Recently, Mozilla upgraded their DRM system for Firefox, which made it compatible with EME (Encrypted Media Extension), an extension which will be used by the biggest streaming service in the future.
Mozilla has always been a wild card in the browser market, getting a ton of success thanks to Firefox over the years. Today, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced that the EME system will be soon integrated into the famous browser.
It was right there, on the FSF website, where they announced a partnership that nobody thought possible, between Mozilla, which is working to get free quality software on the market, and Adobe, which clearly operates in a very different way. It is for the sake of the DRM that Mozilla decided to work along with Adobe, even though the entire partnership goes against every value that Mozilla tried to spread.
Even if the FSF understand why Mozilla did that and underline the effort to put the DRM aside of the main code, they do not understand why Mozilla folded under the pressure from big society and by fear of losing users. Luckily for the users, the Firefox source code is free, and it will be possible to find a DRM-less version under a different name. Only the future will tell if Mozilla made the right choice, but we are pretty sure that the number of Firefox enthusiast would have been much bigger than the number of users leaving because there was an unavailable service, which could have been easily integrated with a third party add-on.
Source:
Free Software Foundation via
Le Comptoir du Hardware et
Framablog.