Do you see any realistic chance of this happening? Generally if a company is captured by a parasitic leadership sucking it dry, that's it, right? Is there anyone on the board whose interests are more aligned with keeping Mozilla alive (probably hard to do at this point) than feasting on it whilst there is still something left to feast on? Presumably you'd need a few such people.
It is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account unless the board members that want her out would resign if she does not want to make way. That would be a major statement and would put the remaining board members on notice.
The board typically does not get compensated the way the CEO does so they are usually not in a position to 'suck it dry', on top of that they have some responsibilities and if they don't act in the best interest of the company they might be found to be personally liable depending on the jurisdiction and the details regarding their responsibilities.
I should study that to see if there is any way to solve it but frankly, even though FireFox has been my daily driver since about forever I don't see a happy ending here.
> It is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account
Is this really a problem? The CEO is often a director, and even as chairwoman I doubt anything in the bylaws prevents the board at large from removing her if they wanted to.
Instead, it seems like the board itself is the issue, since they allowed Mozilla to stray so far from its core mission.
Is that common in the US? Because here in Sweden it is regarded as bad practice for medium sized companies and up. The CEO is almost never part of the board here except for in tiny companies.
I served on the board of the Apache Software Foundation for a year and everything about the experience convinced me that it is desirable for the board to be completely separate from the corporate officers.
In fact, I have seen this very debate play out in real life. We appointed a new President of the ASF during my term. That person had been a Director, but when they became President they stepped down from the Board.
For a non-profit charity that relies on volunteers, perfect separation is not always feasible, and especially in the early years when the ASF was smaller the President was often a Board member. But although I can't speak for anybody but myself, I believe that the ASF is likely to continue with an informal tradition of separating Board from Officers for the indefinite future.
A similar cultural change ought to be possible at Mozilla — and perhaps elsewhere.
Yes, having one or more executive directors is standard operating procedure for public companies in the US. Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, et al sit on their respective boards.
Indian here. Extremely common for the CEO to be part of the board. In fact the CEO equivalent "Executive head of company" designation in India before globalization made use of CEO fashionable was 'Managing Director'.
Yeah I remember that. While growing up in 90's and even early 2000's, I always heard praises of someone reaching post of MD. The term CEO became common later.
There are still plenty of MDs in the world, but these days it's mostly used in finance and consulting to represent the first layer of leadership below the c-suite.
It can vary, though; e.g. Kevin Sneader is the de facto CEO of McKinsey, but his official title is Global Managing Partner and his predecessor used Managing Director.
Definitely the normal thing in the UK for companies of all sizes for the CEO to be an executive director and therefore to sit on the board of directors.
It's so common here that I never even considered the possibility of having a CEO who wasn't also a member of the board. It's pretty common for them to also be chairman of the board. Especially for founder CEOs.
This one went nearly 3 years before it had a problem, but as soon as one key started acting up the rest of the row quickly followed. I'll trade up for the latest model (with the touch bar, which I actually like, and physical escape key) the next time I can afford to be unproductive for a couple days.
They're all identical keyboards -- AFAIK, literally -- so if you like it on one (or don't like it on one!), it'll apply to the rest. I have a 2020 MacBook Air and think it's one of the best laptop keyboards I've used in a long time. (And it makes me really hate going back to the butterfly keyboard on my work laptop, even though I found it okay to type on previously. I actually never had any dead keys on it, or on a previous work laptop with butterfly keys, or on a personal MBP 13" that the Air replaced.)
Well, concerning the sucking dry: maybe I'm overly cynical but I wonder if being on the mozilla board is not a nice sinecure (so high effective hourly wage, even if the yearly compensation is not egregious) with a massive CV boost: none of the people I can see on the board of either the corp or the foundation, with the exception of Brian Behlendorf (and I had to look him up) seem to have much name recognition and being on the board of Mozilla might well be the most high profile thing they'll ever do.
Given that, as you seem to agree, Mozilla is probably doomed now no matter what, why would they deprive themselves of these benefits (and possible future similar gigs!) sooner rather than later? It seems extremely unlikely to me the mismanagement is rising to the level of personal liability.
> It seems extremely unlikely to me the mismanagement is rising to the level of personal liability.
Agreed. But the CEOs statement here is very peculiar and might actually rise to that level, the board not taking action in turn might just make them culpable.
It is a very dumb statement, especially for a lawyer, to make.
You mean the "competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to"? It's pretty funny, especially the word "competitive"? I assume the bit you could see landing her in hot water are the three words "and their families"?
Yes, because if and when Mozilla goes belly up and the CEO has been found to enrich herself with this as her motivation for continuing to raid the till when it was clear that Mozilla was in trouble then you don't want to have stuff like that on the record.
The Martha Stewart case revolved around a similar minor (for her) issue, $45K loss avoided but it landed her in jail. Rich people make stupid mistakes too, whether this is one of those remains to be seen (I think it will pass) even so, it isn't smart when your company is on a multi-year downslide.
Yes, if not for that she would have likely walked. Even so, it further illustrates that minor tricks can have a big effect in the right context. I'm pretty sure that Stewart didn't think about the possible consequences when she did that. Must be weird to sit that high and fall so low.
One of the best and hardest things to do for anything with a board of directors is to establish that EVERY BOARD MEETING starts with a vote on one simple question: "Shall the CEO/Executive Director be retained?" Every company, not for profit or even tiny club that makes this the big question performs it's mission well. Those that don't, well, you get a lot more politics.
I love that idea, it formalizes the board taking responsibility for the continued performance of the CEO, and it may also warn a CEO that the board that hired them is about to flip before it is too late.
