
Pale Moon Official Branding Violation – Issue #86 – Jasperla/openbsd-wip - protomyth
https://github.com/jasperla/openbsd-wip/issues/86
======
cthalupa
How bizarre. I can't say I've ever used Pale Moon or particularly care about
it, but the behavior in that thread would have had me eject and find something
different pretty much immediately.

Starting off with such forceful language and without a hint of wanting to deal
with the issue in an amicable manner is nuts. The first guy comes across as an
asshole, and no one wants to deal with assholes - it's perfectly reasonable to
ask to talk with the rights holder and hope they're more reasonable.

Unfortunately, it turns out the rights holder isn't any more reasonable. An
immediate 'I will not be as educational next time' is a clear threat, even
though he tries to backpedal away from it later.

And then we find out that the person working on the port approached the
Palemoon people days ago asking about the proper way to do things, etc.

So, in the end, we have a WIP repo that does not in any way show up in the
official ports tree for OpenBSD, with someone trying to do things the Right
Way, getting pushed around by two people being assholes.

Now, for the technical merit: Forcing people to use special bundled libraries
instead of system libraries is dumb in the vast majority of cases, especially
in something that will be running untrusted code as a basic function. Like,
say, a web browser. It significantly increases the amount of work required to
make sure you are running a system protected against known vulnerabilities.
The reasoning seems to be that whatever they're doing in the browser seems to
not play nice with the upstream libs, so they've instead started doing god
know's what with libs they now bundle with it. Why don't the fix the issues in
their own project? No idea. If they're actually flaws with the libs, why not
submit upstream patches? Not only do you have to worry about them making sure
they are quickly backporting any security related fixes, you also have to
worry that whatever modifications they've made might open up new security
bugs, or potentially nullify fixes from upstream.

The whole MPL style branding nonsense is also bizarre and something I think is
incredibly counter to the spirit of the open source software movement. It was
silly with Firefox and Iceweasel, it's silly now.

Questionable technical decisions, questionable behavior, questionable
commitment to the spirit of open source software.

I'll pass.

~~~
squarefoot
"but the behavior in that thread would have had me eject and find something
different pretty much immediately."

Ditto. And I speak as a PaleMoon user as it's the browser of choice on all my
machines. They could be right on principle, but the OP had no right to act as
an ass that way.

(edit: posted by mistake on top thread)

~~~
lsaferite
So, the question is, have you followed through on that feeling and dumped
PaleMoon as a result? The only way they feel the pain of their behavior is if
users leave due to that behavior.

~~~
squarefoot
After reading the whole threads both on github and Pale Moon forums, I believe
the best option is to migrate everything back to Firefox and dump it. Unless
they either sincerely and publicly apologize for being so rude or kick that
guy off the project. But I'm not holding my breath for that.

~~~
juliangoldsmith
Unless I'm mistaken, that guy is the head of the project.

I dumped Pale Moon a while ago because it was generally terrible, and have had
better luck with Waterfox.

~~~
squarefoot
Never heard of Waterfox, from the features looks interesting, thanks for
mentioning it.

------
mulander
It's now also reviewed for removal from FreeBSD:

[https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
ports/2018-Febru...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
ports/2018-February/112455.html)

~~~
protomyth
This message is a pretty good summary of why the shared library issue is
important to the BSDs and might make one pause about using Pale Moon.
[https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
ports/2018-Febru...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
ports/2018-February/112459.html)

------
anfilt
Well, that escalated quickly. However, this was handled quite poorly.

Moreover, there are not that many choices of decent browsers. Mozilla has
their problems, Chrome/Chromium is a google project. It even gets worse when
you think of how few browser engines there are.

------
unixhero
This was a great read. Just came here to say that.

------
yuhong
I wonder what the official Mozilla Firefox upstream does.

------
ihatedang
Does anyone have an IPFS mirror yet?

~~~
unixhero
Hosted where?

------
Analemma_
In discussions about having more gender parity in programming, I sometimes
hear people ask what benefits, specifically, it would provide to the projects
themselves. Here's one possible example: if we had a more equitable gender
ratio in open-source, we might have have fewer dick-waving contests like that
thread. I don't even know what it's about, and I don't care: all the involved
participants are just peacocking Internet Tough Guys. What a waste of time.

~~~
IntelMiner
I'm not sure what gender has to do with that thread

From my experience. Being an asshole is not a gendered trait

~~~
Analemma_
> Being an asshole is not a gendered trait

When considering a sufficiently zoomed-out view of all the different ways to
be an asshole, I think you're right. But the particular form of asshole-
ishness in this thread– swaggering in and immediately starting with demands
("You will revise your mozconfig..."), responding with passive-aggressive
logical handwaving about how the person will never be listened to again ("you
are dismissed from all further conversation on this matter...")– _is_ strongly
gendered, in my experience, and it's all too common in the open-source world.

The Atwood/Gruber Markdown spat, the Debian/XScreenSaver version warning, and
the Bootstrap/JSMin semicolon debacle are all good previous examples of the
same dynamic here. In all cases, there were no or very minor actual technical
disagreements; all the sound and fury was just men digging in and refusing to
give an inch of ground to another person who had very good points, while being
as aggressive as possible to guarantee a real resolution couldn't be reached.
We could use a lot less of that.

~~~
IntelMiner
Again. I think you're drawing conclusions where there are none.

For the sake of better fitting your examples. I'll say ego isn't a gendered
trait. Versus describing someone as an asshole

Having a massive ego is just a thing that some people have. It's human, and
humans are flawed individuals.

Yes. There's a lot more men in computing. So there's a lot more examples of
ego clashing from "men". But I'd suspect the dynamic not to change much if it
was a true 50/50 split. Or even a complete reversal of the current gender bias
(something like 90% men I'm told? it's hard to get accurate statistics)

For a specific citation against this theory (though I try to avoid mailing
list fights). I'd point to the Libreboot project. Where the lead (and possibly
only?) developer went on a personal crusade against the Free Software
Foundation. Using the project as a spearhead to personally demean them for a
perceived attack against someone else

