> Maybe "open a communication channel" is what Mozilla should have done BEFORE they turned on this thing.

This right here is the crux of the matter. But it seems to be how Mozilla operates. They frequently show a lack of awareness and consideration towards their long time supporters. I doubt this particular incident will lead to any changes, but I really wish they'd do some introspection...

This is an easy mistake in large organizations. Any project often already has so many stakeholders and politics that they are incentivized to avoid adding more stakeholders to the project if they are politically capable of doing so.

Unless there is some sort of blowback, this sort of thing is likely to happen again to someone, and I understand how some people may not want to be involved anymore, and I understand how Mozilla will keep being Mozilla (just like other organizations will continue their current behaviors until some catalyst changes that behavior).

I was in same position as Mozilla guy when I slowly crawl through Cordova Russian translation. Then suddenly MS have initiative with Cordova Tools for VS, they redesign Cordova website (which is great) but completely drop docs website, and say - hey, we can use automatic translation if you want read in your mother tongue. Ironically I speak with MS manager and he was Russian speaking as well. So even if large corps made mistakes, their mistakes can const community contributors. But they are cheap, so who cares...

> This is an easy mistake in large organizations. Any project often already has so many stakeholders and politics that they are incentivized to avoid adding more stakeholders to the project if they are politically capable of doing so.

This person is already a stakeholder, you don't have a choice to add or not add them, you have a choice to include or not include them. And it's a gamble to not include them for this exact reason.

I'm all for keeping stakeholder counts as low as possible but you can't do it by just pretending some of your stakeholders don't exist, that's no good and in my experience, usually ends exactly like this.

It's really sad when seeing this incident, and then looking at the larger picture of FOSS volunteer work and seeing that there's no one to replace the old guard once they retire out. The programmers of old never seemed to realize that volunteer work is only done when you're in a position of privrledge, and less people these days have that.

Mix that with incidents like this and you basically are seeing the real time stagnation of open source contributions. You'll only contribute if you work at a top company who chooses to have staff support it.