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> Calling "NaCL" an "open technology" is about on par with calling Silverlight an "open technology", for what it's worth. Silverlight is closed-source, patent-encumbered, and released by a company with a history of "embrace, extend, extinguish." That someone who appears to be speaking for Mozilla would draw this comparison is, again, disappointing. > If PNaCl ever happens and is not directly tied to Chrome's internals (which it is at the moment), the discussion can be revisited. This claim is directly at odds with the public statements of Mozilla's Chris Blizzard, who argues against the very idea of native code delivery to browsers. His arguments aren't against the NaCl implementation, process, etc, they are fundamental arguments against native code in general: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/12/google_native_client... > Basically, as far as I can tell your argument comes down to saying that Mozilla should be open to implement PNaCl (not NaCl) I'm not even hoping for that at the moment, at this stage I'm only hoping for them to stop maligning it publicly, like Chris Blizzard saying it will lead to DLL hell, or like with Brendan's slide that desaturates a picture of salt as if (P)NaCl is going to come for your children in the night. |
It's worth considering technology on its merits, not just based on past behavior of companies. In recent years, Microsoft has been much more of a team player in the web space than Google has, for what it's worth.
That said, I didn't claim NaCL was in all respects identical to Silverlight. I said it was comparable. It's more open in some ways (open source), less in others (e.g. no independent reimplementations, and precious little chance of any as things stand). The provenance is equally unpalatable, from my point of view; Google may not be aiming for "extinguish", not least because that's not very likely with the web at this point, but it's certainly aiming for "embrace, extend, coopt", which is not much better.
> That someone who appears to be speaking for Mozilla
In general, people who work on Mozilla speak for themselves. The cases when they're speaking for "Mozilla" are very rare and always marked as such. In this instance, I'm speaking for myself.
> This claim is directly at odds with the public statements > of Mozilla's Chris Blizzard
Chris and I don't always agree on everything. But some of his arguments are certainly valid. I didn't say I'd adopt PNaCl with open arms; just that the discussion should be revisited. As long as we're talking about things that are hardware-dependent, there's just no point having the discussion at all.
> at this stage I'm only hoping for them to stop maligning > it publicly
What you view as "maligning" someone else may view as an attempt to keep Google from pushing hardware-dependent code as part of the web platform, which is what they're trying to do. All a matter of perspective, I suppose.