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[theweaselking]

Mozilla appoints CEO with history of material support for homophobic causes; Mozilla employee whose rights he denies has a comment.

(Linked in her post is said newly-minted CEO's defense of his homophobia. tl;dr: he claims he's not homophobic or bigoted but won't discuss why he supports homophobic causes because you're just too mean and also because he can't think of a defense. But he's too cowardly to just own it and say "hell yes I gave money to a cause devoted to removing rights from gay people, because I don't think gay people deserve rights".)

(Other Mozilla people: Not as sanguine as the first link.)

Comments

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

Well, that's another company to avoid like the plaguey lovechild of leprosy and ebola

[quillismightier.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I wish there was a reliable, free or opensource alternative to Thunderbird, though. I'm not buying Outlook and I need something to easily manage multiple accounts via IMAP. I need it to be a stand-alone program, though. Because non-IE browsers have a terrible habit of eating up RAM when open for too long, even when working offline.

So... in other words... dammit.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Mozilla no longer develops Thunderbird - security patches in response to discovered vulnerabilities only. Maybe that's enough for your conscience?

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

I feel as though you'd be living in a shack in the woods if you boycott all companies who have a single executive who holds a distasteful belief.

[quillismightier.livejournal.com]

Yes and no. If you still go on their main site, that is where you find it for download and add-ons. And it still has the name "Mozilla Thunderbird." I'd rather get away completely if I can. It's buggy enough as it is and there isn't really a non-MS based option.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

YOU STAY OUT OF MY WOODS PALLY

[thornae.livejournal.com]

... and this is the point in the conversation on many forums where some supercilious twit pops up to tell you to set up your own MTA and learn to use mutt or something equally dreadful.

No. I spent five years hand tuning my procmail rules, some way back. I stopped doing that because I have better things to do with my time. This whole "if you don't like it, build it yourself" attitude is good for people who have the time and skillset to do that, but some of us are building other things, and just want some working software.

... ahem. Sorry, got a tad distracted there.
Anyway, there's some people who claim that Evolution is a reasonable replacement for Outlook, but that only works if you're on Linux/BSD. Otherwise, yeah, there's not really a lot of choice. Personally, I just shove everything through gmail - and that, of course, has problems of its own.

[quillismightier.livejournal.com]

That's usually the point where I tell the supercilious twit that if they have that kind of time with no commitments and would like to donate their services free of charge, to have at it.

Yeah, I know how, that's not the issue. I can do quite a bit of raw coding and such if I want, but the issue for me is time. Those people in the forums seem to forget that some of us are married, like to spend time with our spouses that do not involve IMing each other from across the house, have full time jobs that don't involve loads of idle time to putz on the computer, among other things. But, I digress. :P

Yeah, I'm running Win7 on my laptop right now, my primary computer, because for the same reason I don't code anything outside of basic web design myself anymore, I just don't have the kind of time Linux requires to make everything work on it the way I need it to. Granted, last time I actively used it was in Red Hat early days, so, dunno. I just know that a lot of the hardware that gets put in the Win 7 and later machines is pretty Windows driver specific and getting Linux to run effectively and stably... I just don't have that kind of time.

I have gmail, I run multiple gmail accounts, which is why Thunderbird as amazing for that, actually. I could monitor all the accounts, plus some non-gmail accounts, in one non-browser program, while I worked. Gmail works best in Chrome. Chrome has this issue about when you leave it open for too long, it doesn't quite know what to do with itself and starts eating memory like Cookie Monster in an Oreo factory. The only way to avoid using IE, is to just close Chrome when I don't absolutely need to have it open. There was a hack to add a 'memory dump' button... but recent versions have apparently disabled that option. Ugh. Thanks, Google.

Thunderbird is like the Walmart of my internet use. It isn't perfect, I kind of hate the company's policies (or the asshat CEO's), finding something else to given me something I need at low cost that work similar to high-cost stuff, it almost impossible.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It's still a Mozilla product. They're just not working on it.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Thunderbird is like the Walmart of my internet use. It isn't perfect, I kind of hate the company's policies (or the asshat CEO's), finding something else to given me something I need at low cost that work similar to high-cost stuff, it almost impossible.

I don't like that analogy because what Wal-Mart sells is shoddy and crappy, and the Wal-Mart shopping experience is soulcrushingly desperately horrible, and Wal-Mart is as a corporation devoted to destroying its customers, suppliers, AND employees to enrich a couple of people.

Mozilla hiring a homophobic CEO is the box-store equivalent of Costco hiring Pat Robertson or Bryan Fischer to do the job: reasonably good company providing reasonably good product in reasonably ethical way, promotes bigoted moron and experiences PR failure because their target audience are mostly people who don't like bigoted morons.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Oh and:
That's usually the point where I tell the supercilious twit that if they have that kind of time with no commitments and would like to donate their services free of charge, to have at it.

