You mean like Firefox -P -no-remote ?
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles
I can understand that end-users with little computer knowledge think it doesn't exist, but you are posting on Slashdot and are supposedly an advanced user that can check his facts, that was the first hit on google for "Firefox profile management".
This feature exists since... forever (Mozilla Suite even had it), I have 2 versions of Firefox running happilly at the same time with separate profiles. How do you think that web developpers check their pages in different versions of Firefox ?
Then again, the French government is the only one, outside of a George Orwell novel, that has an agency dedicated to "language purity".
Another urban legend:) Many countries have such an agency, for instance in Spain they have the Real Academia Espanola (equivalent to the French Académie française) and they also have the Instituto Cervantes (equivalent to French Alliance Française).
The purpose of these agencies is mostly to make sure that the written language does not differ too much from a country to another one while the spoken French can be very different (I have difficulties understanding people from some regions of Québec or West-Africa for instance, but we write the exact same language unlike Brits and Americans who have languages clearly diverging).
German is another example of a language with an even stronger "official" version, they had a huge language reform in the 80s/90s that went way beyond what the Académie Française ever did and which purpose was to normalize written German.
You sound so American, and you call the European whiner !! Look at yourself, always complaining and being persuaded that all that is done in the world is meant to be against you.
I am always amazed to see that in definition of freedom from US-Americans, other people's freedom of choice is negligeable compared to your mega-corporation's freedom of establishing monopolies abroad and behaving as leeches on foreign economies. Sorry dude, our freedom of choice and decide our lifestyle and future will always be more important than your freedom to "innovate" (loot). By the way, all international labour stats show that the French have one of the highest productivity rate in the world, higher than the "hard-working Americans", basically, the Europeans work more and produce way more value than the US, but it's not as if you were really interested in understanding the true economic situation, it's so much easier to think that the US-Americans are always right and the rest of the world is wrong.
Anyway, these jokes tell more about the people that make them than about the French. And if you want my opinion, they give quite a sad picture of the average US-american...
All TVs in Europe use both PAL/SECAM standards and not only France had SECAM has a standard in Europe, Greece, and Eastern Europe used it as well. Which is why I can buy a TV in Madrid and have it working in Paris.
The last time I saw a PAL only apparel, it was a VCR made in Taiwan my cousin had brought back from Germany, it was about 15 years ago...
PAL is just as standard as SECAM and NTSC and in the same vein, English being the Standard language in anglo-saxon countries doesn't make it the standard in Poland or China.
Can you explain us why a project being open source sould have any relationship whatsoever with the very purposes of the project?
The purpose of the Mozilla project is to defend a web open to everybody, having significant market share is key to reach this goal, if you don't understand it, then you have a total misconception about what the mozilla project is about.
The mozilla project, the openoffice project or the ubuntu project are there to make a difference on the desktop, to defend the interests of the end-user at large, not only of the computer geek.
Of course, you can also choose to not want to change things, to keep a 0.5% market share, curse all those websites that are IE only (because who cares for 0.5% market share?), let the technical future of the web and the desktop be decided and owned by the proprietary software market leader (yes I am talking about Microsoft here but if they weren't there, it would be another proprieatay software monopoly).
Basically, that's the difference in wanting to change the software industry for the good of the end user (your mother included), or not.
The Mozilla project is about preserving choice and innovation on the internet, making a browser like Firefox now or mozilla suite in the past is just a tool to reach this objective.
In other words, the mozilla project exists so as to prevent Microsoft from having such a monopoly on the web that the web becomes an extension of windows and becomes inaccessible to other OSes like Linux or MacOS, that would result in merely killing the web and rename it MSN.
When gecko was under 2% market share, Windows only sites were flourishing, even government sites where only accesible with IE and basically, surfing the web for joe user was painful if he didn't use IE.
Market share is key to make sure that the web becomes again what it was meant to be, an interopable network where information could be accessed and modified whatever your OS / browser, as long as it follows a certain set of web standards.
