A full exploration of the html obfuscation and DRM employed by Google would be very interesting
I've been looking at this - there's a blog post with some preliminary discussions, and a follow-up giving some ways of getting around it. The short answer is that if you just want to save the image to disk, it's not too hard in a decent browser.
Hardly a scandal. The Mozilla Foundation has trademarks on the Firefox and Thunderbird logos, and we want to make sure they are only used to label our stuff. Trademark law says we have to ask people misusing them to stop, or we lose the trademark.
When I get a second, after tonight's staff meeting where I will be bringing the issue up, I plan to get back in touch with the people concerned and see if we can't find a way to make these legal.
However, the way to get legal icons is not to distribute illegal, infringing ones and hope no-one notices or fails to take you down. The Free Software movement is (or should be) built on respect for the law. After all, if people ignore copyright law, they can rip off our software. And we would rightly complain about that.
Well as it was Jesus who said it I would assume he meant for you to follow his example. Which was one of actions not words.
Jesus ministry was of both words and actions - but primarily words. His message was the most important thing. What was the first thing Jesus did in his adult ministry? Here it is recorded in Mark 1:
'After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. "The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!"'
Later in that same chapter, his disciples come to him to try and bring him to heal more people (which has proved, unsurprisingly, very popular).
'Jesus replied, "Let us go somewhere else--to the nearby villages--so I can preach there also. That is why I have come."'
Here he shows his words are more important than his actions. He came to preach - to tell people the Good News. That is how he made disciples, and that's how Christians should today as well.
That's why I keep my strong religious convictions to myself
If you are a Christian, what do you make of Jesus's command to "go and make disciples of all nations"? (If you aren't, of course, this question isn't relevant:-)
Leaving aside what I think about this issue, your post contains major factual inaccuracies.
their lackadaisical attitude towards branding of their product (Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox?)
I'm sorry to use strong language, but that's completely clueless. The Firefox naming decision took such a long time precisely because we spent an inordinate amount of effort trying to get it right. We even held up the 0.8 release for months to make sure we had a solid and sustainable brand and strategy.
Realize that your contributions, while critical, do not need to include drawing shitty icons
The new theme is being designed by graphic designers.
Every keyboard I use, I just lever the Caps Lock key (and the three Windows keys) off. Voila - no more accidental-key-press problems.
Modes are generally bad things; you need a really good reason to have them (see any decent usability book for the reasons.) Keyboards should _not_ be modal. Caps Lock makes them so.
But for menus, toolbars, dialog boxes - stick to the standard stuff!
And rewrite the UI for every new platform? That sounds like an excellent way to waste a lot of time. Netscape went there for 4.x and regretted it massively.
You'll never be a regular user and are incapable of having a balanced viewpoint.
It's funny how one's own viewpoint is always balanced and everyone else's is skewed...
There are loads of things you need to be able to do to support CSS that the available cross-platform toolkits couldn't do when the project began, and still can't do.
In the beginning, the included spam filtering worked wonders, but after time more and more spam began to leak through no matter how much "training" I did.
Yeah, Thunderbird's Bayesian implementation did fall behind a bit. Fortunately the latest 0.6 release has an updated version, which is apparently a lot better.
why the hell is Mozilla married to its own slow-ass widget set?
a) Justify "slow-ass" with figures. b) Let's see you render an animated GIF background on a button using the Motif widget set.
Any browser which wants to support a decent part of CSS needs its own widgets, because OS widgets just don't cut it. IE does it too - and they have access to the underlying platform development team, _and_ only have to support one platform!
Your comment talks about two totally different things - user interface design and new features - which are very different. You can make a lot of changes ("improvements" is a loaded word I'm trying to avoid) to a product's UI without changing the feature set, and you can often add features without changing the UI.
So how is "Mozilla developers aren't taking any UI patches" related to "there hasn't been a worthwhile new feature for ages"?
Also, why are you looking to Seamonkey for new features? The suite is in maintenance mode - there are still people and companies interested in it, but they are interested in it staying as it is. Firefox is where the innovation is happening right now.
Why? Who decided that? Why can't obvious UI mistakes be fixed?
Not everyone has the same definition of "obvious UI mistake". Same point as last time.:-)
nobody has the balls to draw the plans for Mozilla 2.0.
Says who? Just because we haven't reached the stage where it's appropriate to publish them doesn't mean they aren't being looked at.
That's all it takes to spin a 2.0, nothing more.
You've got it all backwards. You don't pick a version number first and a set of features second. We are not thinking "goodness me, what can we do so that it looks sensible calling it 2.0?", we are thinking "what's the next big step in Mozilla's evolution?" and, incidentally, deciding to call it Mozilla 2.0.
it also gets Mozilla a new fresh round of much needed media coverage.
Who says the Mozilla suite needs media coverage? It's certainly not obviously true. One could argue that we should spend all our effort getting media coverage for Firefox and Thunderbird.
