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Inquirer Blasts Mozilla for Microsoft-Style Bashing
DoubleWhopper writes "An article over at The Inquirer blasts Mozilla and "lead Firefox engineer" Ben Goodger for resorting to Microsoft-style bashing of Netscape for their recent flawed release. After posting excerpts if scathing comments from readers of Goodger's own blog, the author comments, "I wonder why should companies contribute or fund the Mozilla Foundation, if any derivative work or redistribution of the Foundation's browsers they create is going to raise the FUD mocking and anger of Mozilla's 'lead engineer'". This after Christopher Aillon's (of RedHat) reaction last week."
It's not FUD when it's true.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Firefox may have a few flaws but its still better then IE which never gets fixed.
Taco?
he was reported to of said "you called me names you rotter, no fair!" and with that he picked up his ball and went home !
Storm, meet tea-cup.
The Inquirer blasts Mozilla and "lead Firefox engineer"
As if the Inquirer hasn't done any blasting themselves?
As if the Inquirier is a reputable media source. How many time have they been sued?
Like Microsoft never bashes anybody...
Pot, Kettle, Black
nxymywa
There's a pretty big difference between bashing somebody for a malicious intent, and bashing someone because they need to get bashed. From the article, it seems like AOL put out a fixed version of the browser a day after he made the comments.
Perhaps if he'd known Netscape was going to put out a new browser, he'd have refrained from making those comments. But he probably didn't. Anyway, he was still correct (by a day)
Security is more important then people's feelings.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
We've got a link to two old Slashdot stories, the Inquirer's main page, and the Inquirer article to which this article is alluding. You people need to start including the actual articles that you're talking about so I can bitch at people for not RTFA when they post comments.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
sometimes you have to seperate the art from the artist. e.e. cummings ended up saying some really nasty things, but his poetry is amazing. We should apply the same license to others we meet -- there *is* a difference between the art and the artist.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
... was hardly wrong. Here it is, verbatim from his blog:
If security is important to you, this demonstration should show that browsers that are redistributions of the official Mozilla releases are never going to give you security updates as quickly as Mozilla will itself for its supported products.
Now, if it is true that Netscape is a "redistribution" of Firefox (Netscape says it is), its only fair to comment that if FF is updated, it will be some time before Netscape is. I wouldn't call it Microsoft-style bashing.
I don't want to read
Even if you agree with the guy, Mozilla relies on donations from people and corporations to stay afloat. Most of that, I'm willing to bet, comes from corporations. If you disagree with the way a release is going you have a right to say something, but make it private instead of scathingly public, especially if it's against the person that pays your bills.
Isn't a "news" source supposed to do the bashing? That's kind of their job. But it IS bad form for a company to rip on their competitors. It gets really old, trite, and pathetic, really fast. If you can't let YOUR product do the speaking for you, then maybe you should shut your mouth and get to work on making it better. And if it is better, then you, as a developer, don't need to say a word. Your actions have spoken much louder than your pie hole ever could.
The Inquirer? The same Inquirer that blasts Brittany when she's caught not wearing make-up is complaining about Mozilla's bashing?
Oh, wait, wrong tabloid...
Developers: We can use your help.
hey is this a deliberate parody of the troll?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Hmm, I have no problems with pop-ups and other crap using Lynx.... What ever happened to Gopher, that was a sweet text based internet.
"Mozilla Foundation to ban Firefox derivative browsers?" is the headline for the second article. First of all, Mozilla Foundation can't, because of the license of their code (and if they were to relicense it, they likely would face an XFree86-like split). Secondly, they're not: this is just one developer (albeit a prominent one) making a comment on his blog about the security of Netscape's. I fail to see the big deal here.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
Isn't everyone using internet explorer these days?
Can't beat the proprietary!
He was totally justified with what he said. Netscape released their version based on a release of Firefox with security holes when a patched version of Firefox already existed.
;)
It can create a bad impression on Mozilla applications if other apps that proudly boast that they're based on such apps don't release updates in a timely manner.
On another note, it's quite possible that Netscape are breaking the Mozilla trademark guidelines. The application should have said something like based on Gecko rather than based on Firefox because after all the Netscape bloat adding it looks nothing like Firefox.