Having worked a lot on Mozilla Tech Evangelism in my country I can tell you the difference when we had 1% market share and when we now have 20% :
2002 : Big banking/government site IE only, blocks access from Gecko browser. I contact them and get almost insulted by the webmaster explaining me that they fdon't give a shit about my crappy linux browser and that I am basically an idiot for not accepting that the web is IE/windows only
2006 : Big banking/government site contacts *ME* to tell me that they want to be fully W3C compliant, that their site is now fully compatible with Firefox.
That, is the difference when you have significant market share, and in all countries where firefox/gecko has very significant market share (especially in Europe), the web is way better for all alternative browsers, while in countries where we have little market share (latin-America for instance), most of the big websites are still half broken in anything else than IE.
XAML is a copy of XUL (with the difference that XUL has been working reliably for years of course), on which Firefox is built on.
So you are telling us that once IE7 is out, which is a big improvement in standards compliance, you will make sure that your applications are 100% IE-only ? That's stupid if you want my opinion.
"The calendar gets renaming and slight improvements. It becomes better but it does not take off as it happend with Firebird. It is not even considered to be a an equal member of the community. What's to expected next? A new name and announcement?"
1/ the purpose of the Mozilla project is not to make a Calendar, it's just an addon. Is there a company with 98% market share on Calendars ? No.
2/ Firefox was based on Mozilla browser which was a mature project, Calendar/Sunbird/Lightning isn't based on any previous mature project
3/ a calendar is used by a small percent of the global population, a browser and an emailer are used by everybody, hence the priority
I love lightning, I use it everyday, but I am realistic enough to know that it is a marginal target in the global scheme.
"Equal member, oh, think of KompoZer, earlier Mozilla Composer component, than Mozilla Composer+ than taken over by Robertson as NVU and now further developed. You say it is "not our son". It is. And Mozilla could benefit a lot of reintegration of these mature software projects."
I know both NVU and KompoZer developpers, they are not part of the Mozilla Corporation/Foundation and don't claim to be.
As I already said, ALL OF NVU MODIFICATIONS ARE BEING INTEGRATED INTO THE MOZILLA TRUNK. Furthermore, KompoZer's creator is doing it as an interim solution while a new Mozilla Composer is being prepared, which means months of work to sync the 1.7 private Nvu branch and the 1.8/1.9 editor branch in the trunk, it also means moving to XulRunner instead of hacking a Firefox binary. That takes huge amount of times and only a handfull of people in the world are able to do it, these people are also working on other projects to fill the fridge and put food on their kids' table.
When the Mozilla Foundation was created it had to make choices, it couldn't pay for the 200 ex-netscape developpers but only a dozen at first, choices had to be made and I am glad that they chose to focus on Firefox instead of Mozilla Composer. Now that there are more ressources a Mozilla Composer may well be released ion the future, but even today The Mozilla Corporation is just about a half of what the Netscape Engeneering force was.
"When you have the opportunity to raise funds you should use that power to make other projects mature. Mozilla was able to emerge because many believed in the cathedral which was second choice for a quite a long time. It seems like 3 years ago the other projects had a more equal status than today. Sunbird is crucial for Thunderbird's future and the little progress clearly indicates a lack of programmers staff."
Working on the mozilla code base requires huge amounts of knowledge and expertise, according to several mozilla coders I know, any serious core patch requires at least studying the source code for a year. We are talking of a project which has millions of lines of code. If money could just automagically produce good code, IE7 would have been released a year ago, it would have full CSS2.1 and DOM2 support and would be XML based like Firefox, fact is that money helps but is not enough.
Three years ago, there was no focus, all projects were used and promoted by only a handful of geeks (myself included), the Mozilla project was just a blip on Microsoft's radar and most of the industry thought it would just become even more marginal or slowly vanish. Today, the Mozilla project has probably more exposure than Linux, it has taken serious market share, has tens of millions of users, is available in almost 40 languages, has created an MDC equivalent to MSDN, has a strong deployment infrastructure, has about 70 employees and it's technology is used by dozens of projects. If you see this as a failure to meet their goals, then you are not facing reality.
