Comments on: Firefox is a Public Asset, part 2

By: Timbuk2 Tasche

Timbuk2 Tasche — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 19:37:36 +0000

Good informations. For me Firefox is not the place to test the effects of the profit motive.

By: George Rypysc

George Rypysc — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 18:12:49 +0000

I’m having trouble seeing how discussions about the Mozilla/XUL platform versus Firefox itself have anything to do with ensuring the public interest. It seems the software licensing terms themselves do that. Then it becomes a popularity contest between “open” licensing (support of open standards too) versus the “closed” competition. Since MoFo/MoCo has made great gains in this popularity contest, then it’s important to ensure its future. I think Matt sees a dose of capitalism as helping ensure survival and future progress, while the licensing does the job of ensuring “openness”.

By: Frank Hecker

Frank Hecker — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 15:50:55 +0000

Asa: First, you’re correct: “clean air” is a better example, in fact it’s one of the canonical examples of public goods.

Re education, I don’t think we need to get wrapped around the axle debating whether a particular thing, whether it be education or the Internet, is a public good in the economic sense. (And IMO we can’t just unilaterally declare “the Internet is a public good” in an economic sense.) I think the better way to approach it is to ask, “Is an open Internet in the public interest?” (not, “Is it a public good”). Clearly the answer is yes; in economic terms the Internet as it has existed has “positive externalities”, i.e., good things have happened as a result of the Internet existing, and those good things have accrued not just to the private entities who helped build the Internet and the services that run on it, but to the general public as well. Given that answer, then clearly promoting the idea of the open Internet (as in the Mozilla Manifesto) is in the public interest as well.

By: Daniel Glazman

Daniel Glazman — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:58:33 +0000

From my perspective, the problem can be summarized that way : we (the community) and you (Mozilla Corp/Foundation) have a false view of our ecosystem because we/you are taking the problem the wrong way. Instead of looking at Firefox built upon XULRunner, we should see Firefox Runtime, the core of Firefox.

By: Asa Dotzler

Asa Dotzler — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:21:33 +0000

OK. Thanks, Frank. I see where I got it wrong on food. Substituting something like “clean air” might work better.

The reason I ask, is that I want to be able to clearly articulate how these terms would apply to Mozilla’s efforts to educate the public about the importance of the Internet, the Open Web, etc.

This gets a little recursive, but couldn’t it be said that a Mozilla education program focused on raising awareness of the importance of the Internet as a public good is itself a public good/service provided by Mozilla? Could “education” be a product right alongside Firefox, provided as part of our public benefit/interest mission?

By: Frank Hecker

Frank Hecker — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:57:01 +0000

Asa: Firefox, Thunderbird, and other open source products are indeed public goods in the strict economic sense: Anyone is free to use them without restriction (they are “non-excludable”) and anyone can use them without interfering with others’ use (they are “non-rivalrous”). “Public provision” of goods in the strict sense is done by government; however one can think of the Mozilla Foundation and other nonprofit organizations as acting as agents of government, in the sense that they are granted special status in return for their engaging in activities deemed to be in the public interest (or “public benefit”, if you will).

In your example of a local government providing food, food is not a “public good” in the economic sense, but rather a “private good”: you can control access to it (excludable) and only one person can eat a given piece of food (rivalrous). Standard economic thinking is that private goods are most efficiently provided by private actors through market mechanisms, which is why (with very minor exceptions) everybody gets their food from groceries and restaurants and not from city hall.

I agree that the plethora of “public foo” terms is confusing; if I have time I’ll do a blog post to address these questions in more detail.

By: Asa Dotzler

Asa Dotzler — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 00:04:09 +0000

Mitchell, in your post on the Internet and the Public Good you partly described the distinction between three terms as they’re used by economists:

1) public “good” - which I understand to be the actual product or service utilized by the public,
2) public “interest” - which I understand to mean the benefits derived by utilizing public goods, and
3) public “provision” - which I think refers to the type of organization delivering the good. ex. a public charity rather than a private foundation.

So, an example might be: a local government (public provision) giving away food (public good) so that people can live (public benefit).

If I’ve got that much right, then the Mozilla organization is a “public provision” (MoFo+MoCo) delivering “public goods” (Firefox, Tbird, etc.) to promote a “public interest” (choice and innovation.)

Is that how these terms would apply to us?

If I’m still not way off, then what is a “public asset”? Is asset synonymous with “good”? Can those terms be interchangeably?

Also, are “public benefit” and “public interest” similar enough in meaning that we can use those interchangeably as well?

I think that being able to understand and make these distinctions will help me articulate what is Mozilla a lot better.

- A