Why I won’t mourn Mozilla | Hacker News Reader

Why I won’t mourn Mozilla

esr.ibiblio.org

26 pointsdoppp16 comments

It doesn’t look good for the Mozilla Foundation – especially not with so much of their funding coming from Google which of course has its own browser to push.

I guess ESR did not get the memo that Mozilla decided to not extend the Google deal a few months ago. It shows how much ESR is out of touch with reality.

Google, Yahoo, the money spends the same. The error doesn't change the meaning one iota.

Does Yahoo make its own browser?

The author of the article doesn't seem to be judging Mozilla by the work they have done...

Also, Eich said he chose to resign because of the political pressure from the people, not pressure from Mozilla. You may believe this was a lie, but Mozilla never publicly did anything but support him as CEO.

Also, there was no large reaction against Eich's politics when he served a technical role, but when he moved into the political CEO role, people looked at his politics. You may disagree that they should be analyzed at all, but it's hard to argue that CEO of Mozilla is an apolitical position.

Yet another fine example of why ESR seriously needs to stop pretending to be the arbiter of "hacker culture" as if he speaks for all of us.

Closed the tab when I saw it was about Eich. Love him or hate him, if he's the main source of your opinion on Mozilla then you have nothing interesting to say on the subject.

Wait, this was ESR? He's quickly become the fedora to RMS' neckbeard.

Eric Raymond has a vested interest in dudes not being held accountable for their vile opinions and / or actions.

(see things like http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5001 )

I've always had my suspicions about ESR (to be clear I'm now only defending the "Preventing visceral racism" post you link), so I clicked through and... what's the problem? Sure this is a difficult subject, and therefore isn't discussed in "polite company", but that's his blog, so caveat lector. The only "vile" things described therein are ESR's semi-automatic gut reactions. Those might be valid targets for thought policing, but fortunately for society ESR went ahead and policed up himself. His "opinions and / or actions" are totally divorced from those gut reactions. If this topic may not be discussed in this fashion, then it may not be discussed, full stop.

What a ridiculous article; such specious reasoning.

The meritocracy argument is such bullshit. White, straight, privileged males love to talk about this shit so much, but then they look the other way when people are kicking out any attempt to making the playing field level for others. There is no real meritocracy when the opportunities and treatment of individuals are so unbalanced. There's just privilege.

Beyond that, he's actively rooting against the only ever successful non-profit, open-source browser vendor because they didn't live up to some silly ideological expectations perfectly. Great, Mozilla is gone. Now, the only browsers that can run under the modern web are from corporations.

Even further, such hypocrisy. Check this logic out:

-Mozilla didn't judge Eich by the quality of his work alone, but threw him out because of how he treated gay people by donating to causes that would prevent equal treatment under the law.

-I don't like Mozilla because how they treated Eich.

What a petty individual.

Mozilla's failure w.r.t. Brendan Eich started before they "failed to defend" Brendan Eich. So blaming them for such a failure is off-target.

Doing an under-resourced mobile OS that also appears to lack a workable ecosystem strategy is what could do a lot of harm to Mozilla.

I will, because I think the world needs Firefox.

But given their treatment of Eich and of user security, they deserve to end.

I'm still bitter that mozilla did not allow the mozilla suite to continue.

Instead we got the name seamonkey... which was named almost specifically to be "non politically correct", virtually guaranteeing no corporate use (you're welcome firefox team).

Mozilla with their ridiculous branding/artwork/trademark management turned me off pretty much from the beginning.

So, yeah, I use seamonkey personally, but it's practically non-existent in wider usage. If Mozilla fails, then I'm not sure with its future... which is something that I'd mourn.

Please nobody read the comments, but also please somebody explain this one to me:

"Considering that you are throwing away probably the most efficient way to keep Islamists out of participating in the design of technological infrastructure, I really hope this is worth it."

Also their constant push for JS is deplorable. I want to build stuff in languages I like, not transpile/script.

I thought Eich chosen to step down.

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