Accountability is underrated, and I've been in more than one meeting where there was a surprise no vote from a couple of board members. The result was that problems got fixed quickly.
Imagine if, every quarter, a committee voted on whether you keep your job.
Does this make you more or less willing to take risks? More or less focused? Does this decrease or increase the amount of attention you give to "optics" and politics?
This doesn't bother me in the least. A CEO's boss is the board of directors, period. Every board meeting is a review on the performance of the organization, and therefore the CEO. Most employees do not roll up to a committee, and their review is usually with a supervisor. The board meeting is no different.
It's not just the leadership at Firefox. FF has been hijacked by a bunch of people who have no interest in the browser and sucked it dry while it went down. Sad for the people at Mozilla who cared about the browser and wrote the code.
As an FF user I hope Mozilla does a turn around, gets back its engineering culture and focuses on delivering the best - and most secure and private - browser in the market.
If you have a link or other details I’m interested in who you’re referring to that hijacked/influenced development. I’ve never heard that and am really curious. I too really hope they can turn it around but sadly have been less and less hopeful.
Possibly taking one of the best parts of Firefox, the addons, and replacing it with a system that doesn't bother to support many of the most popular addons.
Slavishly copying Google's plans to nerf the addon interface isn't "the right thing". Thankfully, Google has gone too far by crippling ad blockers and Firefox is unlikely to fall on that sword.
While I definitely agree with changing leadership. I dont think she can be described as parasitic leadership.
She is incompetent, but I dont think she has the intention to drive Mozilla to the ground. After all she co-founded the Mozilla Project, and was the Chairwoman for a long time, long before she was named the CEO.
Why did they not find someone else to be CEO is beyond me though.
I suspect she's been in there for a very long time, is tired, and just want to cash out. She sees her friends working for the likes of Google who made 50+ millions during certain years and see her small 2.5M as nothing.
She's a lawyer. She got the Mozilla deal out of Netscape and AOL. That's the highlight of her career and what she's good at too - that and public speaking. For what it's worth she even recognized this in the past and stepped down as CEO before - but stayed as Chairwoman of course and kept getting the salary.
I really don't really see how her actions can be interpreted in any other light. If she were just incompetent, she would not so blatantly enrich herself all the while laying off hundreds of staff, many undoubtedly more deserving. Did you read their revolting PR statement?
Remember Stephen Elop, former CEO of Nokia? He did an awesome job in reducing Nokia's marketshare (and hence, its market capital) to make the company ready to be acquired by his mother company, Microsoft, at a very low price (cheaper than just one app—WhatsApp which was sold to Facebook).
Or remember Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer? She also did a great job at making the company ready to be sold out to Verizon at low price.
These CEOs know what they're doing. They take care of their personal interests and steal companies for the tech giants.
While I am absolutely pissed ( to say the least ) that Nokia was sold to Microsoft and Yahoo couldn't turn its ship around. I dont think both CEO were doing in their own interest or another companies interest.
Nokia refused to use Android. ( Which was what really killed Nokia ) That was only two possible outcome, either go full force with Symbian or partner with Microsoft. I mean there are so many wrong with Nokia even before Elop joined nothing much could have been done. It turns out the penalty for completely dismissing iPhone and Smartphone was death for their phone division. ( Currently the Nokia Smartphone are manufactured by a JV formed by former Nokia employees and Foxconn, with the name licensed from Nokia )
Elop did however completely neglect the importance of Carrier / Network Infrastructure segment, although arguably Ericsson wasn't competing much and Huawei didn't show up on their radar. ( Yet )
Marissa was trying very hard to recreate Google within Yahoo. She was absolutely executing it. But it is one of those example where I put the argument against execution eats strategy for breakfast.
It is not one OR the other. You need both. The equation times both together. When you have a strategy which trends towards zero or even negative, it doesn't matter how well you execute it.
In the end she failed. The strategy was wrong from the start. I actually thought the other CEO candidate's vision of turning Yahoo in to an Online Media Companies suits Yahoo better. But Marissa got the job, and the rest is history.
As someone who was at Nokia when Elop became CEO and had some (very limited) view into the goings on, as the kids say: "yes, this, +1".
Circa 2010, Symbian was clearly uncompetitive and MeeGo was far behind schedule. There was a fairly ambitious plan to build a new UI framework in Qt that ran on both Symbian and MeeGo -- the Nokia N9 used this with Harmattan, which internally I don't think we ever referred to as MeeGo, IIRC! -- but I'm pretty sure when Elop arrived he took stock of things and thought, "My God, this MeeGo thing is Nokia's version of Apple's Copland project," and it's really hard to say he was wrong.
Looking back, it's really easy to say that he was wrong not to choose Android, but it was seriously considered. The problem was that Nokia insisted on two mutually exclusive conditions: they wanted to use a lot of Nokia-based services so the new devices still "felt Nokia," and they wanted to fully partner with Google and market the devices as Android. And Google wouldn't do it. If you want to call your device "Android (R)" then you use Google services; if you want to use your own, you have to do what Amazon did with the Fire devices. Google wouldn't make an exception for Nokia, but Microsoft -- who by that point had, at least internally, realized Windows Phone was seriously floundering -- would. And so they went with Microsoft.
Absolutely this. I was a Nokia/Symbian fan back when it actually was the industry best. The real problem was that iPhone and Android came around and started executing like 100x faster than Symbian ever did. Nokia was too used to working with software on a Symbian timeline, and it took them too long to see that their only options were to learn to execute on Symbian improvements at that speed (probably not practical), give up Symbian and adopt Android (becoming essentially a vassal of Google), or get buried.