Still nothing is as innovative as IE
Why does "bashing" get such a bad rap these days? Is it because small groups pumping worthless products monopolize both their industries and access to the media? So powerful attacks - especially the most powerful, simple truth - are merely branded "bashing", and dismissed precisely for their power and accuracy. Competition is a bashing affair. We don't want competitors backing each other up, ignoring one another's shortcomings. That's known as a "cartel". Bash on, for the greater good!
--
make install -not war
Calling a spade a spade isn't necessarily a bad thing. Especially when you're right.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
He said something impolitic, or maybe unwise. Possibly even wrong. So what? Engineers have been known to do that occasionally. (Theo de Raadt says impolitic things fairly often, yet OpenBSD is still a great product.)
This is a tempest in a teapot. Nothing to see here.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Why can't we all just get along!?!?!?!?!
Evolution or ID?
I disagree. And this is why people are fleeing traditional news outlets. Where was a time when, when you asked people why they wanted to be journalists, they would recite a line about being interested in the truth. This isn't the case any more. Now they want to change the world and make a difference.
Investigative journalism used to be about fact-finding and ferreting out the truth from a web lies woven by powerful people. Now it's about furthering an agenda (both the Left and Right are guilty of this, so don't think I'm attacking you and your political offiliation).
The fact that you say here that it's the "job" of the news to bash stuff affirms this in my mind. I don't think the news is about criticism, it's about finding truth (yeah, we can wax philosophical here about the nature and unattainability of truth, just play along) and reporting it. Bias is inevitable, but recently our various media outlets have been found to be deliberately reporting lies or omiting specific truths to further an agenda. You've got the White House hiring reporters to write stories as though they were done by independent journalists. You've got the Department of Defense issuing carbon-copy letters for soldiers to "send home" to their newspapers praising the good work of Iraq. You've got NBC blowing up trucks, CBS issuing reports based on false documents, and dozens of reporters around the country being fired for just flat out manufacturing stories, quotes, and events.
These crimes of journalism are committed by people who want to change the world, not discover and report truth. Whenever somebody says they want to "change the world" or "improve the human condition", you can bet that it's codespeak for "recreate society based on my idea of what a sociey should be." And we have a word for such authoritarian views of what people should want and be: fascism.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
The FA is basically a flame on Ben Goodger's comments. It's much akin to a puerile 16 year old making comments to piss everyone off (oh shit - I must have just insulted a large demographic of OSDN!)
The article goes on to basically "right" Ben's "wrongs" and eventually concludes with an update taht Mozilla Foundation contacted The Inquirer to inform them that Ben Gooder is not a MoFo employee.
And to think, I will never get the time added back on to my life for wasting time reading that article.
Always!
- Sh!t
At the same time the article is itself a FUD and sort of repulsive for the same reasons of the first, only more so because Goodger can at least make a claim to having the users best interests at heart while the Inquirer would pour gasoline on a blazing inferno if it'd sell, in this case taking it to almost epically stupid proportions:
You dumbass. You just quoted all of the people in his freaking blog that thought Goodger's post was crap. Read your own stupid story.
A new usage of the word "with":
"remember I got Netscape 8.01 with is based on the latest Firefox 1.04"
Come on. Is MoFo the best abbreviation for firefox? What about FF? I got to the summary line, something like MoFo Ben blah blah and stopped. Obviously whoever wrote this was not in a clear state of mind. At the least, it's flamebait. At the most, it's troll.
/. I think it's something that does need to be discussed, but not in that manner.
Sadly enough, from the summary on
This was taken out of context.
8 .html
Ben was likely annoyed about Netscape.com's alert about Firefox 1.0.4 being out of date. The alert told users to install 8.0 which was based on Firefox 1.0.3 which had securtiy issues.
Netcape.com has resolved the issue of telling Firefox users to update their browser.
Asa's post about the alert with screen shot.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/00817
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
From TFA:
The Mozilla Foundation got in touch with me to let me know that Ben Goodger currently is not an employee of this organization, something I've heard before. [...] It shouldnt be surprising then that due to Goodgers past at the Foundation and his involvement in leading the Firefox browser development, his words are often misinterpreted as representing the project.
