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The Economist on Mitchell Baker
Sara Chan writes "The Economist has a
story about a trapeze artist who, in her spare time, is the Chief Lizard Wrangler at a non-profit. You perhaps know her as
Mitchell Baker, leader of Firefox." From the article: "Ms Baker gradually found herself the leader of this project. Perhaps this is because she is a somewhat unusual member of the Netscape diaspora. For a start, she is a woman in a community populated, as one (male) colleague puts it, by geeky males with 'spare time and no social life'. Ms Baker herself has never even written code. She studied Chinese at Berkeley, and then became a lawyer--her role at the old Netscape was in software licensing. On all technical matters, she defers to Brendan Eich, her chief geek."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker
This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.
This is not a troll. And, I agree it is unfortunate. However, I saw Mitchell Baker being interviewed by Charlie Rose. She was amazingly socially unsophisticated. She said she had no technical knowledge, but is a lawyer. She gave the impression that she needs to be replaced by someone more capable.
She gave such a poor account of herself that Charlie Rose was visibly embarrassed. That's the only time I've seen Charlie Rose embarrassed in the many years I've watched his interviews.
Don't think you are being loyal to Mozilla by supporting someone who is so obviously not suited to be a leader.
even though she doesn't write any code, they figured having a woman telling the developers what to do would be the best way to get them to obey as they were used to taking orders off their mothers/wives
i kid, i kid, posting this from firefox, keep up the good work guys
@ AC and Erebus: please post pictures of your handsome selves for comparison.
I'm not sure which is sadder: the troll saying that she's ugly, or the rebuke of the troll in which the word "feminazi" is used unironically.
Other main fact is that I have not had one browser based attack succeed on my main computers (work or home), compared to the M$ fiascos that cause a significant amount of our company's IT budget to be consumed in "silly patchwork" fixes, and it doesn't matter to me what Ms. Baker looks like or how much code she has/hasn't written.
What matters is that Firefox and Thunderbird have been well guided, to the extent that there needs to be enough profitibility in a related enterprise to defend both against corporate, copycat, or cracker type attacks.
Sure, Mozilla is our pet lizard, but wouldn't you rather have a good chief lizard wrangler than nobody?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
David Baron is, in fact, writing enormous amounts of code. He is close to being finished with rewriting the entire reflow system of Gecko (= progressive page loading).
Mozilla Foundation is no longer developing future versions of the (1.7) suite. A different team of developers has taken it over, and renamed it SeaMonkey. So complaining about their inability to fix a Suite-only problem is fairly pointless. If it's a problem with the Core (shared between Firefox and Suite) then reproduce it in firefox and let Mozilla know. Otherwise, get in touch with the Seamonkey developers by email or IRC or whatever, it's not hard.
And if you have a problem with your bug being auto-resolved, just go ahead and reopen it again. The auto-resolver was supposed to clear up rotten bugs that weren't real or were fixed by other code changes, not actual replicable bugs.
So far we have...
- she's ugly
- she's socially inept
- she's a lawyer
- she has a bad hair cut
- she's obviously "not a leader"
- she's not a geek (this was posted as a bad thing)
- she doesn't care about the code
- she only cares about marketing
- Mozilla never fixed my pet bug (several times).
- the software crashes on me every day
Back to your basements, little boys, or your mother will spank you.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?