They dawdled and ignored the problem for too long, and were left with selling to Microsoft and adopting their mobile OS as the only semi-plausible way to maintain a strong market position. Both Nokia and Microsoft's efforts ended up being too little, too late.
Nokia was pathological before Elop arrived, but it was still huge, and a huge name. There was more than enough time and money to turn it around. Instead he released his "burning platforms" memo that made everything worse.
From the outset it looked (from the outside) exactly like his goal was as described - torpedo the company and get it bought by Microsoft, returning to the mothership in the process.
It's easy to say this stuff looking in the rearview mirror. Nokia and BlackBerry saw their platforms as their moat that enabled the company. It wasn't obvious that Apple and Google would eat up the market.
Yahoo was similar in a way -- they built a whole array of services around identity way before Google did. Ultimately it didn't work out well for the company.
Firefox and co are open source projects. Couldn't you just create a new company, "Next-Mozilla" or so, and fork off the projects, install a new CEO, take over the developers? You would have to use a new branding, i.e. they cannot reuse the trademark, and they have to make sure that enough people (developers and users) will switch over. But with such bad press, this might not be too hard, if there is one focused attempt for this. Financing is another issue initially, but at some point they would get a similar Google deal. And otherwise, financing like Wikimedia or Internet Archive (mostly donations, right?).
How will you pay for this? Without critical mass you are not going anywhere. FireFox had critical mass, and lost. You won't be able to recover that position without some extremely deep pockets even if you start off from what is there today.
I am not convinced that even if Mozilla/FF got a competent CEO tomorrow and started executing 'just so' that they would be able to recover from their slide, a newcomer would have it harder.
The browser market is so much different now though.
Firefox was originally competing against the pile of steaming garbage that was IE6.
Now they are competing against Chrome which is actually a good browser, and Chrome also has the advantage of having google behind it which can leverage their search/ad monopoly to push Chrome.
The way I’ve heard the story is that by the time of firefox, IE6 was still a really good browser, it had just stayed stagnant for a little too long, and bundled got with Microsoft’s monopolistic behavior.
I think there are more parallels between late IE6 and present day Chrome then you give credit for.
maybe my memory is fuzzy, but I don't have a single fond memory of IE6. I remember it being a revelation how much better firefox was when I first switched back in the day.
Pretty much. But they had not ridden Netscape that far down to the bottom just yet. Don't forget that the roots of Mozilla were seeded in 1998, the Mozilla foundation came 6 years later. Netscape was still hugely popular and FireFox took that popularity and ran with it.
To do this today, with a much more complex product would be no mean feat, back then a browser was a much simpler piece of software than it is today.
Steve Jobs was able to do that with Apple. There is no reason to believe that is not possible with Mozilla. Especially taking into consideration that Mozilla doesn't have to be profitable as a company. Being sustainable would be enough.
Steve Jobs didn't do it alone, there was huge trend transforming all of the music industry, with piarted MP3's over P2P networks, and he rode it, and did so exceptionally well.
What trend should Firefox ride ? And how will it keep that project a secret for long enough, Given that it's all open-sourced ?
Oh tons of ways. The fact that the default search engine is Google is the obvious one, but GSuite is huge for Google - they're competing directly with Dropbox, O365, etc. and GSuite heavily integrates with Chrome.
ChromeOS of course puts them in the OS market, and it's doing very well for a niche operating system - my entire company runs on ChromeOS in fact.
There is a possibility, doesn't matter how low, I like to think about: Group of people leaving Mozilla, forking the Firefox and creating another non-profit.
If played smart Mozilla could be another. I have some ideas about how this could be achieved but Mozilla in its present day configuration would never be able to make any of them work so I'm curious to see if and how they will get out of their current predicament.
So far what I am seeing and hearing does not make me very hopeful.
FF will be my daily driver until they stop updating it, where FF does not work I very reluctantly use Chrome. I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.
> I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.
There is a bigger reason. Literally every software engineer at Google/Alphabet uses Linux, other than a very few exceptions (likely only a fraction of a percent).
Even if your laptop is a Mac or Windows machine, your source code access is exclusively on your Linux box in the office.
Google is a Linux shop. Regardless of their reputation for dropping products, Chrome on Linux isn't going away any time soon, for the simple reason that they need it internally.
What makes you think Google will drop linux support? As far as I can tell it's in their interest to keep a (2nd class) linux version around: linux is no competitive threat to anything they do, a large fraction of their staff use linux machines, and leaving linux without any viable browser (killing it dead as a desktop and development platform) would concentrate a lot of money, smarts and political power into seeking alternatives that could pose a serious threat to Google.
Precedent. Companies tend to spend effort to keep others at bay but as soon as they are no longer a threat they move their effort elsewhere. As long as FF has a viable territory Chrome will be there to compete with it.
Since ChromeOS itself is just a stripped down flavor of Linux, they can hardly just drop Linux support. Unless they also give up on ChromeOS, which is unlikely but not impossible for Google.
It would be trivial to stop supporting the linux version publicly while still allowing the ChromeOS one, it's not going to compile for regular linux if Google does not continue to put effort into that.
ChromeOS graphics stack is not based on Wayland or X11, so if Google decided to ditch Linux and only support ChromeOS, you would have to maintain the Linux graphics port. That may or may not be a one person effort.
That's reassuring to know. I don't think I would want to give up linux as my daily driver OS and if there were no current browser for it that would be the end.
