On Saturday 25 June 2005 22:24, Gervase Markham wrote: > Ian Grigg wrote: > > On goals - I have never been able to identify > > the goals of the project? If you can point me > > at them I'd greatly appreciate it. > > "The mission of the Mozilla project is to preserve choice and innovation > on the Internet." > http://www.mozilla.org/about/
Hmm, ok! Minor editorial note, please feel free to pass this on to whoever does the pages: Everything on the http://www.mozilla.org/mission.html should be on other pages, perhaps history.html and function.html. And the statement above "The mission of the Mozilla project is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet" should be on the page mission.html. There should also be some description as to what you mean by those two claims ("preserve choice and innovation"). So the question then is whether Mozilla really believes that the mission is to "preserve choice and innovation on the Internet." And how that relates to current activity. > "The Mozilla Firefox project aims to build the most useful web browser > for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X." > http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/ > > In the area under discussion, I would define "most useful" as "providing > the greatest amount of security for the largest number of users". Well, I'm sure you can see that "most useful" is just a placemarker for a real mission. E.g., we can rule out "second most useful" or "moderately useful" as a goal, leaving "most useful" as a sort of statement that says nothing by definition. (I'm not saying this is a bad thing. It may just be that nobody's sat down and worked out the what and why of it all. This is quite normal, and indeed back in the 90s or so there was a big backlash against "missions" because so many companies did it because they thought is was best practices ... only to discover they didn't understand what they were doing. And then came the dotcom boom, and "belief" became the fashion....) I'd suspect the *original* mission for Firefox was to create a good workable browser. Now that mission is achieved (e.g., download stats), it might be a useful exercise to think of where to go from here. I.e., craft a mission for the future. On security in particular: Frank voiced a catchphrase as "security for the average user" a while back that speaks differently to your suggestion of "providing the greatest amount of security for the largest number of users". Others have suggested they want the most secure browser for the educated techie user. These differences matter. Like Firefox, I'd say that there might be a spot where a security mission is to be placed, but the debate on what to put in that spot hasn't been had as yet. iang -- Advances in Financial Cryptography, Issue 1: https://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000458.html Daniel Nagy, On Secure Knowledge-Based Authentication Adam Shostack, Avoiding Liability: An Alternative Route to More Secure Products Ian Grigg, Pareto-Secure _______________________________________________ Mozilla-security mailing list [email protected] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-security
