I presented a fact with no opinion attached, I have no desire to join the debate. I'm not sure why you've chosen my post to reply to, there are plenty of others who post actual opinions you can discuss.
You asserted that an exercise of free speech on OkCupid's part was "an attack". That's not a fact -- it's a subjective opinion about a fact ("OkCupid asked visitors to its site to use a different browser" being the relevant fact).
I don't know that I particularly agree with your opinion, or at least, I know I don't agree that it was less of an attack than Brandon Eich's actions. So I was attempting to understand your response.
It's rather odd to complain that posting your opinion in public provoked a response. If you're not interested in having a conversation, I'd suggest that the wisest course of action is not to post.
Well I guess we're stuck in semantics, because "doing something which negatively affects someone else" constitutes an attack IMO.
You seem to be of the opinion that exercising free speech cannot be an attack, which I call bullshit on. If free speech were not powerful, we wouldn't protect it so fiercely. The right to free speech comes with the responsibility for what you say, and what OK Cupid and Brenden Eich said when exercising their right had repercussions they have to take responsibility for. "I don't like X" has different repercussions depending on the person who says it; OK Cupid advocating boycotts of Firefox is them exercising free speech to a large userbase, free speech which had consequences for Mozilla which surely objectively were negative.
Either they are ignorant of the consequences or they chose their words to cause the consequences which they knew would be negative. The latter is an attack.
> You seem to be of the opinion that exercising free speech cannot be an attack, which I call bullshit on
Quite the opposite, actually.
It's just that I have trouble caring about the negative repercussions from OkCupid saying "please visit our site using some other product" vs the negative repercussions for thousands of Californians, among them many mozillans, of Brandon Eich saying "here is $1000 to help make sure these people stay second-class citizens. Here's $1000 to make sure Alice's long-term partner can be denied access to her in the hospital. Here's $1000 to actively hurt other human beings".
At the end of the day, OkCupid wasn't out to deny Eich fundamental human rights. It's like complaining about the brightness of a candle held next to the noon-day sun
I haven't advocated Eich's views, I personally find them reprehensible. All I wanted to say in my original comment and from then on is that OKCupid deliberately performed actions with a negative impact (ie, an attack) - which countermanded bkor's original point. I found the statement "Nobody attacked Mozilla" to be incorrect - there clearly was a negative backlash.