When an open-source project grows popular (and therefore its community gains some power) the press will begin to pay some attention and publicizing quotes and statements. Unfortunately, the press usually represents any community as monolithic entity. Often, it's not such a big problem, but here Mozilla is competing with giant corporations and so the press tends to equate the mozilla community with a corporation.
Goodger make a perfectly valid statement which reflects his viewpoint of the Mozilla project. However, Goodger isn't a paid employee of the Mozilla Foundation. He is basically a highly involved community member. If the Register wants to report on his opinions, that's fine, but please don't presume that he is speaking for the community or the Mozilla Foundation.
Well, he spoke the truth. If you want to be the most safe and secure, use Firefox and upgrade when security fixes are released. Netscape will always being running behind.
Now, if I could only I could convince our IT managers that Netscape is a redistribution of Firefox, I'd be set. Getting yelled at for using Firefox and being told to use Netscape instead makes my head hurt.
Yay for cut/paste trolls.
Now if only we could cut/paste this guy's genitals to his forehead.
Nice little embarrassed damnce the original TFAuthor does in his update. I guess he took Journalism from Dan Rather University.
I don't necessarily see why bashing someone is against the truth. To me (and I realize this isn't realistic), if you have nothing truthful to say, you shouldn't open your mouth. The fact that people are so intent on putting "spin" on facts sends me into a rage. In my mind, and in my life, I'm not going to open my mouth against someone unless I have something factual to say (with some semblance of proof). But when I do, I will "bash". That doesn't mean I'm going to bash according to "agenda", either. I fucking hate religious conservatives in power (at least, if they're using their religion to try to make laws that determine moral right and wrong for me). We seem to have a lot of those nowadays, so I tend to bitch, and bash, a lot. I think, having stated that I dislike religious conservatives telling me what to do, it's pretty plain I'm against Republicans and for Democrats. With that said, however, when Republicans do something right, that is logically sound, I'm not going to bash them. I'm not going to fabricate some lie just to knock them down, just because they're Republicans. Also, when Democrats do something fucking stupid, I'm not going to give them a free pass on everything. They can be a bunch of cockbiting fucktards, too, and I won't hestitate in the slightest to call them on it (not that they even hear me, but that's not the point).
The point is: bashing is not necessarily bad, if, by bashing, we mean "intense, negative criticism". It's a tool. Misuse of that tool, however - THAT is what's bad.
I've wondered about that myself. How often is the branch going to be out of date? Applies to more than just NS vs FF. There's only 3 scenarios. Branch updates before trunk. Branch and trunk update simultaneously Branch updates after trunk. The first two happen from time to time, but the 3rd is the norm. The good news is that security updates discourage forking since the 1st and 3rd encourage whoever is lagging to keep up or fold. Me, I'm sticking with FF over NS for just these sorts of update troubles.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
A skript kiddie suggested to me that we troll slashdot on a few machines here as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of trolling it for our employee's day-to-day amusement. So I decided to let him install the script onto 5 machines to see how the slashdotters got on. Besides, our "Open Proxy, Ban Me" script had been running fine up till now, why not try it on a few more threads? Once he'd got the machines up and running with the script we let the slashdotters mod it down. It all seemed fine to start with: Our trolling scripts was a pretty good replacement for the "Open Proxy, Ban Me" script and the slashdotters could still flame each other as normal. Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints seen from slashdotters who could not complain about things they were used to (Microsoft even!??) or tasks they could not perform that they previously couuld on slashdot. The final straw came when one moderator lost several hours work when the slashcode suddenly had an error reading from our trolling script and modded an entire article off-topic. I made the script kiddie uninstall the trolling script from the machines and lets just say he's not with us anymore.
Well, as a writer for the Inq, I can say that as far as I have seen, the answer is zero. We get nasty letters all the time, but nothing ever went to court, at least that I can recall.
Then again, what does suits have to do with anything? Does getting sued make a company bad? That would mean car companies must be evil because they get sued all the time, same with IBM. Now, the flip side of that arguement is that people suing must be right and viruous, so that would make SCO a champion of the truth, eh?
-Charlie
Criticism is not, by nature, mutually exclusive with truth. Nor is journalism mutually exclusive with providing criticism.
However, in the modern American media, deliberate obfuscation and masking of truth is being done to support the criticism that wouldn't stand on its own if people knew the truth.
