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Mozilla and Google's "Don't-Be-Evil" Bulldozer
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla execs John Lilly and Mitchell Baker were interviewed at the WSJ's All Things Digital conference last week. In a wide-ranging conversation, they discussed the history of Firefox, proprietary versus Open Source development and the debut of Chrome and Mozilla's changing relationship with Google. A great interview. Well worth reading. There's video as well."
The bulldozer quote comes from the interviewer, not the Mozilla guys.
Sometimes it's best to make your own news.
Furthermore, this makes the point that it is in Microsoft's interest to not make the computer too safe. If people become comfortable experimenting with their machines, they might learn they don't need Microsoft software.
I think Mozilla needs to come up with an "official" consistent unbranded name for firefox for FOSS projects or start accepting upstream patches for other operating systems so that they can be blessed with trademark use.
That reminds me of something.
Imagine the average Firefox newbie. Do they really, really care if Mozilla is v2.0.2, v2.0.12, v3.0.10 or whatever. Why not just drop the whole "v3.0.10 is now available for download!" and just say "Update available. Want to update your Firefox?". Because anyone who knows the first thing about computers can go to Help -> About and check their version if they really want. To Joe Moz in the street who wants to browse and isn't yet a disciple, all the version stuff is just numbers. It means nothing. It's making their browsing experience a bit more complicated as opposed to a bit more easy.
Hell, I've been using linux for years and I'm skittish about an update which involves the kernel. If I have a presentation later that day or the next, I'll put it off until afterward. I don't want to be googling and dmesg'ing the bug in console for upward of an hour, when I have something else to do. It has happened...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky