1. What Mozilla is doing here seems antithetical to the implicit underlying precepts of the open-source movement. Implicit is the key world there, because I realize that it is never directly stated, but the idea of software freedom and being able to do things your own way, from community contributions right up to and including forking free code to go your own way if you want to, and then sharing it again with the community so others can do the same if they want to, or the original software can use that code for their own software, is something that at it's core almost implies free speech. Code itself is speech. Forking it for a purpose is also speech. Sharing it with the community is also a value or a principle- legally mandated by some of the open-source licenses, but a principle sort of hidden within the licenses themselves.
So, to me, it's kind of odd that Mozilla, which is part of the open-source movement, is trying to stifle speech on a third-party forum dedicated to software that was forked off the tree from them.
2. People are going a bit off-topic in this thread. I respect their right to say what they want to say, within the bounds the moderators set, and I am not calling for it to be censored, but I have to say I'm a little puzzled at what some poster's opposition to gay rights and social justice has to do with this. I am pro-gay rights and pro-social justice- complete with a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker on the back of my car, and I love Pale Moon.
I get that some people are upset that Mozilla fired their anti-gay rights CEO under pressure from outside groups, and some people are upset about that, but that really has nothing to do with this issue. When it gets turned into a conservative or a progressive issue, you're going to lose people who'd otherwise agree with you. No reason to polarize people who are on your side when it comes to Pale Moon, just because they have different views about other matters.
3. While I respect that MoonChild probably desires to keep this lowkey, and understandably so given that he's said that Mozilla's cooperation is important in helping to make Pale Moon as secure for the end users like us as possible, it occurs to be that if worse came to worse and relations went completely south, he could publish their letter. GHacks for one would probably write an article about it. Slashdot could get it modded up on their site. I wonder if the fellow who emailed you really speaks for the entire Mozilla corporation and foundation- and, if he does, if they would deny that he does and renounce what he said under public pressure coming from media exposure. Mozilla could potentially loose important contributors and support if they are seen as stifling criticism on third-party websites.
4. Having said all that, I think I know what post may have triggered this. Given who it came from, I have no concerns that any reasonable criticism of Mozilla when it's on-topic or in an off-topic area is going to be squashed here.
5. Mozilla is fighting a losing battle trying to squash speech they are opposed to. A better course would be to make a better browser. Who cares what some people somewhere say on a message forum? When their software was good, they could do no wrong. As their core Windows browser product gets worse and worse, they are getting criticized everywhere- the Pale Moon forum is the least of their worries in that regard. I mean, they've lost like 75% of their usershare in just 2-3 years. It wasn't all because of Pale Moon- if it were, this browser would have at least 10 times the userbase it does now.
6. Perhaps if Mozilla like to mend bridges with the Pale Moon community, they could contribute some code patches and such. It's open-source. If Mozilla wanted to contribute directly to this project, I'm sure MoonChild and others would publicize their good deeds, and it wound engender a lot of good will. Even a prominent Mozilla employee doing it on his or her free time and not being retaliated against by Mozilla would be received very positively.
Right now, I think a lot of the community is upset because they feel like Firefox promised them choice, and then just went their own way and said forget all of you. If they were to, say, help maintain a forked browser like this in a prominent way for users who like to do things the *old* Mozilla way, it'd speak well of them. I mean, I could hardly criticize them if they said "You know, we wanted to go in another direction with our main trademarked browser, but in the spirit of the open-sourced movement and user choice, and given that we are in theory a charitable foundation, we want to help out people using other browsers and prefer things go a different way than our main browser is going". In fact, that'd be a wonderful thing for them to do- above and beyond the call of duty.
I think there is cooperation between Ubuntu, which is owned by a corporation (I think. Maybe Canonical is a foundation.), and a lot of owned and unowned forks, branded and unbranded, centered upon different UIs, in the Ubuntu Linux family, as well as downstream and upstream cooperation. This isn't necessarily a zero-sum game where one browser has to win and the other has to lose. They could all support each other and collectively offer users more choices, and better supported choices. Pale Moon and Firefox could both increase their user base without necessarily cannibalizing one another- plenty of Internet Explorer, Edge, Chrome, and Safari users to lure over from the dark side.
