While I had heard about the frog and the scorpion story in the past, I didn’t realise the analogy with the current CA/browser summit occurring shortly. I’ve been throwing out some mailing list posts to the mozilla groups as well as some private emails trying to gain more information about who’s going to be attending, how open and freely the information will be after the fact, so on and so forth and I’ve not been given any straight or useful answers to date.

For example I received an email from Steve @ Comodo in response to one of my questions about attendance, his reply was that he wasn’t going to tell me and that it was up to the PR department of companies involved to make this public knowledge. So far I have next to nothing to go on and I’m being told it’s a public relations issue? Either this is a PR stunt to make it look like everyone is doing something about current issues, or there is some pretty major ulterior motives being acted out upon (which leads me back to the story on the frog and the scorpion).

The frog and the scorpion are stuck on a small island in a rising flood, looking at the bank.

The scorpion says, “you know, you could swim to the other bank.” The frog says, no, I can’t see where to go when I’m swimming. So the scorpion says, “well, I’ll ride on your back and tell you where to go.”

No, you’ll sting me, says the frog. “Ah, no, I won’t sting you because it is in my interest to get to the other side. I promise you I’ll not sting you.”

Oh, ok, says the frog, so the scorpion climbs on the frog and off they go. As they are swimming
along, the frog kicking and the scorpion directing, suddenly, the frog feels a burning sensation in his side, and realises that he’s been stung.

Not understanding why the scorpion would sting him when they were only half way across, as the
paralysing freezes his body, he gasps out “Why??”

As the frog sinks under the scorpion, with confusion in his eyes, the scorpion gargles out his last words too. “It’s in my nature…”

I will mention here I don’t think “everyone” is out to get us, or that anything they can cook up will effect us, but it just flys in the face of what F/OSS and in turn what the Mozilla Group is supposed to stand for, that is open source and being able to see the code to see if there is any security issues, why aren’t their other policies on this matter so liberal? After all aren’t they supposed to be looking out for the interests of their community first, how can the community at large make any kind of informed choices/decisions if people in the Mozilla Foundation aren’t forth coming with what I’d consider fairly important information about what may effect all their users in future.