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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."
Like Microsoft never bashes anybody...
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.
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.
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.
Their freedom of expression isn't the issue. Its the sensibility of it. If Netscape pulls the financial plug then it will be a loss for the Mozilla Foundation, not a win.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Fixing the bugs within a day is not good when the bugs had already been fixed in Firefox and were known about for a while.
The responsible thing would have been to delay the release by one day. This would also have meant that they didn't force all their early adopters to update so soon.
Yes, it would have been good to see something patched that quickly if the defects had been found after the release, however when the holes are known about then it makes sense to delay the release particularly if it's only by a day.
As for the Firefox trademark issues, the reason was to stop a poor quality derivative from giving Firefox a bad name.
Very strictly speaking Firefox(TM) is not open source, everything is open source except the branding though.
See for yourself, if you check out the firefox source code from the CVS and build it you'll get an app that is firefox in every way but the branding (the icon doesn't have the fox). You can add a flag to configure to enable the official branding, but you should not call modified versions firefox. But you're free to release it under your own name
If security is such a concern, how come I keep clicking the "Check now" button for updates on my plain old 8.0 install and it hasn't informed me of an 8.0.1 update?
Conflict is *good*; it spurs change, reveals flaws, and pushes people to either put up or shut up.
Not necessarily. Not all conflicts are like that. Even for this subset, they are only good to the extent that conflicts are revolved quickly, without spilling over, creating bad blood, sapping energy from people, and causing other sorts of damage.