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| I don't know how many times I've read of people who've uninstalled this |
Sorry. I've just been really annoyed about this whole Mozilla CEO situation recently. Ever since Brendan Eich was chosen as CEO there's been this giant sh*tstorm around Mozilla for (in my opinion) nothing.
I'm gay, I'm as activist as they come, I founded this LGBT blog, and I'm STILL using Firefox. This site was even built using Firefox! "Shock!" "Horror!" No. I've been trying to avoid writing this post for over a week now, but earlier on today I found that now the anti-gay camp is boycotting Mozilla because they fired Eich from his position.
I'm really not amused by any of this. I've used Firefox from day one. Why? Because I don't want to feed all of my browsing history to data-hungry Google. Gmail scans your emails to give you "personalized" adverts (as if you care). And I don't support that.
So if I don't support a homophobic CEO, and I don't support gay-friendly Google, what do I stand for? Privacy, overall. You see, the thing I like about Firefox is the fact that it's made by a group of volunteers. It's a community project. And supporting that, dear readers, is far more important than supporting (or not) a homophobic CEO. The chair of Mozilla, in other words the CEO's boss, stands for equal rights, so whilst the decision to elect Eich may have been an odd one from that point of view, I think we can safely say that Mozilla is far from being a homophobic company. It's not as if Mozilla itself donated $1,000 to Prop 8. It was an individual.
Here's an interesting question: how do you know if your local supermarket manager donated to Prop 8? You don't. But what does that change? You still need food. In fact, he or she may have donated more than Eich, but not said anything. If they had, would you boycott the supermarket and put dozens of innocent peoples jobs at peril just because one individual made a donation to an organisation which is against your views? We can't be picky like this. It's just not worth it.
Think of all the innocent gay-friendly, or even gay, programmers who volunteer at Mozilla to build Firefox. You're directly wasting their time and effort to build a decent browser by uninstalling it and moving to Chrome (I presume) which is made by the billion-dollar company with no expense to spare (and it's still not as good as Firefox), Google.
Now don't get me wrong, I love that Google stands up for gay rights, and think it's very important that they do, but I just don't trust Chrome, no matter what workarounds you suggest to me to keep my data safe.
OkCupid stuck its nose in soon after the news broke, God knows why, but it seems to have backfired because Mother Jones has done some digging and yesterday they posted their findings. It turns out the CEO of OkCupid doesn't have such a gay-friendly record either! He donated to a Republican a few years ago who later worked to fight against marriage equality. See what I mean about the supermarket manager? You just can't know.
So now that (seemingly) half the LGBT community on the web has uninstalled Firefox, Eich has been removed from his functions due to the LGBT boycott, thus ensuing a boycott from the right-wing homophobes, I'm really feeling sorry for Mozilla about all of this, and I just wanted to let them know that I'm still here, and I hope others will read this post and join the #MozillaResistance!
Oh and as a side note, please don't go boycotting your local supermarket!
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