George Ou over at ZDNet writes: "It's a mystery why Mozilla is operating in secrecy with Open Source code and one can only speculate about the motivations."
I've uncovered a few mysteries of my own:
1. It's a mystery why George's colleague, Joris Evers, as well as George's editor, Dan Farber, managed to find our complete disclosure.
2. It's a mystery why George didn't ask anyone at Mozilla if he was unable to find it.
3. It's a mystery why, when George was corrected on this point by his editor, he acknowledged this with nothing more than an "Update" at the bottom that says that Mozilla "seems to have" posted more details. Anyone skimming the ZDNet page still sees "Firefox 1.5 patches undisclosed security holes
With all these mysteries, one can only speculate about the motivations. George previously wrote an article asking "Is the Firefox honeymoon over?" George, what are your motivations? Are you in bed with Microsoft? Nevermind, these accusations are completely unfounded -- just like your article.
George goes on to write, "The problem is that we don't know what all but one of these security fixes are and that seems to fly in the face of the Open Source mantra." The real problem is that George didn't do any research before writing his article, and that seems to fly in the face of basic journalistic integrity.
And if those failings alone weren't enough to have his editors cringing, when George was was confronted about his mendacity, he lashed out at his commenters with all the charm and wit of a high-school student, calling them zealots and labeling their arguments "nonsense" and "double-speak."
There's only one final mystery in all of this for me, why on Earth does ZDNet give this guy a stump to stand on?
update: It looks like George has retracted his blog post, and like only the most responsible journalists, he's laying the blame squarely on someone else's shoulders. Good work, George. Real classy.
