Is Mozilla free? and Marketing

I've never thought I'll see links to Andkon's "stuf" on a Mozilla blog. :)

There are some other "nice" articles by this guy:

http://www.andkon.com/stuf/mozilla/ ("Mozilla - The Corporate Fraud")
http://www.andkon.com/stuf/mozilla2/ ("Mozilla - Multi-Billion Dollar Theft")

:)

Comment by marcoos at March 7, 2004 05:04 PM | Permalink

Yeah, Andkon has been a total nuciance and has posted some really misinformed articles in the past. The wierd thing is that about 2/3 of his critique of the mozilla.org website is quite insightful.

Feedback on the other document is much appreciated.

While abstract thinking/writing about an overall project like this sometimes helpful and necessary (I wrote an article criticizing the Mozilla visual identity last year myself), it's not much good without people willing to help with the implementation.

It's kind of like people saying "Linux needs to be more user-friendly and polished to be used on the desktop". That's not much help to anyone. Instead - be specific, file bugs, get in there. You don't have to be a developer to help.

After I wrote a critique of the Mozilla visual identity, I was contacted by some people at the Mozilla Foundation to try help improve things. It has been a great and humbling experience. I'm a lot more careful throwing around criticism now to make sure that it is really constructive and that someone (if not myself) can actually try to fix it.

For what it's worth, I contacted the author ("Andkon"), and though he has a really anoying animated buddy icon, he was receptive to my suggestion that he make suggestions people could act on, or get involved and try to help.

Comment by Steven Garrity at March 8, 2004 06:10 AM | Permalink

Steven: Yeah, I'm not advocating whining about stuff in the hope that sombody else will fix it. Having said that, trying to help with stuff in Mozilla can often be frustrating; especially on the marketing side, people inside the project often work to their own timescales so individuals in the community can try to fix a problem and be ignored for ages before a solution is finally handed down from on-high (witness the Seamonkey splash-screen issue, for example. Note, though, that I'm not in any way suggesting that the kind of behaviour that went on in that bug was acceptable).

My point about Andkon was simply that he's got a deserved reputation as an annoying twat. However, unlike his previous "essays", the criticism of the mozilla.org site is not misinformed twaddle (for the most part) but actually raises some reasonable points. That was one of the motivating factors for writing the second document (the observation that the site doesn't make the point that Mozilla is free and not shareware / adware / etc. and in fact confuses the issue by giving more prominance to the for-cash CD link rather than the for-free download link).

Watch for a new article coming soon on more marketing.

Comment by Andkon at March 9, 2004 05:08 AM | Permalink