Striving for excellence…
…or bowing before the whiners?
That is the question!
I think that the Mozilla Corp. bowed before their lawyer whinies. But now the freetard whinies whine back at them.
Yeah that happens, when you start listening to whiners, they come back to haunt you, and BANG, you’ve lost your edge.
Of course, showing a EULA dialog that nobody reads is not a big deal, but its the attitude behind it, it shows that somebody who is in charge does not care about the little details of the product anymore.
Welcome Mozilla to the world of Mediocrity.
Some more examples of why attention to the little details matter:
(EULAs are like crappy stickers, you know.)
Quote from “Inside Steve’s Brain” from Leander Kahney, page 101:
Ive also hates stickers. A lot of Apple products have product information laser etched right into the case, even their unique serial numbers. It’s obviously a lot simpler to slap a sticker on a product, but laser etching is another way that Apple has advanced the way products are made.
Oh, and other people notice too that attention to detail matters:
What Indie Gear Makers Can Learn from Apple
Oh, and did I mentioned that crappy stickers are another example for lack of attention to detail:
Cheers
-Richard
PS.: I don’t exactly get what this black blob on the right is, but I guess it’s related to the OpenBSD Blob.
UPDATE
Offizial Response
Also there seems to be some controversy about what is actually the problem of this EULA thingi. Just to make my position clear:
I don’t care what this EULA says, I won’t read it anyways. It might tell me about how firefox phones home to google, about how the firefox logo is trademarked and protected, about how the sourcecode is available and modifiable. I don’t care, this is all nice and good.
What I do care about however, is the insulting presentation and click through dialog thingi. If it is included as part of the documentation, inside a README file, or in the “About” dialog, then it is completely fine for me.
Less Lawyer speak and a human readably formatting like the CC thingis would be nice though.
UPDATE:
I do like the Fedora approach.