"He had a ring around his finger, And something burning in his hand."

[claidheamhmor]

I find it interesting to see articles like Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage, essentially saying that the involvement of Mormonism was one of the major factors in California's Proposition 8 (restricting marriage to a man and a woman only) being passed.

What disappointed me was to see that Alan Ashton, one of the co-founders of WordPerfect Corporation, had donated $1m to support Proposition 8. I used to work for the WordPerfect distributor in South Africa, and the reason that distributor was chosen was because of their non-racial policies during the time of apartheid. It was sad to see someone who had obviously been pro-human rights aligning himself on the side of bigotry.

Then I was pleased to see someone else who'd also donated $1m: philanthropist Bruce Bastian, the other co-founder of WordPerfect Corporation. He, however, donated his money to oppose Proposition 8.

I wonder which way Pete Peterson would have gone. Pete owned the 1% of WordPerfect that Ashton and Bastian didn't, and was the guy involved in the day-to-day running of the company. He seemed like a nice guy; I had an email conversation with him once on how WordPerfect had failed.

Incidentally, I still miss WordPerfect; in the DOS days it was king of the hill, and the later Windows versions are still far better than MS Word at handling huge documents or documents requiring precise layout.

Comments

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

I still use Word Perfect on a daily basis. I can't stand "styles" - I would so much rather "reveal codes" and see everything spelled out cleanly and elegantly. It's also great for when I want to run some search-and-replace macros through a huge text file.

[claidheamhmor]

Seconded. WordPerfect is so much more powerful when it comes to resolving issues in documents. Just thinking about issues with bullets, numbering, and styles in a Word document makes me shudder.

[windrider-09.livejournal.com]

It is interesting, that the people we would think will be progressive in their view, being the technology pioneers and so forth would hold very conservative/outdated moral views.

Just shows the complexity of the environment we live in. Sometimes our technological progress stops at technology.

[claidheamhmor]

Very true...