💾 Archived View for hyperborea.org › log › 2021-05-01-mozilla-coffee.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:39:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

⬅️ Previous capture (2022-01-08)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Remembering Mozilla Coffee

by Kelson Vibber, 2021-05-01

In 2003, when Firefox was still in beta and the Mozilla Foundation was new, I read an article on MozillaZine about Mozilla Coffee:

RJ Tarpley's Coffee Company has dedicated a special selection of gourmet coffees to help benefit The Mozilla Foundation. Owner, Ron Tarpley is a self described 'Mozilla Geek' and heavy coffee drinker so the marriage between the two seemed natural....RJ Tarpley's will split half the profit on all orders directly to The Mozilla Foundation.

The next time we ran low on coffee, I figured, what the heck, let’s order some. It’s a way to get coffee and support Mozilla at the same time.

A bag of "Enviro Lizard" Mozilla Coffee.

It was good coffee! We ordered from them a few more times.

In 2004 they started offering mugs with their logo. Something about it just screamed “Buy me! Buy me!” – something in the combination of “Mozilla” and the lizard’s expression as he holds up his coffee mug, all of it appearing on a coffee mug…

By the end of the year, though, Tarpley had shut down his coffee business, unable to keep up with order fulfillment. The domain name was snapped up by a link farm.

Epilog

The following summer, while cleaning the apartment, we found a long-forgotten bag of the "Lazy Lizard" decaf. There was maybe half a pound left, but 12-month-old already-opened decaf coffee just isn’t fit to drink anymore, so instead of brewing one last pot in salute, we tossed what was left.

Overall, though? It was good coffee, and it helped support some good software. And I got a nifty mug while they were still in business.

In fact, I still have the mug! The printing's scratched a bit, but hey, it's been more than 15 years!

The Mozilla Coffee mug as it is today.

It's irreplaceable. But it's also trivially replaceable.

Life

FOSS

Food

Photos

Previous: Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Next: Ya-who? Flickr and Tumblr Were Lucky!

Archive of the MozillaZine article

Adapted from these posts at K-Squared Ramblings

Mozilla Coffee!

Mugzilla

Last of the Lazy Lizard

Fediverse: @kelsonv@wandering.shop

Log Home