Not me. That leaves me relying on that kind of supercilious twit to set it up properly in the first place, and maintain it correctly, in perpetuity.

I mean, I don't trust That Guy to do it right the first time. Why would I trust him to do it right, keep doing it right, and make sure that it works at least as well for at least as much uptime as a professionally maintained server with paid minders in a cluster whose hardware I'm not responsible for?

[quillismightier.livejournal.com]

Most of the vitriol toward Walmart, however, is from people that are looking at things on paper and not talking to people who are general workforce. The entire Walmart corp is not terrible. Their Sams Club brand actually treated their employees and suppliers quite well -I've had numerous friends work for the Walton corp either at Sams or Walmart proper. Most markets do pay their employees decent wages if the employees are willing to actually work. Starting wage here (Wisconsin, northeastern area) is around $10/hr for a cashier. Getting anything other than part time hours is a bigger issue, but that's anywhere right now, honestly.

Walmart provided cheaper product because they are actually not getting the same product to put on sale as other stores are. So... in terms of what I'm using here, company politics aside... lets take... a Sony Viao laptop...

Best Buy has a list price of that laptop for (random number, I'm not looking anything up) of about $800.

Now, Walmart has one of "the same specifications" for $599.

Yes, they are both Sony Viao laptops. However, if you actually look at the serial number information, you'll see that even though the model number looks the same... it isn't. Sony produces a lower quality product for Walmart.

So... in terms of software... Thunderbird works very much like Outlook Express did a few versions ago. So, it's a cheaper, knock-off version of a Microsoft product IMO... and while it isn't MS hosing me into thinking it's the same darn thing, they are two similar products for vastly different prices, from different "companies" ... the cheaper one who didn't think through the PR nightmare promoting this new CEO would bring.

To me, this makes perfect sense. The problem with all analogies, though, is that they are not perfect as everyone sees different parts of the world in different ways.

[quillismightier.livejournal.com]

No, that's usually just meant to tell them to take their opinion and shove it, honestly. I don't actually expect them to follow through. The "well, built it yourself" crowd --regardless of the medium, are great at preaching things but won't help out or see that it doesn't work for everyone.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Except we're not talking about "holds a distateful belief" we're talking about "actively performs hateful actions".

Dude didn't just say he objects to gay people existing and thinks they shouldn't have rights, he crossed over into devoting his time and money to making sure of it. Had his action been illegal, it would have fit the classic definition of a hate crime. Since it was legal, it's just a hateful ACTION.

Not belief, not opinion, ACTION.

And he stuck Mozilla's name on it, which just shows poor judgement.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Do they still develop Eudora?

[wyatt1048.livejournal.com]

Well, damn. What's your opinion on the best alternative to Firefox? For some reason, my computer struggles mightily with Chrome.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I don't know of a working alternative.

Chrome is closest, but several of it's UI sins are both egregrious AND unfixable.

[thornae.livejournal.com]

Hah, yes. And then you get banned from the forum by said twit. The internet is a terrible, terrible place.


I primarily run Linux Mint MATE, because I need some *nix tools, and it more or less just works. I used to run FreeBSD, with a totally customised, super shiny sweet WindowMaker desktop, but these days I just want an OS and desktop that I can install and then it gets out of my way and lets me do my thing.
That said, every time I upgrade, I spend a solid week swearing and searching to try and get things working again, and swear that this time I'll write all this little caveats down (I never do).
And yeah, most of my machines are somewhat venerable, and so don't have such driver issues. I use Win 7 on work machines, and have no problems with it.


Oh gods yes, my issues with Chrome. I tend to switch between Chrome and Firefox as each one pisses me off more than the other. Although, given this, now I might be searching for a third alternative - has Opera got over its "everything must be Mobile" suck phase?
I've tended to find that most decent FOSS software is a) abandoned, b) run by a control freak with very specific ideas and no interest in contributions, c) run by an a bunch of supercilious twits, d) taken over by a large company for their own ends, or e) most or all of the above.
But, y'know, it's still nice to have alternatives.

[quillismightier.livejournal.com]

Chrome is the best of what I've tried, honestly -if you are using a Windows machine. It has issues, memory-Bloat is a huge one of them, and there are fixes and hacks that come up for them if you stay diligent in the forums of people who like to futz with those things. But once a good stable fix comes out from someone that isn't Google, Google seems to go, "NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE!" Then they release a patch that disables that hole that let the original fix-it non-google patch was put in.

Which is why I need a desktop email application, because leaving a tab for gmail open all day (especially since I run multiple accounts which there is no clean way to really navigate inside Gmail itself at one time) just kills my laptop's memory usage. When a separate client open just for email IMAP access, I can close Chrome when not using it, avoiding that problem.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

And NO VERTICAL TABS?!?!

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Evolution it is...