willing to pay billions just to purchase marketshare let alone how much they'd be willing to put into ads and other FUD should a fix take 241 hours.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The Debian thing is not a strike against Mozilla. Their stance is correct and clear. You can't have someone else using your trademark to cover something that they are supporting.
That wasn't really the problem, I think there were a few disagreements on some defaults Debian had set, but in general I don't think Mozilla would have any problem rubbing-stamping it like they do with other distros' versions. Where it really broke down wasn't really a practical problem, it was more policy vs policy.
Mozilla's policy is that they must approve anything using the trademarked name and logo, so that they can stop bad versions with spyware, adware and such.
Debian's policy is that they must be able to apply security parches immidiately without approval from any third parties.
In themselves, both admirable policies but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In practise there wouldn't have been any problem getting security patches into Debian's version in a timely fashion with Mozilla's blessing, but one of the policies would have to make an exception. Neither Mozilla nor Debian were willing to bend on their principles, and so Iceweasel was born. Yes, it's a policy aberration but I don't feel one side was being more unreasonable than the other.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Are the censored four letters "work"?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
As an aside, it always seems the network and hardware geeks are the ones who smoke pot, and the database and BSD guys who like their vodka. The C/C++/Java programmers (this is my category, usually) are chain smokers - Marlboro Reds in a soft pack style, and caffeine junkies. How many of you have a Mountain Dew can that you're drinking next to an empty Mountain Dew can - and both are still cold to the touch? Yeah - all the programmers.
And the Mac guys generally seem to be clean cut replicas of Jeff Goldblum, for the most part. They're health conscience, and probably taking on a good number of sunshine units from those freakin' 45 inch MacBook Pro screens as they tend to be fans of irony. Mac guys also probably currently have a half gallon of water, in a jogging harness, on their desks right now... probably the cleanest desks on
Oh, and I think the Amiga guys are in to acid or something - that's why they've been in their garages for the last 15 years hacking away. Poor guys don't even know their wife unplugged the monitor 3 years ago.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Once Konqueror gets a Windows build, it's game-over for Firefox. It's a better browser - it just hasn't, until recently, run on Windows.
I happen to agree it's a much better browser, and a very good file manager, among other things, BUT there's nothing to make me think that once it becomes popular enough, the exact same thing won't happen to it. Popular software gets sucked into the corporate venus fly trap faster than a trailer park gets sucked into a tornado. The nice thing about all this open source though, is that nobody can claim exclusivity. We can always make something similar, a little bit better, and put a different name on it. I was under the impression that's the idea behind GPL and BSD and Creative Commons, etc. to begin with. So we can simply forget about the guy who takes a wrong turn, instead of following him over the cliff.
What?
I bring this up because this was going on around the same time the whole rename issue was getting a lot of attention. It seemed to me that Debian was introducing changes that Mozilla wasn't - as demonstrated by my own odd behavior of the two Firefox installs. Of course - I don't know enough about the bug I had or the issue in general to really know for sure. Maybe someone else can take a swing at it?
The real problem was that Debian was using the Firefox logo with modified Firefox code (as in: Debian patches not in official Firefox build), witch is against Mozilla policy.
That's where it started, not where it ended. It went something like:
Moz: "You're using some mods to Mozilla with the official logo, stop it."
Deb: "Ok, but some of these changes we want/need to do."
Moz: "Submit them to us and we'll approve them. Oh and those won't go through."
Deb: "Ok, we can drop those. We'll sumbit the rest."
Moz: "Good. And you must also submit any updates to us first."
Deb: "In general ok, but security patches we'll push immidiately."
Moz: "No, you must. Mozilla policy."
Deb: "Not acceptable. Debian policy."
I think my post was fairly accurate only I didn't include the backstory, there was dialog to fix the rest but the policies were the deal-breaker.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The stupid thing is it is a statement of policy, it's just that it's not in marketing speak.
If your brother says something like that you know you'll get either that or a good excuse. The good excuse is always an unwritten option, it's just with professional liars that you have to tie them to the every single written word because trying to pin them to a statment is like trying to pin live eels!
This is a step in the right direction, though. Guaranteeing to fix a future bug that you know nothing about in ten days is just plain insanity. While it's a nice pledge from a marketing viewpoint, developers realise that it's just a lie.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
The thing is, if you allow different products from different sources to be publicly distributed under a single trademarked name, the trademark becomes dilluted and can be declared invalid (by court, trademark dispute board, etc.) That's what the law says, there's not much you can do about it.
BTW, that's why the "Linux" trademark wouldn't surive a test in court now. It doesn't identify a single product from a single source. It's dilluted and invalid.