"The task would be * to use the cash cows to crossfinance emerging products"
There is no cash cow, the Mozilla project does have more money than most other open source projects but compared to the task and the competiti
You can twist words as much as you can, a boycott isn't temporary by definition (plus in this case it is completely stupid). Of course, you can still try to convince a Vegetarian that his boycotting of meat is temporary, it won't make them eat meat in the end.
To engage in a concerted refusal to have dealings with (as a person, store, or organization) usually to express disapproval or to force acceptance of certain conditions. (Merriam Webster)
To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion. (American Heritage)
If you think that a boycott is a temporary action, then you don't know your own language which makes your initial post even more idiotic.
Isn't it interesting to see that all the opera fanboys spreading FUD here never do it publicly but post anonymously?
Of course they either show :
Case 1/ They are total illeterates and can't read since they don't understand the article (a 10 year old kid would understand it, slashdot articles aren't Shakespeare text, I am not even a native English speaker and it is cristal clear to me...)
Case 2/ They would do anything to convince people to use Opera, top 1 technique is blatatnly lieing of course
Opera is a great browser, it deserves better users than the idiots posting FUD here.
yeah sure, boycotting the only opensource software in the world that has a bit of success (with Openoffice) is the way to go ! Let's all promote Opera ! Let's make sure that the web becomes what it used to be ! A windows only place with more and more sites that are unaccessible to othe OSes. Lets shoot ourselves in the foot !
With this logic, Firefox shouldn't even be available for Windows, Microsoft is no better than Real about the end-user privacy and rights...
FIREFOX WILL NOT COME WITH REALPLAYER, IT'S REALPLAYER THAT WILL HAVE FIREFOX BUNDLED AS A BONUS
And if one day Mozilla makes a bundling deal with DELL, it won't mean that you will receive a DELL desktop if you download Firefox, it will mean that DELL buyers will have Firefox preinstalled with Windows.
This post is so wrong that it is on the edge of pure FUD, so let's restablish the facts:
> Mozilla got so much money. But do they invest in development? I fear they don't.
In two years times, Mozilla went from about 15 employees to about 80, most of them developpers.
> Just look at Sunbird, Lightening or whatever the calendar is called these days
Lightning is a project launched by the very Mozilla you critic, it has lower priority over Firefox and is a very young project but it doesn't mean it is not developped. Actually, version 0.3 was announced for the end of September today.
> Or NVU's son KompoZer?
What are you smoking? NVU isn't a Mozilla project, Kompozer is an unofficial improved Nvu by a French developper. The fact that KompoZer uses Mozilla code, doesn't make it a Mozilla project. And for your information, all the work done in Nvu is being merged into the Mozilla trunk, something Nvu's creator already announced a long time ago. So the situation is exactly the opposite from the one you imagined.
>Mozilla has the ressources to cross-finance development of other tools, to bootstrap open source. But it seems they don't want to.
Last time I checked, the Mozilla Foundation goal wasn't to replace the FSF or any other general-purpose opensource promotion organisation. The purpose of the Mozilla Foundation is to defend an Internet open to everyone and promote innovation on the web. In other words, the Mozilla Foundation main goal is to take as much market share as possible from Microsoft, something they DO achieve (and are the only ones to achieve in fact). Man, Firefox is one of the most important pieces of Opensource today and THAT is bootstrapping opensource in general. Remove Mozilla technologies from Linux distros and see how many people you can convince to switch to Linux... I don't even talk about all the cool technologies they create that are used by other projects like Democracy or Songbird. Of course I should also underline the fact that they offer opensource grants or that they have already financially helped other opensource projects in the past, brrr, how bad they are !!! Why can't they understand that they should just be happy with 10% market share and give all their money to other projects !
Just the communication and marketing budget for the IE7 release is estimated to about 5 to 10 times Mozilla's annual budget, and the IE team can count on way more internal ressources than Mozilla (like tens of thousands of employees promoting the product worldwide, bundling with all OEM in the world, almost illimited budget extension in case of need...).
Mozilla is competing with the biggest monopolistic corporation in the world, the 50 or 100 millions they got from their google/yahoo deal is not a lot of money in this war, the last thing the Mozilla project needs is to loose focus and forget what its purpose is.