Also, there is no plan to leave maintenance mode at the moment
No, and that's the point. That's what maintenance mode is. Seamonkey is still around because some people care about it, but they care about it being like it is now. Any massive marketshare increase we get will be driven by Firefox, not by Seamonkey.
Heck, you could hold "Vote for Mozilla 1.X splash screen" sessions at Mozillazine.
A vote is (well, was originally, it's now mostly inertia) the reason the suite is stuck with that current weird throbber. Votes, in general, suck as a way of choosing anything. Open Source projects are (mostly) not democracies.
If you want to be listened to, come out from behind that cowardly anonymity and engage in constructive discussion.
Odd numbers are the stable releases, even numbers are the development versions?
Mozilla doesn't use an odd/even scheme. We just designate particular releases and branches, such as 1.7 as stable. Previous releases with this designation were 1.0 and 1.4.
My passwords are all stored in Keyring for Palm OS in my Treo (with the database backed up to a PC), and the master password is written down in a "useful information" appendix to the original copy of my will, along with my bank account details. My original will lives in the walk-in safe in my parents house, and both my executors know it's there.
The will contains a person nominated to take ownership of my machines and conclude my online affairs, including notifying interested parties and posting a message on my website.
So don't worry guys, if the hit succeeds, you'll find out fairly quick;-)
Mozilla is not a technology preview. Note on mozilla.org it is listed above the line which says "Technology Previews". It's a stable product, suitable for consumer use.
You are correct in saying that Firefox, Thunderbird and Camino are all technology previews.
Slashdot Mirror
More thoughts, and some suggested counter-measures for Google (hey, let's be fair.)
Gerv
A full exploration of the html obfuscation and DRM employed by Google would be very interesting
I've been looking at this - there's a blog post with some preliminary discussions, and a follow-up giving some ways of getting around it. The short answer is that if you just want to save the image to disk, it's not too hard in a decent browser.
Gerv
Hardly a scandal. The Mozilla Foundation has trademarks on the Firefox and Thunderbird logos, and we want to make sure they are only used to label our stuff. Trademark law says we have to ask people misusing them to stop, or we lose the trademark.
When I get a second, after tonight's staff meeting where I will be bringing the issue up, I plan to get back in touch with the people concerned and see if we can't find a way to make these legal.
However, the way to get legal icons is not to distribute illegal, infringing ones and hope no-one notices or fails to take you down. The Free Software movement is (or should be) built on respect for the law. After all, if people ignore copyright law, they can rip off our software. And we would rightly complain about that.
Gerv
Well as it was Jesus who said it I would assume he meant for you to follow his example. Which was one of actions not words.
Jesus ministry was of both words and actions - but primarily words. His message was the most important thing. What was the first thing Jesus did in his adult ministry? Here it is recorded in Mark 1:
'After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. "The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!"'
Later in that same chapter, his disciples come to him to try and bring him to heal more people (which has proved, unsurprisingly, very popular).
'Jesus replied, "Let us go somewhere else--to the nearby villages--so I can preach there also. That is why I have come."'
Here he shows his words are more important than his actions. He came to preach - to tell people the Good News. That is how he made disciples, and that's how Christians should today as well.
Gerv
That's why I keep my strong religious convictions to myself
:-)
If you are a Christian, what do you make of Jesus's command to "go and make disciples of all nations"? (If you aren't, of course, this question isn't relevant
Gerv
Leaving aside what I think about this issue, your post contains major factual inaccuracies.
their lackadaisical attitude towards branding of their product (Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox?)
I'm sorry to use strong language, but that's completely clueless. The Firefox naming decision took such a long time precisely because we spent an inordinate amount of effort trying to get it right. We even held up the 0.8 release for months to make sure we had a solid and sustainable brand and strategy.
Realize that your contributions, while critical, do not need to include drawing shitty icons
The new theme is being designed by graphic designers.
Gerv
Every keyboard I use, I just lever the Caps Lock key (and the three Windows keys) off. Voila - no more accidental-key-press problems.
Modes are generally bad things; you need a really good reason to have them (see any decent usability book for the reasons.) Keyboards should _not_ be modal. Caps Lock makes them so.
Gerv
But for menus, toolbars, dialog boxes - stick to the standard stuff!
And rewrite the UI for every new platform? That sounds like an excellent way to waste a lot of time. Netscape went there for 4.x and regretted it massively.
You'll never be a regular user and are incapable of having a balanced viewpoint.
It's funny how one's own viewpoint is always balanced and everyone else's is skewed...
you know perfectly well that it is, grow up
Ouch. That piece of logical argument really hurt.
Gerv
If you need your own widget set to do the web page form controls, why not use it for the UI? Otherwise you need _two_ widget sets.
Anyway, if you want some other set to be used round the outside, use Camino, Galeon, Ephiphany, K-Meleon or any of the other Gecko-based browsers.
But I personally don't choose software based on which widget set it uses...
Gerv
It was an example.
There are loads of things you need to be able to do to support CSS that the available cross-platform toolkits couldn't do when the project began, and still can't do.
Gerv
In the beginning, the included spam filtering worked wonders, but after time more and more spam began to leak through no matter how much "training" I did.
