Hats off to Mozilla

Doc Searls su Linux Journal, in un interessante articolo che ha catturato la mia attenzione:

Ten years ago, we still were in what Tantek Çelik calls “the heyday of the independent Web”. Back then, it was easy to homestead on the Net’s frontier with your own domain, site, blog, e-mail and so on. “We all assumed that it was sort of our inevitable destiny that the Web was open, the Internet was open, everyone had their own identity”, Tantek says. Now most of us live and work in feudal fiefdoms: the Kingdom of Google, the Duchy of Facebook, the Empire of Apple, the Electorate of Amazon, the Principality of Twitter. That we can travel between these castles does not diminish our dependent stature.

E ancora:

No other name-brand entity, with hundreds of millions of users already, is in a better position than Mozilla to help us fight against all this. Mozilla makes the only popular browser that is open source, uncompromised by commercial parentage and on the side of the individual. Yes, the company does get major funding from Google, but it also has an extreme need to differentiate Firefox from Chrome. Guiding that differentiation are who they work for—you and me—and with.

Giù il cappello nei confronti di Mozilla, che ancora una volta in una rete fatta di aziende, in un equilibrio fatto di economie guidate da interessi, ha inserito la sua peculiarissima realtà no-profit, che tutela come sempre prima l’utente, e poi la Fondazione stessa. Ricordandoci, in un impeto di realismo, che la nostra identità giace altrove rispetto ai millemila profili social che possediamo, altrove rispetto all’Internet dei vendor che spadroneggiano. Not in a corporate database.