Aside from the rights and wrongs done by both companies, ^^ this sentiment is the one that really makes me mad.
Mozilla gets notification from a company that they screwed up. Mozilla begins removing the objectionable material without delay. Mozilla gets flamed for "burying evidence".
I imagine this flame can't hurt as bad as the alternate one where people say Mozilla is just flaunting their wrongdoing by not taking the material down, but sheesh!
The issue had already gone public. The guys at Mozilla had a choice. They could either remove the material and play dumb, or remove the material, acknowledge the issue, and work with MetaLabs to find a satisfactory solution. At issue was not "removing the objectionable material", but "removing the material without any acknowledgment".
I find it surprising you would consider my call to Mozilla to "do the right thing" a flame. There was no anger or malice in anything I said, just a desire for someone at Mozilla to say "we are working with MetaLabs to sort out this issue". (I say all of this as a supporter of Mozilla, and a long-time user of the Mosaic-Netscape-Firefox browsers.)
MetaLabs: Hey, you guys are murdering children. We aren't going to contact you to confirm. Instead, we are going to publicly rip you a new one and make assumptions.
Someone at Mozilla: Whoa! Something went wrong. We didn't mean it that way, but let's fix it right away because we can.
Someone else at Moz: Should we say something?
Someone at Mozilla: No, we shouldn't. We don't have the whole story, and we don't want to make even more mistakes by saying something that isn't true.
Someone else at Moz: Okay. At least we started on the path of fixing the problem.
Public: OMGWTFBBQ COVERUP!!!!!! SPAEK NOW FOOLZ!!!
"we don't want to make even more mistakes by saying something that isn't true."
"We are working with MetaLabs to resolve the issue" would have been a perfectly fine public response. It would have made Mozilla's intentions clear, without piling on any new mistakes.
(BTW I find it interesting that people are yelling at me about jumping to conclusions, while themselves jumping to conclusions about me jumping to conclusions.)
Considering there was very little time between them reporting the issue and Mozilla changing the offending post, I don't think they had time to "work with MetaLab."
How do you know with any degree of certainty that Mozilla was "playing dumb" and not just taking down the material as a pre-emptive measure to try and fix the situation? Do you work at MetaLab or Mozilla?
I said they had a choice, and urged them to make the right one.
Until MetaLabs finally communicated what had happened, the scenario was ambiguous. IMO, Mozilla could have eliminated the ambiguity much sooner simply by saying "we are working with MetaLabs to resolve this."
You can still see a screenshot at https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:FlightDeck_Editor.png as of this posting.
To the guys at mozilla: do the right thing. It's too late to bury this.