>FF will be my daily driver until they stop updating it, where FF does not work I very reluctantly use Chrome. I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.
I also use FF as my daily driver. However, should FF become unsupported, I'll go with Palemoon[0] rather than Chrome.
In fact, there really isn't anything that could get me to use Chrome. I find its interfaces to be insulting to my intelligence and not at all friendly enough to the idea that I should never see ads or be tracked through my browser.
Auto update strikes again. I'll react to that when it happens. One of the main reasons I use firefox is because I hate advertising, if there is one thing that would make me jump ship that would probably be it.
I don't think your ideas there result in more market share or a sustainable business model to support Firefox. Because fundamentally you're trying to shove a new value (privacy) down the throats of consumers who don't share it, they want functionality first.
I think the goal should be to make Firefox the sane default firstly for business and secondly for consumers. Business users care about privacy and security, yet Chrome and IE are the standard platforms for business webapps.
If you want an example of how misaligned those values are from reality, I need to use Chrome to talk to my doctor. Safari and Firefox aren't supported. That's entirely because Firefox doesn't do enough to make it the default platform for developers and by focusing on the wrong users.
Those are good points, and it’s frustrating that they don’t seem to be in Mozilla’s focus, but do you really believe this could lead to an Apple-style comeback?
Well, I'd certainly hope so or I see myself as a Chrome user in a few years time and that's not the best possible future. I already have to for browser/midi stuff.
Those ideas look solid. It will require the board to make some critical decisions and there has to be a person for the moment. Do we have the analog to Steve Jobs in this situation - Brendan Eich?
JWZ? That would be a fun turn-around, I think the bar/restaurant business is maybe not such a great spot to be in and it would be a nice return for him. For sure I'd trust him to do the right thing from a tech perspective.
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. We've had to ask you this multiple times. This kind of provocation leads to discussion that is equal parts nasty and brain dead.
It wasn't long ago that comments were shouting that this was the absolute most qualified person to lead Mozilla when others were questioning having a lawyer lead a tech company. Someone with at least a little hands-on experience in building a product really should be something companies look for in leadership.
I mean, sure, Baker's done plenty for Mozilla, but Mozilla has been absolutely lost as to what they're trying to be this past year. It's not a clear cut software company anymore and that's a problem.
> t wasn't long ago that comments were shouting that this was the absolute most qualified person to lead Mozilla when others were questioning having a lawyer lead a tech company.
I don't think you'll be able to attribute that quote to me. Eich fucked up, and should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other. But he resigned (he wasn't forced out, though it might have come to that, contrary to various strong assertions in this comment thread, both Eich and the board are on the record about that). I can't imagine there isn't anybody to be found who is more qualified than Baker but the window of opportunity for turning this around is closing rapidly. FF usage is the only thing that keeps the whole circus alive, when that goes Mozilla will have officially failed in their mission, no matter what the balance on Baker's personal savings account.
> I don't think you'll be able to attribute that quote to me. Eich fucked up, and should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other.
I have a problem with characterizing Brendan Eich as a bigot for donating to a non-fringe political group. IIRC, the proposition campaign he donated to had close to a 50/50 split in support for/against. Eich's ouster crystalized in my mind that Mozilla wa no longer focused on its core mission (the signs were already there - dropped Thunderbird, had an oversized IoT dept). I am speaking as a person who was a vocal Firefox evangelist since the 2.x days
The leader of a large tech company was the government to ensure his gay and lesbian employees can never legally get married, despite straight employees enjoying all the personal/financial benefits of marriage.
I don't care if it had 50/50 support. It's dead wrong. 50 years ago there were places in the US where interracial marriage had 50/50 support or less. Still dead wrong.
There was no forcing. People voluntarily expressed their desire.
* Some people no longer wanted to work at Firefox if he was their lead
* Some people no longer wanted to use Firefox if he was their lead
Now, the organization can easily take any position here. They could say "Yeah, I guess you can't work here, employees who can't work with Brendan Eich. And yes, I guess you have to stop using Firefox, users who can't use product led by Brendan Eich" or they could say "Brendan, looks like you leave or we lose these people" or anywhere in the middle.
This is just people freely expressing their views and advertising how they will act. It is pure liberty and I love it for that.
Because they are supposed to lead those very employees. If you are going to square off over something like this in the workplace then it will - obviously - impact your ability to do your job.
How could he support gay marriage without negatively impacting his ability to lead his devoutly conservative employees?
I’m in favor of equality in marriage and broadly the rights of individuals to live true to themselves and free from discrimination, but if a divisive topic is 50/50, it’s hard to see how supporting one side or the other wouldn’t alienate some portion of your employee base.
Obviously, never taking a stance on any issue is the most middle of the road, career-lengthening tactic to take, but that’s not exactly the world I want to live in either. I don’t have to (and do not) agree 100% with my CEO’s political views; that doesn’t impact his ability to lead nor my ability to execute.
>How could he support gay marriage without negatively impacting his ability to lead his devoutly conservative employees?
There’s no point in making this argument. Mozilla is company headquartered in San Francisco - and AFAIK, has the most “out” LGBTQ employees I can remember of most tech companies.
Just like I wouldn’t be surprised if Mitt Romney got raked over hot coals for not supporting a RBG replacement, I’m also not surprised Eich got kicked out for not supporting gay marriage. It was incredibly deaf on his part.
I think this is a fallacy: either way you're making someone unhappy. It's fundamentally a flawed argument: giving rights to someone it's not taking them away from someone else.
You're not making the "50%" of the people that are conservative unhappy. You are impacting a minority of those, the ones who can't live with the fact that somewhere there is a married same sex couple.
