index.md 6.4KB
title: Mozilla: What constitutes “open source”?
url: https://palant.de/2015/10/24/mozilla-what-constitutes-open-source
hash_url: d45e9bff2b
I became a Mozillian more than twelve years ago. I’m not sure whether the term “Mozillian” was even being used back then, I definitely didn’t hear it. Also, I didn’t actually realize what happened — to me it was simply a fascinating piece of software, one that allowed me to do a lot more than merely consume it passively. I implemented changes to scratch my own itch, yet these changes had an enormous impact at times. I got more and more involved in the project, and I could see it grow and evolve over time.
Not all of the changes were positive in my eyes, so this blog post hit a nerve with me: is Mozilla still an open source project? How is Mozilla different from Google or Microsoft who also produce open source software? See Android for example: while being technically open source, the project around it is completely dominated by Google. Want to contribute? Apply at Google!
In my opinion, making the source code accessible is a necessary requirement for an open source project, but clearly not the only one. It should be possible for people to get involved and make a difference. I could identify the following contributing factors:
1. Source code availability and documentation
This sounds trivial but it isn’t, particularly with a project the size of Mozilla. Finding the Firefox source code is fairly easy, but it already gets more complicated if you need the build configuration of the Firefox release builds. And when you start looking into web services that Firefox relies on things get really tricky, with the source code hidden under cryptic codenames and distributed more or less randomly between hg.mozilla.org and various GitHub organizations. Even if you find the source code, chances are that setting up your own test environment will be hard to impossible.
There is also another aspect here: seeing a piece of code often isn’t enough, you need to see the reasoning behind it. That’s why the information contained in the revision history is so important. Unfortunately, I’m getting the impression that this aspect is increasingly getting neglected. I frequently see changes linking to bugs without any description whatsoever, or where the description is so cryptic that it is only understandable to some inner circle of developers. It also seems that Mozilla no longer has a consistent policy of opening up security-relevant bugs after they have been fixed. So the context of these changes stays hidden for a very long time.
2. Contribution processes
Contribution processes have always been a sore spot with Mozilla. Finding corresponding documentation has always been too hard and the process in general too complicated. Contributors had to deal with depressingly long review times and lack of mentors. This is a tough topic, and finding the right balance between “just do it yourself” and “help somebody else do it” is hard. However, I’ve had the impression that Mozilla got too comfortable hiring people to do the job and neglected making contribution easier.
3. Decision transparency
This might be the most disappointing aspect of all of them: that you can contribute your effort but have no way of making your voice heard or even understanding the direction in which the project is heading. I think the Australis project was one of the positive examples here: the goals and each step of the project were documented, feedback requested during various stages of the project, and the result was released when it was really ready. Sure, you cannot make everybody happy and lots of people ended up opposing Australis for whatever reasons. It’s a fact: when you ask your existing user base then typically most people will either be indifferent or oppose a change, simply due to self-selection bias. But I did have the impression that feedback was taken seriously on this one.
Sadly, that’s not always the case. I seem to recognize a tendency within Mozilla to delay public discussion until late stages of a project in order to avoid negative press. This is very unfortunate because people outside Mozilla cannot contribute until all the major decisions are already done (occasionally this even seems to apply to key figures within Mozilla). Contributors feel excluded and complain about Mozilla’s lack of transparency.
There are more issues here of course. There is the sheer amount of information, and the fact that it’s very non-obvious which information sources to follow for each particular topic — is X being discussed on Planet Mozilla or Google Groups? Bugzilla? Discourse? Air Mozilla? Something else?
There are also unclear hierarchies and responsibilities within Mozilla. Do you still remember those press articles citing a person with an impressive title who wasn’t actually qualified to speak for the project in question? Yes, journalists are very confused by this, and so are contributors. Already figuring out who is in charge of which project is a non-trivial task. I guess that this wiki page is the way to go but it isn’t easy to find and it doesn’t seem terribly up-to-date either.
And then there are people making strange statements on the Mozilla blog which seem to be very hard to justify, yet these are announced as new Mozilla policies without any obvious way to comment. How come that they are speaking for the entire Mozilla project? They definitely didn’t ask for community input, and I am unable to recognize relevant contributions to the project either (that’s assuming that Mozilla is still a meritocracy).
Conclusion
Don’t get me wrong, Mozilla is still a fascinating and unique project. Building up a large open source project and creating the right balance between contributors and paid employees is a very complex problem, and there is a lot to be learned from Mozilla here. However, I have the impression that the balance is increasingly shifting towards paid employees, and that the people at Mozilla understanding why this is a problem are getting fewer. I would love to have somebody prove me wrong.