I like how he says in one sentence that maintaining code is too hard, and then in the next, asks Mozilla to maintain extra code. It is scary how few programmers realize that software they use every day is the same as software they write themselves. There is no magic.
To make it easier for everyone, the comment where he demands the cash is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=765645#c13 - otherwise you have to read through lots of drivel before you get to the juicy part. This guy sounds absolutely nuts, the other property for opacity has been supported for over 8 years now and the dude is still using old code? Wow.
"Estimate this to be around 100 hours of time, as it has to be done manually in text files for every single instance of the code"
search and replace anyone?? carefully crafted query using even Funduc S&R would take it max 5 minutes... but hey, given the content of the site... I would be afraid of a guy quoting bible verses in replies too!
The bug was filed by no less than YHWH Himself. I've heard of cases where people tried to sue God, but this is the first time I've seen the reverse. Can't He just smite them?
For some reason I'm bothered by you saying 'get it' and linking to urbandictionary. To me it implies some kind of slang word or internet term. So I'll link a more normal dictionary or two.
The urban dictionary entry is the first one using YHWH in the link title in my google results. It's the third result total, but the first two use 'Yahweh' in the link title, not YHWH
Some Christian people (not nearly all) think that the correctness of their belief system is so obvious to everyone, that those around them will be inspired to bend over backwards to help at the mere mention of the fact that the person is a Christian.
It is a weird phenomenon and it usually has the opposite effect on me because it shows that the person doesn't even understand what his/her own religion is supposed to be about.
Yeah, I agree, Christianity is not the magic ticket to get whatever you want - kinda the opposite of the Bible's teaching on the subject, actually. Makes me cringe when you see stuff like that original thread: he's choosing to be a representative of God (which I believe that Christians are), but is in the process demanding that we or Mozilla or whatever bend to his will.
But if you look at it with firefox 12 (before firefox 13) you'll understand his point a lot more vividly. With that opacity, it used to look great. Now... it's all broken. :/
"My hourly rate as CEO of this Corporation is HK$1900 or US$247.00 per hour.
Think that with a discount, US$18,000 should be sufficient to cover all my time related costs, fixing ALL code instances, for ALL the aforestated reasons..."
Then he adds:
"Thanks a bunch for being SO HELPFUL !!!"
Also, $18,000/$247.00/hour comes out to about 72 hours.
His first post was on 2012-06-17 21:06:44 PDT and his last post was on 2012-06-19 23:11:22 PDT, so it's only been ~50 hrs since he posted it until he asked for the money.
I once worked as a customer service staffer for a phone company. I was extremely surprised by the number of people complaining about service being cut for not paying bills who were "stockbrokers" losing "thousands per hour". Really, sir? Most of them knew their bluff was called when we told them about the difference between residential-class and business-class services, but a few hardy souls would stick on. Strangely enough, those few hardy souls whose time is worth thousands an hour were rarely willing to pay a phone bill worth a hundred...
ISP tech support is the same way. The guy paying $30/month for his internet is complaining that he has lost tens of thousands of dollars today. Perhaps he should invest in some redundancy if the internet is so important to him.
I don't see a threat to sue here? I see him saying he will send Mozilla an invoice for $18,000 based on his (very rough, very inaccurate, very arbitrary) estimate, but there's no legal force behind that. It clearly was an idle threat and his last responses seem to indicate he was resigned to having to eat his labor and treat the cost as a lesson learned.
But the title of this post is a bit inaccurate in that he didn't threaten to sue. He threatened to send Mozilla an invoice for his work, but he came out looking very foolish, and ended up tucking tail.
In the thread, multiple people answered his question. Here are the two most significant reasons that I noticed.
1. The prefix was already not being supported by most browsers, thus supporting it would mean supporting the development of websites that don't work properly in other browsers.
2. Best practices suggest that one shouldn't rely solely on the prefixed version of an experimental alias. If this developer had written good code to start with, he wouldn't have had the problems he ran into.
The Mozilla developers explain the reasoning at length.
They don't want to tie people to Firefox. So when a standards-compliant version of a CSS directive becomes available, they deprecate their own -moz version.
Eventually they remove it.
The goal statement is that a page written using Firefox as the development browser will look the same for Chrome, IE and so on.
-moz defeats that purpose because it's browser-specific.
On the "threatening legal action against open source projects" thing, you wouldn't believe the number of times people have threatened to sue Wikipedia or individual admins because the spam article about them or their business was deleted.
It looks like he was happy with the ending and did take peoples comments in to consideration. Not sure he understood the sed instruction being thrown at him though. Clearly not everyone understands temporary postfixes.
It's funny that someone so enlightened as he is unaware of a suitable find and replace all in whatever tool he is using. Also, that had to be the most god awful webpage I have seen since geocities shuttered.
If it is, it is God-level, 10/10, serious long-term trolling executed masterfully. The domain has been around since 99 and the site has looked like... that... since at least 2001 according to the Wayback Machine.
So I doubt it. I'd love to believe it, but I doubt it.
Also, duuuude, the site in question is awesome: http://www.constellation7.org/Constellation-Seven/Josiah/Ind...