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March 14, 2007
Eich reconsidered
Eich reconsidered: I've been re-reading the Mozilla CTO's essay "The Open Web and Its Adversaries". My first reaction was "open web? closed web? deathmatch? huh?", but now I think I may have been reading it wrong. Suppose he was trying to do a "rally the troops" message to various Mozilla contributors, to push forward on new initiatives and new capabilities for the next generation of the browser? When I read it that way it makes a lot more sense to me. It was the closing section that twigged it for me (snipped into the extended entry here)... he may have been trying to encourage people who see webtech as "open vs closed" into supporting new work at Mozilla... "if we don't do it, we'll be left behind." I'm not particularly comfortable being portrayed as "the enemy", but I can see how it might be tactically useful for others. Supposition on my part, but it seems to make more sense when read from this perspective. (Interesting comments at WaSP, btw.)
Here's the penultimate paragraph of Brendan's essay, the one that particularly made me wonder whether this was an inwards-facing message:
"Anyway, I'm committed to improving the Open Web, even at the expense of Firefox market share if it comes to it (but we are still growing, and Firefox still has the second-place leverage to improve the Web quickly). If we should fail and just make a fancier browser whose nascent standards are not adopted by IE, at least we tried. The alternative is to renounce innovation and let the proprietary rich clients move the Closed Web forward. That might be convenient for some (big company) developers. It's not in the interest of the larger developer community, or of the public, in my book."
Posted by JohnDowdell at March 14, 2007 07:35 PM
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