I've been deeply studying "trust" for the past year, as part of a
project around "Zero Trust". It's a core pillar in cybersecurity.
Trust is very complex. Extremely hard won, easy to lose, practically
impossible to rebuild.
Mozilla have blown it and there's no going back for that company.
This is what happens when you let morally defective people take the
reigns. My advice would be, dissolve it and use whatever money is left
to start new projects for free-software browsers.
Mozilla's core major malfunction is that they are deceptive, as an
organisational culture. No amount of hard work, careful words, money
spent on PR will hide that odour, and whatever goodwill they show now
will naturally be undone as they return to business as usual.
What complicates things is that large companies have incentive and resources to try to dissuade users from using completely free and open source browsers.
This makes it harder to trust messages about not trusting ie. Firefox.
There are certainly many enemies of Mozilla who've used disinformation
and exaggeration to agitate against them.
From where I stand, Mozilla have done little to deflect that,
everything to encourage it and generally been been their own worst
enemy.
Taking on an operation like running Mozilla is not just running some
random tech company that makes a browser. Standing up for software
freedom is an ideological stance (in the best possible sense) and
requires more capable people who are prepared to dig deeper, work
harder, take risk, and stand up for what is right.
I do not see those people at Mozilla. Correct me if I'm wrong (and
let's have their email) so I can apologise and invite them to discuss
why Firefox is no longer a browser that I can trust.
I've been deeply studying "trust" for the past year, as part of a project around "Zero Trust". It's a core pillar in cybersecurity. Trust is very complex. Extremely hard won, easy to lose, practically impossible to rebuild.
Mozilla have blown it and there's no going back for that company. This is what happens when you let morally defective people take the reigns. My advice would be, dissolve it and use whatever money is left to start new projects for free-software browsers.
Mozilla's core major malfunction is that they are deceptive, as an organisational culture. No amount of hard work, careful words, money spent on PR will hide that odour, and whatever goodwill they show now will naturally be undone as they return to business as usual.