This response to my recent blog post is the best post on the Brendan situation that I’ve read from a non-Mozillian. His position is devastatingly understandable.
This response to my recent blog post is the best post on the Brendan situation that I’ve read from a non-Mozillian. His position is devastatingly understandable.
What position? He simply describes (better than others) the obvious. And it is obviously impossible that Mozilla recognizes it.
Lorenzo: I think you are reading too much into the word “position”. Try substituting “viewpoint”.
I replied over on his blog.
:)
Let me say after I have read your personal site you are a great guy.
I don’t consider the said blog post like a “viewpoint” either, it just states the obvious, like that quote from the movie: “the sky is blue, water is wet, women have secrets”.
And I reinstate that Mozilla cannot recognize that obvious otherwise it should reconsider itself. You can see these days the mantra is “not our fault” and “business as usual”.
Hi Mr. Markham.
I’m a long time Mozilla supporter and fan, but rare participant. I do hope you’re still taking replies over the controversy. Thank you for staying with Mozilla.
So, things happened and real people were disappointed, sad, scared, and engaged in knee jerk reactions. Then the pendulum swung and it happened all over again. I know this is a massive oversimplification, but I would do a poor job of rehashing all of this. I don’t know you or Mr. Eich, but there is no evidence to support that either of you hate anyone. Neither of you know me, but I there should be no evidence to support that I hate either of you. However, I think that I finally understand Mozilla and I feel terrible about how bad things got.
I wish Mr. Eich didn’t feel he had to leave. I wish no one within the community felt unsafe or ignored. I wish hurt and scared people didn’t assign arbitrary and invented “agenda items” to Mozilla that it doesn’t have. I wish Mozilla Corp. had a perfect marketing team that could have anticipated all this.
Very few entities come out of two consecutive trials-by-media unscathed. Mozilla is especially vulnerable because it is a symbol encompassing a corporation, foundation, software, outreach, etc. It’s a glorious and messy community of humans dedicated to making the web the best it can be for literally everyone. While there are a few, major public faces there is no one mouthpiece that can ever claim to speak for Mozilla. What makes Mozilla so wonderful and good is also what makes it defenseless against media circuses.
Of course Mozilla is also held to a nearly impossible standard and mistakes are amplified within and without, similar to other communities, like the Linux kernel and Libre- vs. OpenOffice. I remember how much crap Mr. Dotzler had to endure when Firefox went on a 6 week update cycle BEFORE Firefox had a seamless update process in place.
Thus, it’s nearly impossible for you all to wrest control of any narrative and I think it’s unfair to expect any community to do the “exact right things” that would have satisfied everyone. Mozilla could have done few things better, but I sadly fear that you would have still had two trials by media. I prefer ALL OF Mozilla being publicly and proudly Mozilla rather than hiding from bad press and hurt people.
And I remain a proud and public supporter, even more so, now.. So, Mr. Markham, after all that’s happened and the many frustrations, is there anything I can do to help?
Hi,
Thanks for your thoughtful words and your offer of help :-) I’m not sure you can help with the problems caused by this apart from telling those you know to continue to use Firefox and support Mozilla. But if you want to help Mozilla more generally, there are loads of ways you can get involved. See http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/ :-)