It's not necessary that criticism eschew fact, it's just happening now because journalists no longer want to pursue truth (perhaps in the interest of proving their agenda), they want to push an agenda by manipulating or manufacturing truth.
We seem to have a lot of those nowadays, so I tend to bitch, and bash, a lot.
But are you making shit up about them to further your argument? Or blindly accepting things people say about them because it's convenient to believe that? If you're an intellectual critic, you're not doing that. There's a vacuum of intellectualism in American journalism today.
I think, having stated that I dislike religious conservatives telling me what to do, it's pretty plain I'm against Republicans and for Democrats.
I wouldn't even derive that much. I'd derive that you most likely oppose the religious right. I'm a conservative and I can't stand the Republicans any more. I've completely abandoned the party, it's being taken over by people who can't see the difference between, "This is right for me" and "This is right for everybody." It used to be the Democrats who did that (and a number of them still do), but the Republicans have become an insufferable lot of big-government, big-spending mouthpieces for religious conservatism. And I can't abide it. I see true conservatives abandoning the Republicans in droves. And I see true liberals abandoning the Democrats as well.
With that said, however, when Republicans do something right, that is logically sound, I'm not going to bash them. I'm not going to fabricate some lie just to knock them down, just because they're Republicans.
And that makes you politically honest. The media has no such integrity anymore. On either side.
The point is: bashing is not necessarily bad, if, by bashing, we mean "intense, negative criticism". It's a tool. Misuse of that tool, however - THAT is what's bad.
Again, I don't think criticism is bad or the media shouldn't do it. It's that their motivations for it are based on pushing an agenda and cherry-picking facts (or making them up) to support that agenda. The crime here is that this is then represented to people as objective truth. At least we know what platform Rush Limbaugh is preaching from. At least we know where John Stewart's political idealogy is. And we can digest and think about what they say knowing that their opinions are colored by their political beliefs.
But the media wants us to think that they are objective people reporting truth. They're not, and that's what's dangerous to a free and informed society. We allow all people to vote regardless of their qualifications to make an informed decision. The media is the only private industry whose role in the governance of a free society is specifically laid out in the constitution, and the media is not honoring their responsibility for a fairly informed populace (and neither, frankly, is the White House, Senate, or Congress, but that's not exactly a recent trend).
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Why did AOL release a browser, based on a version of firefox that had security vulnerabilities, while a fixed version was available? Don't tell me it was because they developed especifically against 1.03, because they released a patch the next day.
Why couldn't they simply wait a day? Instead of commenting back and forth about what the developer said, everyone should have asked that question.
Basically, AOL did something stupid, a developer responded to it, and now this gets taken out of context.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
If they had waited a day to release 8.0, the 1 day patch to 8.01 would have been unnecessary.
Aren't you confusing the one with the supermarket tabloid? Or, did I miss you attempt at humor?
MoFo is obviously has a established meaning for mother f!!cker, as is, "that guy is a f'ing mofo".
I would never get tired of saying in a meeting "we need to get that mofo distro out!"
I shall spend a good portion of the day coming up with clever ways to say mofo so that there is a double meaning attached. The louder, the better.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
They disabled search prefixes / quick searches. In firefox, you can put prefixes in your bookmarks so typing "g monkeys" will do a google search for monkeys, or typing "sd m$" will do a search on slashdot for the string "m$" and make their poor indexing server do a shit-ton of work. Netscape 8 has those disabled, and anything typed into the URL bar is treated as a search on Netscape.com. I reported this as a bug when it was in Beta and they never did anything with it. I rely on search prefixes way too much to give them up, so I'm sticking with Firefox.
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Something can be legal and moral and STUPID. Stating a truth isn't always smart or even necessary. For example, I don't go up to handicapped people and say "Pardon me, but you have no legs." Mainly because it accomplishes nothing.
When one feels compelled to make criticisms about something, one might question what the motivation is. Self-aggrandizement generally isn't be best one. In this case, no one using Firefox or Mozilla did so after seriously questioning Netscape. Netscape mainly sucks. Anyone reading his article would almost certainly 1) know this, and 2) agree. So what did he accomplish? No one was educated. No one was swayed. Not only that, his comments have been revealed as rather disingenious, being that the bugs are Firefox/Mozilla's to begin with.
