manifesto principle 9 needs rework
Categories
(mozilla.org :: Governance, defect)
Tracking
(Not tracked)
People
(Reporter: mozilla.bugs.grokchem, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Steps to reproduce:
Visited the manifesto
Actual results:
The manifesto appeared, including principle 9, which states:
“Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.”
Expected results:
This “balance” clause between commercial profit and public benefit introduces a mechanism for contradicting all the other principles. It brings unnecessary compromise. A balance will always result no matter what Mozilla does. It’s not a goal worthy of an explicit statement statement in the manifesto.
If the principle were strictly reworded to maximize public benefit and drop “commercial profit”, that would still inherently imply commercial profitability in the end because the public benefits from commerce. It’s not Mozilla’s role to negotiate a balance that might reduce public benefit. Principle 9 essentially serves as an enabler for conflicts of interest. It likely exists because Mozilla itself has a profit-driven subsidiary. But that profitable subsidiary does not need principle 9 to justify its existence simply because its mission inherently benefits the public interest anyway. “Balance” is really weasel wording for being able to adversely put a thumb on the scale.
BTW, it’s unclear how to file this bug report. Apparently manifesto-related bugs are filed in “Firefox :: Governance”, but that’s non-intuitive. There is a top level DB for “Mozilla Foundation”, which is where we might expect to find a “governance” component.
Ah, apparently mozilla.org has the “governance” component. Fair enough.
I should also stress that profit-driven companies will look after their interests. That’s their job to work out how, and they will figure out how regardless of whether Mozilla caters for them.
The issue I raise is inspired by the fact that people sometimes take the position that a web browser should serve the website’s interests. I do not believe there is a balance to be struck there. The browser has exactly one master to serve, and that’s the browser’s user; no one else.
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