[drdaeman]

Not exactly correct. There was a lot of movement in Mozilla to become a services provider rather than just a software vendor. Firefox Account is the manifestation of that.

I can't tell what exactly their management is thinking, but from my sofa it looks like that just as everyone else, Mozilla wants you to be a part of their proprietary[1] ecosystem.

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[1] Proprietary as in "unique to the company, not compatible with anything else and in full control of that company", not as in "closed source" or "non-free/non-libre software".

[sfink]

I work for Mozilla. But I have absolutely no clue what you're going on about here. Our whole reason for existence is to support a standards-based web and avoid proprietary lock-in. Yes, you can use Mozilla services. But you don't have to. I imagine that if there were a privacy-preserving service that got popular, and allowed storing and syncing the sorts of profile data that FxAccounts is used for, then Mozilla might be interested in making an adapter (or defining an API layer.) But these things tend to be tightly integrated, so I'm not sure if it would be worth the trouble. (I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool to share open tabs across different browsers...)

[pault]

What about keybase?

[scriptkiddy]

First of all, that's not what proprietary means. Second of all, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Mozilla is a registered non-profit. This means they are legally required to uphold their mission statement: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ . Mozilla Corp. (the for profit arm of Mozilla) simply exists as a funnel for money into The non-profit.

It is not in Mozilla's best interest to create any sort of walled garden. In fact, Mozilla has a long history of fighting against the concept of walled gardens on every front.

It's reasonable to be worried about Mozilla turning to the dark side, but claiming that they already have is simply false. What we need to do as people concerned with the well being of the internet and the people that use it is support Mozilla financially and politically to keep them on the right path.

Just as an example, if people were more willing to donate to Mozilla, do you think it would be necessary for them to take on search partnerships?

[roca]

Mozilla put in a lot of effort to let you run your own Firefox Accounts server if you really want to. https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...

So pretty much the opposite of what you're afraid of.

[cdubzzz]

Looks like this has improved a lot since I used it a few years ago. That documentation even seems a bit outdated -- the new monorepo is here: https://github.com/mozilla/fxa.

I eventually abandoned it when I was cutting back on things I had to manage, but maybe I'll take another look soon...