Re: Agenda for January 15

On Jan 16, 2014, at 16:44 , Sid Stamm <sid@mozilla.com> wrote:

> Hi David,
> 
> I'm trying to think this through from a technical perspective, not a
> legal- or license-oriented perspective.
> 
> On 01/15/2014 09:44 AM, David Singer wrote:
>> I am saying, if you write a browser or other UA, that accepts plugins
>> or other add-ons, whose DNT header can be affected by those plug-ins
>> or add-ons, you need to engineer the way that they work so that the
>> rules are followed.  There are many ways to do this.
>> 
>> We are entirely within the end-system ‘house’ here;  we have not
>> stepped into a garden, walled or not.
> 
> Our add-ons can rewrite Firefox however they like.  We can do what we
> want to make it hard, but the architecture of Firefox intentionally
> makes it so an add-on can override pretty much any building block in the
> browser.  Reasons aside, this means an add-on can change how DNT works
> in Firefox regardless of UI.
> 
> We absolutely have many tools to reduce the chance addons will upset
> users--from our vetting process to be listed on addons.mozilla.org to a
> blocklist we can use for malicious addons--but these are both imperfect
> and one can still write an addon that fundamentally changes Firefox
> without Mozilla's endorsement.
> 
> Is that sufficiently addressing the concern for which we want to find
> some text?  Mozilla looks for egregious violators of the spec and work
> with them to correct it (or make it hard for them to get their software
> plugged into Firefox).  It's still technically possible for violating
> addons to exist -- we just attempt to correct them?

My personal feeling is that you have clearly taken joint responsibility here.  If someone tells you “plug-in X is violating the spec” and you agree, you will work to correct the situation by contacting the developer, and if they fail to correct, making it hard for them to get plugged in, i.e. you are exhibiting responsibility.

IANAL!


> 
> -Sid

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Friday, 17 January 2014 00:59:32 UTC