Re: Removing Firefox Version Number

Deepak Vaid wrote:
> I think it will the spectacular self-induced implosion of one of the
> web's premier organizations that will finally wake people up to the
> fact that democracy and accountability in decision-making at open-
> source entities cannot just be a cliche.

 From Mozilla's *Governance* page:

"Mozilla is an open source[1] project governed as a meritocracy[2]. Our 
community is structured as a virtual organization where authority is 
distributed to both volunteer and employed community members as they 
show their abilities through contributions to the project."

[1] http://www.opensource.org/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy

Mozilla is not a democracy and it never has been. Mozilla has a 
structure that is based on accountability in decision making, but that 
structure is not a democracy. It is a meritocratic hierarchy. You can 
read more about this structure at the Mozilla *Roles and Leadership*[3] 
page and the *Mozilla Modules and Module Ownership*[4] page. Here's an 
excerpt from that page:

"Module Owners are chartered to make decisions with input from the 
community and in the best interests of the community. Module owners are 
not required to make code changes or additions solely because the 
community wants them to do so."

[3] http://www.mozilla.org/about/roles.html
[4] http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/module-ownership.html

I appreciate that you want to see accountability in decision making at 
Mozilla. I agree with you on that. So do all of the Mozilla 
contributors. But Mozilla has never been and will probably never be a 
democracy. I encourage you to read some of pages linked above to develop 
a better understanding of how Mozilla operates. If you have concerns 
about those specifics, you should certainly bring them up. But calling 
for a wholesale re-design of how this project has operated for 13 years 
without understanding how it is that Mozilla operates probably will not 
work.

- A