alt Hacker NewsGenerally, anything published by the guy who maintains your most-installed plugin is by definition high profile. That’s why we’re talking about this case on HN.
If Mozilla is providing tiered support by plugin rather than publisher, this latest kerfuffle is evidence that they should reconsider the approach. But if I were betting, I’d guess there’s no one at Mozilla whose job responsibilities include keeping their marquee plugin authors happy.
And, in contrast, that job (or parallel jobs for different 'online stores') definitely exist at Google and Microsoft. At Google, there's a whole army of open-secret glad-handlers for liaising between high-profile or high-relevance Cloud customers and the development teams inside Google that work on Cloud (because sometimes a customer comes up with a novel way to use the tool that exposes the cracks in the abstraction and lets the underlying implementation leak out undesirably). Customers don't get to choose to be handled that way (though they can, of course, indirectly signal it by how much money they spend); it's Google's decision to maximize company value / security.