So to USA I say the same, you are not the only people on the planet and it's not because some of your IT companies have big pockets with lots of money in them that it gives them the right to ignore other countries' laws.
The idea that the purchaser of the adwords should be the only one responsible and not google is appalling, you are simply stating that anyone can sell any illegal good or service and that the consumer is the only one to blame/fine/arrest, neo-capitalism at its best.
Your description of the world is very USA-centric and pretty arrogant, undortunately you apparently don't even realize it. The "local" company you are talking about is one of the biggest world companies, much much bigger than google, and its goods were sold in the most remote places of the world long before the web even existed, actually long before even electricity was available... Not really the situation of a small local company in a small minor country you described.
As for the importance of France as a people or a country, this is so silly that I don't even know if I should answer. It is very American to think that their laws, their way of life, their money, their religion... should become the worldwide standard. Sorry, but it happens that diffferent countries have different laws, if I come to do business in your country, I follow your country laws, I don't import my country laws because I find them more favorable to my business model or just because I want to save a few thousand euros by not hiring a local lawyer to know what are my obligations under the French (and more generally European) laws.
If the ruling had been made in another country, you and other slashdotters would most likely not even talk about it and accept the result of the trial. For your information if the trial had been concluded in Sweden or Italy the result would most likely have been the same since we have a certain homogeneity of commercial laws in Europe (UK excepted). There is a clear tendency among Americans to bash the French and show big xenophobic tendencies towards us and continental Europeans in general. You'll never see such American bashing on a French forum in case of a reverse situation, actually all this bashing (even your moderate criticism) just accentuates how the people perceive the Americans: people who want to impose to the world their way of life and values based on violence, love for money and xenophobia.
You think that this is an exageration? Then just look at all the latest posts, supposedly made by educated people from your country. While I was writing this message some of your compatriots already posted about bombing France, finding ways for google to disobey the ruling, block French ISPs... Nice image you all give of your country.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like Firefox -P -no-remote ? http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles I can understand that end-users with little computer knowledge think it doesn't exist, but you are posting on Slashdot and are supposedly an advanced user that can check his facts, that was the first hit on google for "Firefox profile management". This feature exists since... forever (Mozilla Suite even had it), I have 2 versions of Firefox running happilly at the same time with separate profiles. How do you think that web developpers check their pages in different versions of Firefox ?
Another urban legend :) Many countries have such an agency, for instance in Spain they have the Real Academia Espanola (equivalent to the French Académie française) and they also have the Instituto Cervantes (equivalent to French Alliance Française).
The purpose of these agencies is mostly to make sure that the written language does not differ too much from a country to another one while the spoken French can be very different (I have difficulties understanding people from some regions of Québec or West-Africa for instance, but we write the exact same language unlike Brits and Americans who have languages clearly diverging).
German is another example of a language with an even stronger "official" version, they had a huge language reform in the 80s/90s that went way beyond what the Académie Française ever did and which purpose was to normalize written German.
See the Wikipedia list of languages with a regulation body, which is a looooon list : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regu lators
Yahoo is number one in Asia, the internet isn't just about western countries.
yes of course, thanks! these bad translations happen when you have slept less than 10 hours in the last 3 days :)
You sound so American, and you call the European whiner !! Look at yourself, always complaining and being persuaded that all that is done in the world is meant to be against you.
I am always amazed to see that in definition of freedom from US-Americans, other people's freedom of choice is negligeable compared to your mega-corporation's freedom of establishing monopolies abroad and behaving as leeches on foreign economies. Sorry dude, our freedom of choice and decide our lifestyle and future will always be more important than your freedom to "innovate" (loot). By the way, all international labour stats show that the French have one of the highest productivity rate in the world, higher than the "hard-working Americans", basically, the Europeans work more and produce way more value than the US, but it's not as if you were really interested in understanding the true economic situation, it's so much easier to think that the US-Americans are always right and the rest of the world is wrong.
Anyway, these jokes tell more about the people that make them than about the French. And if you want my opinion, they give quite a sad picture of the average US-american...