On the other hand you're telling the other 50% that they do not deserve a right. All of them.
So - that "some portion" it's not the same in size.
<rant>And if you ask me, which I admit: you didn't, the portion that believes that they should be able to deny other people a right they benefit from, can pack up an go. The inability of emphasizing with others would make them horrible software designers and developers.</rant>
> On the other hand you're telling the other 50% that they do not deserve a right. All of them.
This sounds compelling, but what happens when you apply it to other issues? What will you say to the "taxation is theft" camp when they demand the right to the fruits of their labor and don't want them to be used to wage unnecessary wars?
Or are you fine with capitalists firing anyone who advocates for taxes to continue to exist?
Are you seriously equating slavery (human right) with voting on definition of marriage (social construct)? Do you think being against brothers marrying their sisters also dead wrong?
> Human rights don't depend on how many people support them.
This is _absolutely_ true! However, the con 50% in this argument argued that "marriage as the union of M persons who X each other" (the pro side doesn't agree on what `M` and `X` should be) isn't a human right, but that "marriage as the union of two persons who are of the kind of persons that can procreate with each other" is. Only one side can be right as to what the basic human right is.
Marriage is a state sponsored contractual arrangement between two natural persons. It has nothing to do with procreation, gender or sexuality in terms of its state sponsored advantages.
Reference to the historical record shows that marriage in feudal times was a merger of families and was not practiced by those without economic power to protect.
My personal belief is that if any number of people wish to form a communal partnership for mutual benefit, they should be free to do so.
The government has chosen one particular arrangement, that of two individuals, and has pre-defined contractual rules regarding the mutual benefits, the protection of assets and of the results of pregnancy (ie children, inheritance etc) of either party to the contract.
It also imposes responsibilities on parties to that contract, in particular their responsibilities for those children.
Other laws, in particular, basic law, says that natural persons are, to quote one popular document, "are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights". That same basic law embodies the encapsulation of additional axioms, one of which is that "all people are equal under the law".
All of the rest of the "marriage debate" is irrelevant to the underlying legal situation.
And there we come down to the root of the issue - you define marriage as "a state-sponsored contractual arrangement between (at the moment) two natural persons". I define marriage as "a union of a man and a woman that establishes a family and which precedes, in time and in causality, the state". As I said, only one of us can be correct.
If law is the application of rightly-ordered reason to the task of achieving the common good (as I hold) then the _nature_ of marriage determines and limits what kinds of benefits, advantages, limits, and restrictions the state may place upon people. If I'm right, then what marriage and family _is_ matters a lot (and where we should focus our discussion). If we only care about marriage as an act of power carried out by those with the most capability for force, then obviously this is all academic and whatever happens is whatever happens and why get hot under the collar about it?
In the workplace, employees have (broadly speaking) a _legal_ right to be free from discrimination on the basis of protected grounds. If your boss (or their boss, or their boss, etc.) makes it clear they don't support that: that's not a political statement, it's workplace discrimination / harassment.
That a stance against marriage equality happens to overlap with political fault lines is _entirely beside the point_.
>If your boss (or their boss, or their boss, etc.) makes it clear they don't support that: that's not a political statement, it's workplace discrimination / harassment.
I am going to speak plainly. I don't think people in the Valley really believe this argument. Political opinion is a protected class in California yet people feel free to create a hostile work environment for Trump supporters. It feels like there a set of right answers and you can say the right answers or shut up.
> I don’t have to (and do not) agree 100% with my CEO’s political views; that doesn’t impact his ability to lead nor my ability to execute.
If it was only views, I might agree with you. However, it wasn't just views. It was action. And it's easy to see how action can impact a CEOs ability to lead a team of people. Furthermore, we know for a fact in this case, it did literally affect his ability to lead and execute. This isn't a debate. It happened.
Simply put, he could not do his job effectively. So he stepped down. Others will say he was fired, but you can only think that if you think Eich lied.
Well, and yet here we are in a thread that is essentially about how Mozilla collectively failed to do their job under Eich's replacement. It may be obvious that a CEO with a political stance that is anathema to some subset of employees will impact productivity negatively, but it is far less obvious that this negative impact would have been worse than the negative impact of the CEO they wound up with (and who it stands to reason was chosen on the criterion of not being close to Eich politically, rather than anything else).
This only makes sense if you start with the assumption that anyone with any conservative views is fundamentally broken as a human being and they need to be 'fixed' before they can be treated equal to the other 'normal' people.
But do you and all your colleagues agree on everything with all your bosses? If so, how do you know?
What if the boss eats meat or prefer cats over dogs, while you (or other employees) do not?
Please don't reply with "are you comparing [X social cause] with eating meat?", because for some (not me), eating meat might be more important than [X social cause].
One could make an equally (actually more) compelling argument that anyone supporting (state-subsidised/recognised) marriage is being very discriminatory towards asexuals, polygamists, people who for any reason are unable to form a monogamous partnership.
George Bernard Shore:
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.
I'm still a FF evangelist though it is getting harder by the day.
Eich should have realized that his actions as CEO of a highly visible entity would be viewed in a different light than if he were merely just another nobody. Missing that was his crucial mistake, he could have made the donation anonymously, but decided to do it in his own name making it a given that this would be associated with Mozilla. That was stupid.
But as it was he could have simply apologized and hunkered down, I suspect (based on board members' and Eichs' own statements) that it was the pressure from the employees that made him decide to resign.
Whether a proposition has a 50/50 split or not does not matter, if half your country is made up of bigots that doesn't mean that it isn't bigotry, it just means that you have a very large problem.
