Multiple friends in the various sex-positive and sexual education fields posted a link to an article they saw on Valleywag about OkCupid coming after Mozilla and its CEO and its call to action to not use Mozilla software.
Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid. Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there's a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we're asserting ourselves today. This is why: we've devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we've worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it's professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure. If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.
LOL
So... I'm really torn about this.
Mozilla -is- a corporation but the software they write is open source. Mozilla Firefox is just software, it's a tool, and in general I endorse using the best tools for the job and the fact is... Mozilla Firefox is the only truly platform independent open source browser that's completely functional and unencumbered by platform preferential setups like Safari (for Mac/iOS), Chrome (for Android/Windows/Chromebook) or Internet Explorer (Windows/Windows Phone). Firefox and its companion software works everywhere on virtually every platform. It's free as in free software and no bigot ceo can end that.
The solution here -is- to hit the Mozilla corporation in its pocket book and it's correct; not using Firefox can eventually have an effect but it also has significant collateral damage. Not searching -through- the search bar in Firefox has the same effect; the Mozilla corporation makes a significant amount of money via google searches initiated in the in-browser search bar. Corporations can be pressured, they have bottom lines to worry about and even the Mozilla corporation isn't immune to bad press. I fully endorse exposing their current CEO for who he is and what he's done and for taking action against the corporation but... the Free Software / Open Source movement is a natural ally of the equality movements.
I disagree that we should take action by telling people not to use Mozilla and therefore disagree with OKCupid's call to action.