Bottom line, he made himself look like a complete ass without accomplishing anything. Yes, as we all know and you really don't need to remind us, the 1st amendment protects his rights, but doesn't protect him from being an ass.
From his blog:
/. For example, let me ask you this: Are global warming activists spreading FUD? The history of some would seem to indicate so. Does it make it any less of an argument for them to make it?
If security is important to you, this demonstration should show that browsers that are redistributions of the official Mozilla releases are never going to give you security updates as quickly as Mozilla will itself for its supported products.
The above statement is: True.
From the 10 immutable laws of security:
Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
The above statement is: True.
Either of these could be viewed as FUD, because it requires the reader have a level of paranoia or fear. It is whether or not someone chooses to believe them that makes the FUD different.
IMHO, this shouldn't even be newsworthy enough for Slashdot to cover. As stated by others, this guy isn't even part of the Mozilla Foundation and this is more an attack on one person's comments than the foundation as a whole.
They make a very good point, Firefox contains the latest code and the latest security updates. AOL and Netscape can use their code, but ultimately, if a user's top priority is security, they should probably be using the browser first to be updated.
The only reason why someone should use Netscape or the AOL browser is if they *have* to, or if those browsers offer some feature that Firefox doesn't currently have.
There's a lot of FUD slung from both commercial and open source developers, I don't see why this term has become *the* definition of "evil" on
After all, so long as the open source code is released back to the community, it's not like they're criticizing without people being able to change the code or at least inspect it to decide for themselves, is it?
There Is No Leader. Take The Red Hat Pill.
.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You mean he funded an "independent" study that just happened to find that Mozilla has a lower TCO?
I say trolls these day are too lazy, and their quality has really gone downhill.
One took the "music store owner" rant, just replaced CD with DVD, and made a few other changes. The output still read like the person was just a music store owner, not DVD store owner.
If you are going to do a cut/copy/re-place troll, at least read through it. Plus try adding some new content and put some effort in it, these C&P trolls get really boring for us if all you do is replace the word "X" with Linux/OSX/Open Source/FireFox/etc or never update your complaint lists issues.
I'm intrigued by your ideas. When can I subscribe to your newsletter? Seriously. You're the first person I've seen in 10 years mention the "truth" vs. "change the world" aspect of journalism in any discussion of the media
Unless, of course, the team developing the derivative find the security flaw (or get the notification from someone who did) first, and can fix it locally faster than the patching process can get it into a new official Moz/FF release.
This could cut both ways, and in any case coming across as arrogant and/or egotistical isn't exactly a good way to promote co-operation between sides that should be able to provide mutual benefits.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
sit down and shut the fuck up. next time you utter some idiotic acryonym, you get 6 bananas up your ass
It's no longer enough to refer to it as simple criticism. Now whenever someone complains about someone else, it spreads to all the major news sites under the title "x blasts y".
..so far is that it goes to the top of a page when you hit Back. Ugh. They must have an anti-Slashdot-comments bias. ;)
SYS 64738
Does anyone still use Nut^H^Hetscape?
No matter where you go... there you are.
the title of the blog entry is "Netscape 8 Is Unsafe". Sounds pretty FUDish to me.
However, one must remember that those who are indecisive and are arguing internally are often defeated by groups who put aside their differences to kill a common enemy.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
What happens then when you misspell "acronym"? 7 bananas?
We apologize. Those that have been in charge of the blasting the blasted have been blasted.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
isn't it a little more serious that 1.0.3 had the flaw in the first place? who's fault is that? it seems a lot more reasonable that we should be reading how netscape / aol bashed mozilla for crappy coding.
The press lately has been picking up and running with any disharmony it can find in any open source project as proof of how "unprofessional" open source software is. Normally when so many people all suddenly start behaving the same way there is a common group behind it all.
I see this as yet another FUD campaign by MS and Sun.
You have more mainstream articles pointing out how unprofessionaly the open source squabbles are... even though there as many squabbles in closed source development. It's just that in closed source they don't publish everything the organization is doing onto 1000 websites and mailing lists.
...but no-one will give me a straight answer why I cannot get a patent on 1's and 0's!
because he works for Microsoft!
I don't know whether to watch "Days of our Lives", study "Weekly World News", or read "Slashdot first.
That article is blatantly a troll.