So I meant this to be more timely, but whattya gonna do?
A few years ago, a few friends and I were at SIGGRAPH, and we attended the Ray Tracing Roundup (yes, yes, I know, we are tres cool - you know you wanna hang with us). This was still in the early(ish) days of 3D HW acceleration; it was around and games were doing a lot with it, but it was still new and a lot of the discussion was about software v. hardware - scanline renderers v. raytracers, etc.
The Pixar guys went into a big long diatribe about physical correctness, the importance of research and specs and physics and light - blah blah, and - in support - some guy from ART started describing how they had followed the Pixar spec, had implemented a raytracer in HW, that procedural graphics could be HW accelerated, etc - kind of a Turing complete argument for 3d.
So one of the Pixar guys - no names required - truthfully, we've all been there; stick with me - you'll see... so one of the Pixar guys then proceeds to just dismember the guy. They've learned so much over the last 10 years, graphics has come so far, the spec is stale, what were they thinking (kinda just generally missing the point - which was NOT about specs IMHO but programmability - but that's ALSO neither here nor there).
"If I understand correctly, what you're saying is that over time things change and progress - we all learn a lot and grow, but the one thing that stayed constant is that you're still right."
That's kinda what all the Firefox arguments remind me of... yes, its nice to have access to the code; yes its a nicer engine in a lot of ways, but the question is: is it really better in ways that still matter?
All that aside - I am glad it exists, and that we (royal AOL we here) helped pay for it; keeps everybody else honest.