Comments on: By the people, for the people

By: Sylvain D

Sylvain D — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:29:58 +0000

I’m not Mozilla Spokesperson (I wish :p) but the main goal is for the people by the people even if now it’s still “by developers, for the people” but they try (and it’s quite effective from my point of view) to lower the requirements. (via Jetpack for extensions and personnas for styles).
And “basic” users already work on firefox by finding bugs, translating the interface,…

Of course a non-develloper can’t work on gecko (the rendering engine) because it’s complex.

By: iang

iang — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:36:20 +0000

To me the phrase sounds American and political, and USA politics are not popular around the world (c.f., Bush / Obama). That will heal in time, and you might want to catch that wave now.

I think a major downside is that, in common with all political talk, it is deceptive or used in a political context of deception. It’s based essentially on a fantasy, that “we the people” can have a voice, and we work for our benefit.

The detailed mismatch to Mozilla would be that it isn’t that. Mozilla is “by the developer, for the people.” This is no bad thing, indeed it is a great thing because it is an alternate model to others like “by M$ for the people.” But it has to be said, the developers aren’t the people, there is a bit of a challenge in communication between the two sometimes. When there is no good feedback from the real world, people become very sure of themselves, and bad solutions persist.

Having said that, the vision may be something good because it stresses that the shortcomings are accepted as shortcomings, we aspire to meet that which is unmeetable. “For the people” would certainly would help my work, I’ve frequently found myself pointing out that the end-user of Mozilla’s products is generally the only one who is not present at the discussion.

By: Jeff Walden

Jeff Walden — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:55:11 +0000

It’s worth noting that while the primary association of the phrase may be with Lincoln now, it wasn’t his invention, and the phrase’s originator may not have been American. (Indeed, from the links below it seems there’s a somewhat common misconception that Wycliffe of Bible publishing fame first wrote it.) That said, nobody seems to have a good original citation, at least not going by these two assays upon the etymology, so it may be impossible to say:

http://volokh.com/posts/1231883593.shtml
http://volokh.com/posts/1244411084.shtml

Personally, I’d be rather more interested in hearing from commenters about the phrase’s connotations in China given what I’ve been told about their political ethos, particularly as it relates to authority (especially that of government).

By: George Fiotakis

George Fiotakis — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:20:40 +0000

I’m Greek and in my language that phrase is used widely almost by all political parties, though communists/socialists use it more often. Now, by default we don’t trust our political parties that much, while the communist party represents something less than 9% of the population, so i think it wont be a big hit .
Personally I really love it but If I had to localize the phrase, I’d prefer something like “By free people, for free people”

By: Sylvain D

Sylvain D — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:06:21 +0000

I just checked my comment and it sounds strange.

by democracies I meant democracies based withouts Kings or Queens (I don’t even know how it’s called in my native language). My mistake.