He wasn't CEO when he made the donations in 2008, of course. Nor was he CEO when the donations came to light in 2012. Everyone at Mozilla knew about them when he was appointed CEO.
> I suspect (based on board members' and Eichs' own statements) that it was the pressure from the employees that made him decide to resign.
I worked on Firefox from 2000 and full time from 2005 to 2016. Your suspicion is completely wrong. All employees I knew, mostly on the engineering side, were happy with his appointment or at least didn't express any wish for him to step down. That includes the gay employees I knew.
The only Mozilla group that I know of who expressed a desire for him to step down were a handful of people in the Mozilla Foundation (who would not have been part of Brendan's org since he was CEO of the Corporation). They went public with it and got a big PR splash, which I think spawned this meme that there was a clamour of Mozilla Corp employees demanding Brendan's resignation. There was not.
You have posted many comments in this thread but apparently you weren't there and you aren't aware of basic relevant facts. Please show some humility.
The basic relevant facts that I'm aware of are those as reported in the various media and written up from the statements of the participants on the matter.
If those are not to be taken as authoritative then I think we may as well shut down HN because there is nothing that can be debated past that point.
I'm sure there are interesting and probably quite relevant details to be had but your word - an anonymous HN contributor to me - does not weigh as heavy as Eich's own statements on the matter.
Maybe it is you that should show some humility? Or maybe you should attach your name to your profile to show that you actually were in the board room at the time that this was decided. If Eich wanted to record a different history then he was entirely free to do so.
I clearly remember his statement of regret at the time, it seemed sincere as far as I could see and I think that he should have been given a fair chance, but I also understand how he may have decided to step down.
There are lots of stories about what happened in that boardroom meeting, all of them more or less plausible, until the participants speak up to contradict it I will stick to basing my views on the official version.
Eich wouldn't say he wouldn't do it again. He said he was doing a great job as CEO after days on the job.[1] He expressed "sorrow at having caused pain" not regret or apology. He said he wanted to be held accountable but not how.[2] I can understand how it was too little too late for some people.
Fair point. I've updated my HN profile. I'm Robert O'Callahan, formerly a Mozilla Distinguished Engineer. I wasn't on the board, but my claims are not about the board.
Pleased to meet you digitally, and thank you for that.
There are some articles which I've linked elsewhere which quoted some Mozilla employees at the time, which seemed pretty strong evidence to me (names, dates). Of course that is a fraction of the workforce there and it could have easily been blown out of proportion but there were at least some employees who thought like that.
Yes, I replied to your comment in which you linked to such an article. That is the "only Mozilla group that I know of" I referred to. It is worth noting (again) that those people were employees of the Foundation, not the Corporation, and so were not employees under Brendan ... a distinction that seems important, but was (misleadingly, I think) elided by press coverage and the comments of the employees themselves.
Thank you for retelling your 1st-person experiences. I had mistakenly assumed parent was at Mozilla since they spoke with authority, without using reported speech.
It's unfortunate that Brendan didn't get as robust a defense from his board as Ms. Rice got from Dropbox's at roughly the same time (and I'm no fan of Condoleeza Rice, the Bush IIs administration in general, or the "War on Terror". I believed then as I do now, that it was a wrong precedent to set)
> Missing that was his crucial mistake, he could have made the donation anonymously, but decided to do it in his own name making it a given that this would be associated with Mozilla. That was stupid.
So I guess this means no Mozilla leader should be making any private political donations at all, because if they do, Mozilla is at risk of losing half of its (US) leaders in red or blue states.
I sure hope the employees still have jobs, and if not, they have vetted their new board & CEOs past donations.
> Whether a proposition has a 50/50 split or not does not matter, if half your country is made up of bigots that doesn't mean that it isn't bigotry, it just means that you have a very large problem.
Do those employees/volunteers feel equally strongly about their "bigoted" user base? Or are they more morally flexible since that directly impacts their incomes?
> So I guess this means no Mozilla leader should be making any private political donations at all, because if they do, Mozilla is at risk of losing half of its (US) leaders in red or blue states.
That's part and parcel the strategy of the left, shifting the Overton Window of what you're allowed to support publicly until anything representing traditional conservative values is safely out of range.
> That's part and parcel the strategy of the left, shifting the Overton Window of what you're allowed to support publicly until anything representing traditional conservative values is safely out of range.
I strongly disagree: political polarization is not limited to the left. The right has used similar polarizarion and smear campaigns for decades in order to turn out single-issue voters: any politicians who is remotely pro-choice becomes anathema, regardless of the rest of their platform. Hillary Clinton was so effectively smeared, in 2016 a lot of voters disliked her, but couldn't articulate why. Since Reagan, the political Overton window in the US is has been sliding rightwards - not left.
Wow. I am surprised to see someone here such misleading and uncharitable claims. What is your definition of mass murder? What evidence do you have that the right has a strategy of it aimed at black people?
Also, I assume you are objecting to restricting abortion which is a very narrow procedure to broaden to making healthcare illegal.
Trying to hold onto racism, misogyny, and homophobia as “traditional conservative values” is the problem here. There are plenty of conservatives that aren’t in that particular boat.
> Trying to hold onto racism, misogyny, and homophobia as “traditional conservative values” is the problem here.
Repeatedly framing opposing views as "racist", "misogynist", "homophobic" is a perfect example of this. Let's not speak up lest we get labeled with one of those.
I'm not aware of anything in this thread that has anything to do with race and yet that's the first word in the triumphant trio of your counters.