All TVs in Europe use both PAL/SECAM standards and not only France had SECAM has a standard in Europe, Greece, and Eastern Europe used it as well. Which is why I can buy a TV in Madrid and have it working in Paris.
The last time I saw a PAL only apparel, it was a VCR made in Taiwan my cousin had brought back from Germany, it was about 15 years ago...
PAL is just as standard as SECAM and NTSC and in the same vein, English being the Standard language in anglo-saxon countries doesn't make it the standard in Poland or China.
Can you explain us why a project being open source sould have any relationship whatsoever with the very purposes of the project?
The purpose of the Mozilla project is to defend a web open to everybody, having significant market share is key to reach this goal, if you don't understand it, then you have a total misconception about what the mozilla project is about.
The mozilla project, the openoffice project or the ubuntu project are there to make a difference on the desktop, to defend the interests of the end-user at large, not only of the computer geek.
Of course, you can also choose to not want to change things, to keep a 0.5% market share, curse all those websites that are IE only (because who cares for 0.5% market share?), let the technical future of the web and the desktop be decided and owned by the proprietary software market leader (yes I am talking about Microsoft here but if they weren't there, it would be another proprieatay software monopoly).
Basically, that's the difference in wanting to change the software industry for the good of the end user (your mother included), or not.
The Mozilla project is about preserving choice and innovation on the internet, making a browser like Firefox now or mozilla suite in the past is just a tool to reach this objective.
In other words, the mozilla project exists so as to prevent Microsoft from having such a monopoly on the web that the web becomes an extension of windows and becomes inaccessible to other OSes like Linux or MacOS, that would result in merely killing the web and rename it MSN.
When gecko was under 2% market share, Windows only sites were flourishing, even government sites where only accesible with IE and basically, surfing the web for joe user was painful if he didn't use IE.
Market share is key to make sure that the web becomes again what it was meant to be, an interopable network where information could be accessed and modified whatever your OS / browser, as long as it follows a certain set of web standards.
Having worked a lot on Mozilla Tech Evangelism in my country I can tell you the difference when we had 1% market share and when we now have 20% :
2002 : Big banking/government site IE only, blocks access from Gecko browser. I contact them and get almost insulted by the webmaster explaining me that they fdon't give a shit about my crappy linux browser and that I am basically an idiot for not accepting that the web is IE/windows only
2006 : Big banking/government site contacts *ME* to tell me that they want to be fully W3C compliant, that their site is now fully compatible with Firefox.
That, is the difference when you have significant market share, and in all countries where firefox/gecko has very significant market share (especially in Europe), the web is way better for all alternative browsers, while in countries where we have little market share (latin-America for instance), most of the big websites are still half broken in anything else than IE.
XAML is a copy of XUL (with the difference that XUL has been working reliably for years of course), on which Firefox is built on.
So you are telling us that once IE7 is out, which is a big improvement in standards compliance, you will make sure that your applications are 100% IE-only ? That's stupid if you want my opinion.
"The calendar gets renaming and slight improvements. It becomes better but it does not take off as it happend with Firebird. It is not even considered to be a an equal member of the community. What's to expected next? A new name and announcement?"
1/ the purpose of the Mozilla project is not to make a Calendar, it's just an addon. Is there a company with 98% market share on Calendars ? No.
2/ Firefox was based on Mozilla browser which was a mature project, Calendar/Sunbird/Lightning isn't based on any previous mature project
3/ a calendar is used by a small percent of the global population, a browser and an emailer are used by everybody, hence the priority
I love lightning, I use it everyday, but I am realistic enough to know that it is a marginal target in the global scheme.
"Equal member, oh, think of KompoZer, earlier Mozilla Composer component, than Mozilla Composer+ than taken over by Robertson as NVU and now further developed. You say it is "not our son". It is. And Mozilla could benefit a lot of reintegration of these mature software projects."
I know both NVU and KompoZer developpers, they are not part of the Mozilla Corporation/Foundation and don't claim to be.