Yeah, Thunderbird's Bayesian implementation did fall behind a bit. Fortunately the latest 0.6 release has an updated version, which is apparently a lot better.
Gerv
why the hell is Mozilla married to its own slow-ass widget set?
a) Justify "slow-ass" with figures.
b) Let's see you render an animated GIF background on a button using the Motif widget set.
Any browser which wants to support a decent part of CSS needs its own widgets, because OS widgets just don't cut it. IE does it too - and they have access to the underlying platform development team, _and_ only have to support one platform!
Gerv
To me, it seems that it's just tailing on the 'zilla name, and no real relation.
Bang on.
Gerv
Your comment talks about two totally different things - user interface design and new features - which are very different. You can make a lot of changes ("improvements" is a loaded word I'm trying to avoid) to a product's UI without changing the feature set, and you can often add features without changing the UI.
So how is "Mozilla developers aren't taking any UI patches" related to "there hasn't been a worthwhile new feature for ages"?
Also, why are you looking to Seamonkey for new features? The suite is in maintenance mode - there are still people and companies interested in it, but they are interested in it staying as it is. Firefox is where the innovation is happening right now.
Gerv
Why? Who decided that? Why can't obvious UI mistakes be fixed?
:-)
Not everyone has the same definition of "obvious UI mistake". Same point as last time.
nobody has the balls to draw the plans for Mozilla 2.0.
Says who? Just because we haven't reached the stage where it's appropriate to publish them doesn't mean they aren't being looked at.
That's all it takes to spin a 2.0, nothing more.
You've got it all backwards. You don't pick a version number first and a set of features second. We are not thinking "goodness me, what can we do so that it looks sensible calling it 2.0?", we are thinking "what's the next big step in Mozilla's evolution?" and, incidentally, deciding to call it Mozilla 2.0.
it also gets Mozilla a new fresh round of much needed media coverage.
Who says the Mozilla suite needs media coverage? It's certainly not obviously true. One could argue that we should spend all our effort getting media coverage for Firefox and Thunderbird.
Also, there is no plan to leave maintenance mode at the moment
No, and that's the point. That's what maintenance mode is. Seamonkey is still around because some people care about it, but they care about it being like it is now. Any massive marketshare increase we get will be driven by Firefox, not by Seamonkey.
Heck, you could hold "Vote for Mozilla 1.X splash screen" sessions at Mozillazine.
A vote is (well, was originally, it's now mostly inertia) the reason the suite is stuck with that current weird throbber. Votes, in general, suck as a way of choosing anything. Open Source projects are (mostly) not democracies.
If you want to be listened to, come out from behind that cowardly anonymity and engage in constructive discussion.
Gerv
It seems the core developers fight every little attempt to improve the interface
- Not everyone has the same definition of "improve"
- The suite is now in maintenance mode, and so there will be no big UI changes
If I was running the show every new release would have a new splash screen ala the GIMP
This sounds like a great way to get people to spend their time arguing instead of hacking.
Gerv
Odd numbers are the stable releases, even numbers are the development versions?
Mozilla doesn't use an odd/even scheme. We just designate particular releases and branches, such as 1.7 as stable. Previous releases with this designation were 1.0 and 1.4.
Gerv
(you are aware that WINE provides many of the libraries you need for windows compatibility without needing a copy of windows, right?)
Sure. But not every Windows-on-Linux solution does. Hence my question.
I don't agree with another commenter; the answer isn't obviously "No".
Gerv
Is there any value in Windows-apps-on-Linux solutions which force you to own a copy of Windows anyway?
Gerv
http://www.gerv.net
My passwords are all stored in Keyring for Palm OS in my Treo (with the database backed up to a PC), and the master password is written down in a "useful information" appendix to the original copy of my will, along with my bank account details. My original will lives in the walk-in safe in my parents house, and both my executors know it's there.
;-)
The will contains a person nominated to take ownership of my machines and conclude my online affairs, including notifying interested parties and posting a message on my website.
So don't worry guys, if the hit succeeds, you'll find out fairly quick
Gerv
Uh, who said that? We have no plans in the "foreseeable future"...
:-) The suite will stay around for as long as people are interested in it, and companies will pay to have it supported.
So plans change
Gerv
Mozilla is not a technology preview. Note on mozilla.org it is listed above the line which says "Technology Previews". It's a stable product, suitable for consumer use.
You are correct in saying that Firefox, Thunderbird and Camino are all technology previews.
Gerv
I wish there was a way to pipe the output of /usr/games/fortune into your slashdot sig...
:-)
Write a Mozilla extension, dude, and there would be
Gerv
The biggest problem such a person will face is the build system - as in, there isn't one for OS 9 any more.
Gerv
We all contributed to Mozilla and now they screw us back by not letting us make any money off of it.
You are perfectly able to make as much money as you can off the codebase you contributed to.
If you'd like to sell Mozilla-branded shirts, I'm sure that's possible. You are in Europe, right? Get in touch and we'll work something out.
Gerv