Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

@eloy "Proprietary" is generally a descriptor that applies to the restrictions stated by the maintainer/owner/etc.,, so yes, it's proprietary.

Even if it may be legally defensible to derive from it, they still *claim* that it's not, and that's what makes it proprietary. And that is not just pedantry, because it also means a chilling effect on people actually doing so.

(Interoperability is just one part of an open format; the ability to take it and improve upon it is another, for example, and that is not permitted according to RAR's terms)

@popcar2 @godotengine There's a very long history of 'security' companies putting out panic pieces like this that essentially boil down to "the thing that is designed to run code, can also run malicious code if you download that" despite it not being a remotely new technique. It's a marketing tactic, trying to market themselves as "the company that found the new thing".

The only real 'insight' here is "this file type can contain executable code". Which isn't *useless* information, but also not really deserving of any more mention than a line on its Wikipedia page or, in this case, a warning on mod portals...

@kescher I really, truly hope that I am way off-base with this prediction. But I've also seen this pattern play out verbatim so many times over the years, just substitute 'blockchain' for 'AI'...

@kescher Actually, let's try to predict the sequence of events in more detail, and I'm curious how close I'll end up being:

Mozilla will do a desperate funding drive, not just asking for donations, but also internally ask around to find investors in their own network. Nobody is willing to invest enough money for activist reasons to keep it afloat. Because of the entrenched structure of the organization, they cannot make it work with smaller offers of investments.

Eventually, a 'friendly' investor shows up who just so happens to be invested in an AI company. The AI company runs a proprietary cloud service, sure, but they've been looking to do better and go against the grain of the industry, and so they wish to partner with Mozilla, on the premise that Mozilla's ethical AI efforts are a good starting point for renewing their product to go in a more ethical direction.

However, their stakeholders need to be kept happy too, so in the short term, they would like for Mozilla to expand their AI offerings with something that integrates with their proprietary, hosted offerings. It will be optional, of course, and it would have a data protection agreement, and wouldn't it be good for the users too? After all, some AI models are just Too Hard to run locally, so for the really difficult things, they could shell out to the hosted service.

And so an integration with that proprietary service appears. There may be a paid plan associated with it, maybe for the more impressive tasks. It's all optional, so you can simply choose not to use it, so it's no problem, right? And in the end, that service will become more ethical due to Mozilla's involvement!

Huh, the AI market is trending down, it seems things are not going well, and investors are getting cagey, so the renewal of their product will have to be delayed to some later, eventual point, and for now they'll have to stick with the existing closed platform. But it's only temporary, and hey, in financially hard times we all need to do our part, right?

It's now three years later. ProprietaryCorp's AI system is still integrated into Firefox, Mozilla is now dependent on their yearly funding, so they can't just remove it. They never really came through with the ethical renewal of their platform, but they're nice people to work with, and nobody wants to rock the boat. Firefox now has a long-term integration with a proprietary hosted AI service that ensures its continued use.

@kescher Unfortunately, I suspect that what will happen instead is that an AI company shows up with a bag of money and shallow promises of ethics, and Mozilla will have no choice but to 'partner' with them if it wants to continue existing.

@ytvwld That's the thing, though. One could plausibly develop a browser off donations, but I don't think one could plausibly *run Mozilla* off donations, because their entire organizational structure and expenses seem informed by them getting essentially bags of free money every year. They seem incapable of operating in the lean manner required to survive this.