Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and W3C EME | Hacker News Reader

Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and W3C EME

hacks.mozilla.org

43 pointscleverjake14 comments

>We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM.

Then so be it. If Mozilla's mission is to improve and defend the "open" web, then EME should never have been considered for implementation. We shouldn't sacrifice our goals for the sake of market share.

How can Mozilla accomplish their goals if they don't have market share?

As I understand it, Mozilla is not creating or distributing software that supports DRM. Mozilla is creating and distrubuting a tool that allows their uses to choose to install and use DRM in a way that is more secure and private than alternative implementations.

Continuing to single-mindedly strive to accomplish goals that are no longer reasonably achievable is not admirable. This doesn't mean that Mozilla is no longer fighting against DRM, but Mozilla is now ALSO fighting to make the security and privacy of DRM more open.

Which goals are you referring to? There's nothing in their manifesto about market share:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

They talk about providing a platform for building stuff in an open way. You don't need market share to provide a platform.

I've been using mozilla since forever. I believe in The Mission.

If I went to view media and a message told me it wouldn't work because of DRM, I wouldn't switch browsers to view it. "The medium is the message," and the message you get from DRMed media is rude and uninviting.

> If I went to view media and a message told me it wouldn't work because of DRM

Not that I'm defending their actions, but I think it's worth pointing out that out of the box, this is exactly what will happen when you try to view DRM'd content. The Adobe decoding crap is a separate download that won't ship with Firefox; Mozilla is neither implementing nor distributing closed-source code.

The hilarious thing is that they are trying to avoid having the decrypted content "fall into the wrong hands" whatever that means, but it still has to pass through user-modifiable code before the user sees it anyway; they even show it in this diagram: https://andreasgal.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/cdm-graphic_6...

It almost makes you wonder whether they acknowledge that what they're doing is futile and absurd, and they just hope those in charge of licensing won't notice.

You might not mind missing out of Netflix streaming visors, but 99% of Netflix users will just switch to Chrome or IE.

This is a separately published version of the article being discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7744771

Very good short term decision (possibly inevitable) but rather risky long term. They might end up digging their own grave. They were the only (slim) hope of scuppering this platform. Now they are at the mercy of whoever controls it and no contract will save them once the platform is the only game in town and they are expendable.

...I'll get my tinfoil hat.

Guess that makes bug #923590 a RESOLVED WONTFIX.

Edit: right on the spot...

To save others the search: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=923590

Deleted comment

Since DRM won't work without installing an Adobe plugin, why can't you just use Mozilla and never install the plugin?

> There is also a silver lining to the W3C EME specification becoming ubiquitous. With direct support for DRM we are eliminating a major use case of plugins on the Web, and in the near future this should allow us to retire plugins altogether. The Web has evolved to a comprehensive and performant technology platform and no longer depends on native code extensions through plugins.

That sure is some spin there after they just finished describing the plugin architecture of the binary-blob CDM.

I also thought it was an odd thing to say, since the CDM itself is a plugin.

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