Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Why I Am Not OK with What OkCupid Is Doing

First, I am not against homosexual relationships and my opinion on that subject is neutral. Second, recent changes in Firefox like plan to include ads and consuming lot of memory etc made me some what upset with Firefox. So don't think that this post is by a Firefox fanboy defending whatever crap Mozilla is doing.

OkCupid, an online dating site, is now asking visitors who use Firefox, to consider changing their browser as the new Mozilla CEO donated $1,000 out of his personal wealth for a campaign against gay marriages. Brendan Eich is not only Mozilla's CEO. He is the main designer of JavaScript. Will OkCupid go clean of JavaScript too? All they wanted is cheap publicity. I assure them that they got it because, someone sitting here in India, who never knew that a stupid dating site named OkCupid existed before, is now writing a rebuttal.

Everyone is entitled to have their own opinion and views. Like fingerprints, no two persons have exact set of views and opinions in this world.That is what makes us humans. Any person's view should be kept as personal and should not affect his/her work. With that said, Brendan Eich can have any opinion as long as he doesn't allow those opinions influence his work.

Up to my knowledge, Firefox has not done anything against homosexuals. None of Eich's works or decisions as CEO of Mozilla were against homosexuals. Even Mozilla reaffirmed their support for equal treatment of homosexuals. The donation supporting gay marriage ban, in question was made 6 years before. Eich had just mentioned Mozilla as his employer and he didn't make the donation on behalf of Mozilla.

So is that like no person can have a personal opinion on trivial issues while holding top level positions in organizations? Should Christians boycott Apple product as Jobs was Buddhist? Instead they should boycott it for its closed nature and patent lawsuits which violates freedom. Should Muslims stop using GNU/Linux as both Dr. Stallman and Torvalds are Atheists? Instead everyone should use GNU system to tackle NSA like surveillance. Where will we be if we take personal views and opinions of people behind a product in to consideration before using it, even when the view or opinion has nothing to do with the product?

Mozilla is not having child labor. It doesn't run sweat shops. It is a non-profitable organization with community support. They are people from different countries, speaking different languages, eating different foods etc joining hands to build a free software. So to oppose a collective effort just because of a personal opinion of a member of that group is morally wrong and outright stupid. I am OK if OkCupid or anyone else opposing Firefox for their shorter release cycles or larger memory footprint or anything else related to their product or organizational decisions. Instead of that picking a person's individual opinion to undermine the collective work of thousands is unacceptable.
Ironically, OkCupid's homepage has JavaScript on the first line of code itself!☺

Now, I know that there is almost no probability for any OkCupid user to read my blog. But still, if you are an OkCupid user, please consider using any other dating site, not because the people running OkCupid are scumbags, but their mean tactics to gain popularity sucks!!!

Update: Sadly Brendan Eich has resigned :-(

References:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26830383

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript

Photo Credit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brendan_Eich_Mozilla_Foundation_official_photo.jpg

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