The Ten Commandments, v0.9
In addition to an introduction, a pledge from the Mozilla Foundation, and an invitation for readers to join the conversation, the manifesto contains 10 broad principles. Here they are:
- The Internet is an integral part of modern life–a key component in education, communication, collaboration, business, entertainment and society as a whole.
- The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
- The Internet should enrich the lives of individual human beings.
- Individuals' security on the Internet is fundamental and cannot be treated as optional.
- Individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences on the Internet.
- The effectiveness of the Internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.
- Free and open-source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource.
- Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability, and trust.
- Commercial involvement in the development of the Internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial goals and public benefit is critical.
- Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.
One curious aspect of the list is that little of it uniquely applies to Mozilla projects. Instead, it's written more as a general Internet manifesto. That's by design, but it does result in a document with principles so big that they seem almost vague. The Internet should enrich the lives of individual human beings? Okay.
The manifesto has been around in various versions for some time, and I ask Shaver if it had actually affected Firefox development at a practical level. He says that it has and points to principle five—individuals must have the ability to shape their own experiences on the Internet. Mozilla has received plenty of offers from around the world to provide exclusive access to a regional search engine, sell space in the default bookmark list, or include local shopping links. "One constant opportunity for anyone who has a popular browser is to sell the space in it," says Shaver. But, he adds, "our users' choice isn't for sale."
Such a statement raises the question of Mozilla's deal with Google to feature its search engine, a deal that brings in most of the group's revenue. Shaver says that Mozilla is willing to partner with companies who are going to "provide search that's consistent with what we feel search can be" but says that it's "important to us that it's not locked in." In other words, exclusive arrangements that would prohibit competitors are out, but preferential partnerships with companies like Google are in.
Shaver is also proud of the work that Mozilla has done to make its browser accessible to those with disabilities and available in many languages (a key application of the second principle in the manifesto). It's important to invest in localization and accessibility "to make sure that people can participate regardless of where they come from on the globe," he says.
Accessibility, localization, and user choice have been important to Mozilla developers for years; they aren't principles that have suddenly been imposed on the group with the creation of the manifesto. The manifesto codifies the values that Mozilla has already been operating under, and so in that sense is nothing new. But there's a benefit to writing it all down: the document contains the "official" principles that guide the organization, making it less likely that Mozilla will drift almost imperceptibly away from its moorings.
Flashing the public
In keeping with principle seven, Mozilla has also chosen not to bundle certain popular but proprietary plug-ins like Flash and Windows Media with the browser. While they work once installed, Mozilla is committed to open-source solutions. The manifesto says that FOSS "promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource." Principle six, however, suggests that interoperability drives the "public resource" aspects of the Internet—a different claim. I ask Shaver whether innovation, in his view, is driven more by open-source software or by open standards.
"I think both of those are the case," he says, before launching into a lengthy apologia for open source. Standards are great, but standards + open source = tech nirvana. "I think the ability to constantly come in and say, 'I want to write a new thing that talks to this old thing,' and being able to do that without having to license technology, you get a lot of that from having an open specification and you get even more of that from having an implementation you can play with," he says. "There's a spectrum there—and there's value all along that spectrum."
Actually, the more problematic issue with Flash has to do with the way it functions rather than with its openness (or lack thereof). "It has better penetration than any other piece of software the world right now," Shaver points out, but Flash apps are not particularly "webby." Instead, they sit on top of the web and remain difficult to edit or to disassemble or even to create without expensive tools. The tech did enable some new functionality over the web, but "the presence of Flash during the dark period of browsers took a lot of incentive off of improving the technology." At one point, things got so bad that companies were rolling out versions of their corporate sites that were nothing more than a big Flash app sitting in the middle of a window. This had obvious implications for the nature of the web: deep-linking into Flash apps was out, for instance.
Perhaps it's his curmudgeonly inner geek talking, but Shaver argues that the web will lose something important if users lack the ability to craft complex web pages in something as simple as Notepad. "Making the web such that you need tools to build it would be a big step backwards," he says, and then points out that this is another case of Mozilla putting its development resources to work in the service of its manifesto. For future versions of Firefox, Mozilla (in conjunction with the Opera developers and others) is developing a new set of tags for commonly-used multimedia functions that are now easiest to deploy in Flash. <video> will be among them, but audio tags will be present as well. Flash will always be needed for artists who want to do things like vector animation, but Shaver hopes that more basic functions can work without proprietary tools.