> I'm not aware of anything in this thread that has anything to do with race and yet that's the first word in the triumphant trio of your counters.
They tend to go together. I'll be happy to bet that a large fraction of the Eich defenders in this thread are just using him as a proxy because they sympathize with his viewpoints, and that you will find a disproportionally large overlap with the other viewpoints mentioned above.
>They tend to go together. I'll be happy to bet that a large fraction of the Eich defenders in this thread are just using him as a proxy because they sympathize with his viewpoints, and that you will find a disproportionally large overlap with the other viewpoints mentioned above.
That's as may be. However, as someone who is significantly to the left of the Democratic Party on many issues, not least being that no one has the right to tell other consenting adults who and how they should love, I was left feeling somewhat uncomfortable with the firestorm over Eich's financial donations to a particular cause.
I'll expand on this as I don't wish to be misunderstood. I vehemently disagree with the idea that the government should restrict how, and with whom, we create and maintain relationships. That applies to all relationships, whether they be romantic, platonic, familial or business.
Given that Eich's donation to an anti-Prop 8 group goes against that belief, you'd think that I would applaud Eich's humiliation and ouster.
But I don't. While I certainly wouldn't invite Eich into my life or home because he is clearly not on the side of liberty and individual rights, I do not believe he should be judged on those stances in his professional life.
There is a difference between the personal and the professional, although they have been blurred (both incidentally via social media, and deliberately by those who seek to dehumanize those who disagree with them -- and that's not a right/left thing) in recent years.
Eich's performance as CEO of Mozilla should have been viewed by his statements/actions as Mozilla CEO. And unless he took steps to incorporate his personal biases into the management of Mozilla, they were of no relevance to his job as CEO.
And so, no. I completely disagree with Eich's personal homophobia. At the same time, our professional lives should be judged by our professional actions and statements, not our personal and political actions, unless there's overlap between the two.
I have no doubt that there are those who will disagree with the above. And I'm glad you do. In fact, I'd really like to hear your arguments as to why I'm wrong.
Because I believe that we, as humans, need to have our ideas, viewpoints and opinions challenged on occasion. Even more, just because someone disagrees with me, doesn't make them my enemy or a bad person.
IMHO, demonizing/dehumanizing those who disagree with you is not a reasonable response. Engaging in discourse so that the best ideas can rise to the top, ala Mill's Marketplace of Ideas[0] is a much better response.
In that light, please feel free to disagree with me. When you do, I'd only ask that you keep in mind that I'm human. With my own thoughts, ideas, biases and experience. I don't need to have everyone agree with me. Rather, I want others to consider what I have to say, just as I consider their thoughts and ideas.
That's a pretty balanced viewpoint, the only reason I disagree with it is that Mozilla went out of their way to appear as a progressive employer and player in the marketplace, to then hire a CEO as Eich makes light of that commitment. If Mozilla were any other ordinary tech company then I would agree with you. But this would be a bit like the CEO of Greenpeace going on a whale hunt for sport.
>Mozilla went out of their way to appear as a progressive employer and player in the marketplace
A fair point. Although I'd say that if Mozilla was actually being progressive, they would focus on Eich's professional decisions, not his personal ones.
Perhaps I misunderstand the term "progressive," but I see it as moving us forward in the context of our current culture/society and not as punishing anyone who refuses to conform. The former attempts to bring positive change, while the latter seems to be focused on stifling personal expression.
>But this would be a bit like the CEO of Greenpeace going on a whale hunt for sport.
I think that's a poor analogy for several reasons:
1. Mozilla is a software/technology organization, not an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. Eich's personal political views are irrelevant to running a tech organization, while Greenpeace is specifically focused on the species diversity and the environment. Apples and oranges, IMHO;
2. Not only was Eich not CEO when he made such donations, I am unaware of any anti-LGBTQ+ actions by him in any of his working capacities at Mozilla (please correct me if I'm wrong). Or that Eich ever brought his thoughts about same-sex marriage into the office;
I may be way off base here, and have no experience working at Mozilla and don't know Eich at all (although the ideas behind the Brave browser disgust me, and as such, perhaps I should just pile on and demonize him just for that).
It's pretty easy to find quite a few publications from Mozilla about their high standards and commitment to workplace diversity, they go out of their way to advertise this, one anecdote in this thread has an interesting bit from a person interviewing with Mozilla that I have never seen or heard about in any other company. They're a pretty large outlier in this respect compared to other businesses, though I suspect that Google and Apple are pretty similar in general but without the shouting it from the rooftops component.
> So I guess this means no Mozilla leader should be making any private political donations at all, because if they do, Mozilla is at risk of losing half of its (US) leaders in red or blue states.
They can, but they had better think this through. Note that money in politics is a problem to begin with, and that your regular votes are anonymous. If you decide to do so in a public way on a controversial subject then you take a risk.
> I sure hope the employees still have jobs, and if not, they have vetted their new board & CEOs past donations.
Writing this from liberal Europe, the American stance against gay marriage is very puzzling, though even here in the EU there are countries where this sentiment is still alive.
> Do those employees/volunteers feel equally strongly about their "bigoted" user base?
They typically don't know. By advertising it the rules were changed, and that was optional.
> Or are they more morally flexible since that directly impacts their incomes?
How many of the HN folk are in the MIC? How many of them are against anything other than heterosexual relationships? How many of them are racists?
We do not know. We do occasionally get a glimpse when someone deliberately or accidentally outs themselves as such and when they do so in the name of a company that tends to reflect badly on that company. Eich made his own bed and chose to walk rather than to lie in it.
