I think we are making the same point, neither of us are stating that mozilla shouldn’t be accepting money from commercial entities, just like auditters shouldn’t be forced to be out of pocket either.

However it doesn’t matter if it’s $10.00 or $10,000,000,000 what matters is what strings are attached to the dollar amount, and that’s where we both agree and even Mozilla’s own policies on certificate authorities has a discolure policy.

After all, one of the, if not the biggest marketing aspects apart from firefox not costing users money is the fact the software is supposed to be open source which is why linux distributions include it. So If other aspects had the same disclousre policies and people were freely able to inspect them as freely as the organisation touts the code is I’m sure this post wouldn’t even exist in the first place.

I guess Mozilla foundation/corp really will find out how much it is worth next time it goes to negoiate contracts with Google and others and demands the contracts be open. If they are worth what they think that are they won’t have to conceed on anything, if they aren’t then they will have to choose between the money and their users, and what does it mean if they choose the money over the users?

unfortunately, the goose and the gander may be closer than you think. You might recall when Frank Hecker was leading the very open Mozilla CA Policy project on the security mailing list, the prevailing mood about auditors was that if someone wasn’t a certified practitioner, then they should do it for free … to avoid conflicts.

It was me that pointed out that making it free doesn’t avoid the conflict of interest, it just buries it. Better is to state that the remuneration is public, so we the users can look for any sense conflicts and judge for ourselves. That’s what was adopted in the policy point 10: “the nature and amount of the party’s financial compensation by the CA is publicly disclosed;…”

As I am now auditing a CA (still, slowly) it’s clear that this gander cooked his own goose! I should point out that the CA has learnt from the policy as well (not through my own efforts) and it is definitely new territory, it’s very interesting to see it evolve.

If Mozilla is in such a strong position and would be able to get an equal amount of money from a competitor, why not demand all contracts and deals in future are made in an honest and open manner that would with stand community scrutiny?

If Mozilla isn’t in such a strong position then obviously you really are already bought and paid for by Google.

I am not a Buddhist so this doesn’t apply to me as a “should”, but it does apply to you since you subscribed yourself.

But there is a good reason why it is so. Suppose all your peers are crooked? Suppose all of them are compensated with 5 personal female slaves? Should you also demand the same compensation just because others get it too?

So when you think of your own compensation, you should think about what is best and what is right in the grandest sense of those words instead of what others get. Because often what others get is simply *not right* and also *not sustainable*.

By the way, I am *not* a Buddhist. I just like to borrow some ideas from Buddhism because they are useful. I am not any kind of “ist”.