As already happened in the past on this blog, this is a guest post from my friend Iacopo Benesperi (iacchi), a long-standing member of the Italian Mozilla community. I agree with him that we’re living hard times, what’s happening inside our (small) community is probably happening elsewhere. And if it’s not clear, this post is here because we still care about Mozilla and its future
This last has been a hard year for the Mozilla world, in many ways. What is left of this year, among other things, is a very tense situation; a feeling of estrangement in many people, a sour taste in the mouth.
It’s not hard to notice it: you can see it in a good bye letter due to a resignation; you can see it in more and more posts on the planet; you can see it in mail exchanges or chats with other community members; you can see it in long time community members leaving because they don’t believe anymore in what Mozilla is doing; you can see it in all the blog posts of lovers of the free (as in freedom) Web who, because of this reason, care about Mozilla; you can see it in the comments of normal, non-techie users on your national forum, people that choosed Mozilla not necessarily because it’s better, but because it’s different; you can see it in the words of an extension writer, saying that he’ll stop updating his extensions because it’s become impossible for him to keep the pace; you can see it almost everywhere. Everything you need to do to notice it is to open your eyes and start paying attention on what’s around you.
In this last year Mozilla has lost many people but many, many more are the ones who are just an inch away from leaving; people who stay because they care so much about Mozilla and the Manifesto, who think that they can still fight to push everything back on the right path, on what they believe is the right path.
I won’t say here what’s wrong and what should be done, it’s all written already. What I will say here is that if you keep going this way, when (not if) all the people mentioned above will leave Mozilla, or stop believing in it, you may even be able to keep working somehow; but from that moment on, every success (what you consider as a success, anyway) you’ll get, if you will get some, will be a Mozilla Company success, the Mozilla Project being dead already. You’ll may even be able to win the browser war in the future, going on this way, but you’ll have lost your soul in the process.
