Re: Linux and Software Freedom

Dao wrote:
> On Aug 17, 6:36 pm, Asa Dotzler<[email protected]>  wrote:
>> Dao wrote:
>>> On Aug 17, 5:33 am, Asa Dotzler<[email protected]>    wrote:
>>>> There's a perfect example up-thread where a user didn't know if he was
>>>> up to date when he had Firefox 5.0 installed but Google or some news
>>>> report or some friend told him they had 5.0.1. It turns out that 5.0.1
>>>> was only available for Mac and 5.0 was the most up to date version of
>>>> Firefox for Windows, and that particular user, at the time.
>>> Except that mozilla.com offered Firefox 5.0.1 to Windows users -- it
>>> simply shouldn't have done that.
>> As a download, yes, not as an update. Confusion abounds. Even if Mozilla
>> had not made the download available, something that was sort of required
>> by our release mechanics, we'd still have the confusion.
>
> If our release mechanics require us to act stupidly, we should fix
> that. I don't think the confusion would have been nearly as big.

It's a bug. Yes, we should not do that. In this case we should have had 
5.0.1 only go to Mac users -- downloads and updates.

I think it would have still been confusing. Some users would have 5.0 
and some would have 5.0.1. In this case it would have been a majority of 
users on 5.0 (windows) and a very small minority on 5.0.1 (Mac). Because 
of Silicon Valley's disproportionate Mac usage, the message would still 
have been that 5.0.1 is the latest version.

I think this gets even worse when we've shipped a dozen rapid releases 
and the one month old press will almost always be wrong about which 
version is the latest.

We're tackling that by trying to help the press understand that they 
shouldn't be focusing on version increments but feature improvements, 
etc.  But we can also improve how the Firefox product "talks" to users.

- A