As I already said, ALL OF NVU MODIFICATIONS ARE BEING INTEGRATED INTO THE MOZILLA TRUNK. Furthermore, KompoZer's creator is doing it as an interim solution while a new Mozilla Composer is being prepared, which means months of work to sync the 1.7 private Nvu branch and the 1.8/1.9 editor branch in the trunk, it also means moving to XulRunner instead of hacking a Firefox binary. That takes huge amount of times and only a handfull of people in the world are able to do it, these people are also working on other projects to fill the fridge and put food on their kids' table.
When the Mozilla Foundation was created it had to make choices, it couldn't pay for the 200 ex-netscape developpers but only a dozen at first, choices had to be made and I am glad that they chose to focus on Firefox instead of Mozilla Composer. Now that there are more ressources a Mozilla Composer may well be released ion the future, but even today The Mozilla Corporation is just about a half of what the Netscape Engeneering force was.
"When you have the opportunity to raise funds you should use that power to make other projects mature. Mozilla was able to emerge because many believed in the cathedral which was second choice for a quite a long time. It seems like 3 years ago the other projects had a more equal status than today. Sunbird is crucial for Thunderbird's future and the little progress clearly indicates a lack of programmers staff."
Working on the mozilla code base requires huge amounts of knowledge and expertise, according to several mozilla coders I know, any serious core patch requires at least studying the source code for a year. We are talking of a project which has millions of lines of code. If money could just automagically produce good code, IE7 would have been released a year ago, it would have full CSS2.1 and DOM2 support and would be XML based like Firefox, fact is that money helps but is not enough.
Three years ago, there was no focus, all projects were used and promoted by only a handful of geeks (myself included), the Mozilla project was just a blip on Microsoft's radar and most of the industry thought it would just become even more marginal or slowly vanish. Today, the Mozilla project has probably more exposure than Linux, it has taken serious market share, has tens of millions of users, is available in almost 40 languages, has created an MDC equivalent to MSDN, has a strong deployment infrastructure, has about 70 employees and it's technology is used by dozens of projects. If you see this as a failure to meet their goals, then you are not facing reality.
"The task would be
* to use the cash cows to crossfinance emerging products"
There is no cash cow, the Mozilla project does have more money than most other open source projects but compared to the task and the competiti
You can twist words as much as you can, a boycott isn't temporary by definition (plus in this case it is completely stupid). Of course, you can still try to convince a Vegetarian that his boycotting of meat is temporary, it won't make them eat meat in the end.
Boycott :
To engage in a concerted refusal to have dealings with (as a person, store, or organization) usually to express disapproval or to force acceptance of certain conditions. (Merriam Webster)
To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion. (American Heritage)
If you think that a boycott is a temporary action, then you don't know your own language which makes your initial post even more idiotic.
Isn't it interesting to see that all the opera fanboys spreading FUD here never do it publicly but post anonymously?
Of course they either show :
Case 1/ They are total illeterates and can't read since they don't understand the article (a 10 year old kid would understand it, slashdot articles aren't Shakespeare text, I am not even a native English speaker and it is cristal clear to me...)
Case 2/ They would do anything to convince people to use Opera, top 1 technique is blatatnly lieing of course
Opera is a great browser, it deserves better users than the idiots posting FUD here.
yeah sure, boycotting the only opensource software in the world that has a bit of success (with Openoffice) is the way to go ! Let's all promote Opera ! Let's make sure that the web becomes what it used to be ! A windows only place with more and more sites that are unaccessible to othe OSes. Lets shoot ourselves in the foot !
With this logic, Firefox shouldn't even be available for Windows, Microsoft is no better than Real about the end-user privacy and rights...
one more anonymous coward jumping in the ant-mozilla FUD bandwagon...
Can you read?
FIREFOX WILL NOT COME WITH REALPLAYER, IT'S REALPLAYER THAT WILL HAVE FIREFOX BUNDLED AS A BONUS
And if one day Mozilla makes a bundling deal with DELL, it won't mean that you will receive a DELL desktop if you download Firefox, it will mean that DELL buyers will have Firefox preinstalled with Windows.
This post is so wrong that it is on the edge of pure FUD, so let's restablish the facts:
> Mozilla got so much money. But do they invest in development? I fear they don't.
