Comment by new299
11 years ago
I'm sure it's a great communications tool, however since Rice joined Dropbox's board (http://www.drop-dropbox.com/) I'd have severe concerns using anything released by Dropbox. Even if it's open source. And while I apologize for a tangential comment, people should be aware of the politics promoted by their software vendors.
Hopefully if it's a truly valuable tool it will be forked and audited.
Do you boycott every company that has any questionable people on their board? This feels like cherry picking because of how high profile Rice is. Her only crimes are being in the Bush administration and doing her job, and being on the board of an oil company. That's pretty weak.
I agree in principal that the politics behind a business matter. But why focus on Dropbox? Rice teaches at Stanford too, why not boycott Stanford and anything coming out of it?
There's a big difference in scope and impact between merely teaching somewhere and being on the Board of Directors and running it. It's not equivalent.
She was Provost there from '93 to '99, which is a little more than teaching [1]. I think that while her willingness to go with the Bush administration's extremist positions (on torture and surveillance, especially) are a dark mark on her career, Dropbox is worth dropping for wholly different reasons (e.g. technical incompetence [2]) than who is on their board.
1. "As the chief academic and chief budgetary officer of the University, the Provost is responsible for administering the academic program, including both instruction and research, and for the coordination of the administrative and support functions of the University with its academic purposes." (https://provost.stanford.edu/)
2. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Dropbox-Accidentally-Turne...
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I disagree. As a professor at Stanford, she's teaching the future rulers of the world how to rule. At Dropbox, she's showing up to board meetings and taking a salary.
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But your complaints have nothing to do with the codebase. How would a fork help? If I fork it and change nothing but the name does it become palatable to you?