In two years times, Mozilla went from about 15 employees to about 80, most of them developpers.
> Just look at Sunbird, Lightening or whatever the calendar is called these days
Lightning is a project launched by the very Mozilla you critic, it has lower priority over Firefox and is a very young project but it doesn't mean it is not developped. Actually, version 0.3 was announced for the end of September today.
> Or NVU's son KompoZer?
What are you smoking? NVU isn't a Mozilla project, Kompozer is an unofficial improved Nvu by a French developper. The fact that KompoZer uses Mozilla code, doesn't make it a Mozilla project. And for your information, all the work done in Nvu is being merged into the Mozilla trunk, something Nvu's creator already announced a long time ago. So the situation is exactly the opposite from the one you imagined.
>Mozilla has the ressources to cross-finance development of other tools, to bootstrap open source. But it seems they don't want to.
Last time I checked, the Mozilla Foundation goal wasn't to replace the FSF or any other general-purpose opensource promotion organisation. The purpose of the Mozilla Foundation is to defend an Internet open to everyone and promote innovation on the web. In other words, the Mozilla Foundation main goal is to take as much market share as possible from Microsoft, something they DO achieve (and are the only ones to achieve in fact). Man, Firefox is one of the most important pieces of Opensource today and THAT is bootstrapping opensource in general. Remove Mozilla technologies from Linux distros and see how many people you can convince to switch to Linux... I don't even talk about all the cool technologies they create that are used by other projects like Democracy or Songbird. Of course I should also underline the fact that they offer opensource grants or that they have already financially helped other opensource projects in the past, brrr, how bad they are !!! Why can't they understand that they should just be happy with 10% market share and give all their money to other projects !
Just the communication and marketing budget for the IE7 release is estimated to about 5 to 10 times Mozilla's annual budget, and the IE team can count on way more internal ressources than Mozilla (like tens of thousands of employees promoting the product worldwide, bundling with all OEM in the world, almost illimited budget extension in case of need...).
Mozilla is competing with the biggest monopolistic corporation in the world, the 50 or 100 millions they got from their google/yahoo deal is not a lot of money in this war, the last thing the Mozilla project needs is to loose focus and forget what its purpose is.
So to USA I say the same, you are not the only people on the planet and it's not because some of your IT companies have big pockets with lots of money in them that it gives them the right to ignore other countries' laws.
The idea that the purchaser of the adwords should be the only one responsible and not google is appalling, you are simply stating that anyone can sell any illegal good or service and that the consumer is the only one to blame/fine/arrest, neo-capitalism at its best.
Your description of the world is very USA-centric and pretty arrogant, undortunately you apparently don't even realize it. The "local" company you are talking about is one of the biggest world companies, much much bigger than google, and its goods were sold in the most remote places of the world long before the web even existed, actually long before even electricity was available... Not really the situation of a small local company in a small minor country you described.
As for the importance of France as a people or a country, this is so silly that I don't even know if I should answer. It is very American to think that their laws, their way of life, their money, their religion... should become the worldwide standard. Sorry, but it happens that diffferent countries have different laws, if I come to do
business in your country, I follow your country laws, I don't import my country laws because I find them more favorable to my business model or just because I want to save a few thousand euros by not hiring a local lawyer to know what are my obligations under the French (and more generally European) laws.
If the ruling had been made in another country, you and other slashdotters would most likely not even talk about it and accept the result of the trial. For your information if the trial had been concluded in Sweden or Italy the result would most likely have been the same since we have a certain homogeneity of commercial laws in Europe (UK excepted). There is a clear tendency among Americans to bash the French and show big xenophobic tendencies towards us and continental Europeans in general. You'll never see such American bashing on a French forum in case of a reverse situation, actually all this bashing (even your moderate criticism) just accentuates how the people perceive the Americans: people who want to impose to the world their way of life and values based on violence, love for money and xenophobia.
You think that this is an exageration? Then just look at all the latest posts, supposedly made by educated people from your country. While I was writing this message some of your compatriots already posted about bombing France, finding ways for google to disobey the ruling, block French ISPs... Nice image you all give of your country.