Personally I think the bigger problem with Mozilla/FireFox is the lack of focus and as long as that isn't addressed it does not matter who is in the wheelhouse the only thing that it will affect is the rate at which the ship is going down. The way things are going there won't be another Google payday for Mozilla because there won't be a FireFox userbase left.
He wasn't CEO during the prop. 8 campaign. I don't think we want everyone in tech permanently abstaining from politics just in case there might be a leadership role years later.
It was close enough that it mattered, four years to be precise. If it had been decades ago it likely would have been a different matter.
Dutch proverb: High trees catch a lot of wind.
If you become a high tree, in politics or as a CEO then your past will come under scrutiny, and what is found there may very well have a direct effect on your present day life.
It's "close enough" only because you're trying to save face from your incorrect implication/claim you've repeated several times across different comments in this thread that he was the CEO when he did the donation.
It's also worth pointing out that public opinion has swung decisively and dramatically in that intervening time period--at least 20 percentage points IIRC.
It's close enough because right up until his apology Eich did not indicate in any way shape or form that he had changed his views on this. Only after it all blew up did he come with his apology. Sure, he wasn't CEO at the time he made his donation but when he stepped forward to become CEO he was well aware of his own position regarding this and knew that to effectively lead Mozilla would be impossible given his - apparently strongly held - views. At least, I'm assuming people do not donate to political causes they do not feel strongly about.
> Eich should have realized that his actions as CEO of a highly visible entity would be viewed in a different light than if he were merely just another nobody. Missing that was his crucial mistake, he could have made the donation anonymously, but decided to do it in his own name making it a given that this would be associated with Mozilla. That was stupid.
You do realize that all political donations in the US are not allowed to be anonymous right? This was years before citizens united, the only way to donate was through your own name.
Nothing you’ve said in this entire thread has made any sense, please reconsider demonizing someone you don’t know about issues you don’t understand with arguments that are false.
>Whether a proposition has a 50/50 split or not does not matter, if half your country is made up of bigots that doesn't mean that it isn't bigotry, it just means that you have a very large problem.
Morality (or what is "bigoted") is not a law of nature or an absolute, it's a societal convention (even murder is not an absolute "bad" - the US or Chinese or Saudi society deems capital punishment as immoral for example, whereas mine does not. Same for drug use or sale, and tons of other things, heck, even incest - not a big deal moraly in ancient Egypt, Westeros, and/or some parts of the rural South).
>even incest - not a big deal moraly in ancient Egypt, Westeros, and/or some parts of the rural South).
Actually, the only places in the US where incest (between adults) is legal are New Jersey and Rhode Island.[0] Which isn't exactly the "rural south," no matter what the bad jokes say.
No, it does not matter. If you are on the wrong side of history the size of the company you keep is irrelevant.
The US has no problem with capital punishment last I checked (nor do they have a problem with life imprisonment without a trial), maybe not the best example?
So basically, one shouldn't have wrong opinions, especially if they're publicly visible persons. Or rather, one is allowed to have wrong opinions (in private), but voicing them or goodness forbid, acting according to those, ist verbotten und un-Amerikane.
No, it is fine if you have wrong opinions. But be prepared to get the flak associated with those.
Nobody forced Eich to make a donation, but doing so publicly set him up for a confrontation with a substantial chunk of Mozilla's employees further down the line.
Just like a 'mild case of rape' could trip up a supreme court justice nominee. (Or at least, it should have.)
>No, it is fine if you have wrong opinions. But be prepared to get the flak associated with those.
That's not different than Stalinist Russia, the Inquisition, Nazi Germany, McCarthyism, some conservative backwater, etc.
If having "flak associated" with having wrong opinions is acceptable by your book, then those examples were all about free speech too. Their victims just got some heavy flak for their opinions.
Or is it bad only when it involves an execution? Rest assured than in most cases in those regimes an execution wasn't needed either. Most were just fired, or beaten up, or ostacized, or disallowed to advance etc., so that's ok I guess.
Doesn't even have to be the state to give "the flak". In the case of the Inquisition it was the church. And in other cases it has been an angry mob.
> If Prop8 had won, would it have been on the right side of history?
Prop 8 did win. I don't know if it is still on the books; it was rendered inoperative due to a later Supreme Court decision based, so far as one can tell, on neither the text nor the intent of the Constitution. In other words, whether one agrees with the decision or not, it was unconstitutional.
Right, fair point, but I mean, the "wrong side of history" narrative tends to presume that either in the long run, whatever side is right will win, or that whichever side wins will be the right one. I think that's a very dangerous assumption either way that should really not be made into the core of a moral argument. Argue from universal principles, argue from universal emotions, argue from social health, argue from self-interest. But don't argue from your eventual presumed victory as if that's a reason in itself.
>No, it does not matter. If you are on the wrong side of history the size of the company you keep is irrelevant.
Sorry, that sounds like something Nazis or the Maoists in the "Cultural Revolution" would say. "Wrong side of history" is historical determinism and teleologism.
Who is on "the wrong side of history" determined by consensus itself. And it can be as fickle and temporary as anything.
> But as it was he could have simply apologized and hunkered down
Apologize for what? Exercising his right to political speech? His views represented the views of 52% of the Californian voters, i.e. the majority of voters. He's supposed to apologize for, literally, "agreeing with most people?"
If employees were revolting, perhaps him stepping down was the right choice. But suggesting that he should "apologize" for having political views some employees disagree with is completely unreasonable and indicative of a bullying power play.
Eich acknowledged he hurt people.[1] He didn't just hold a view.
52% of Californian voters didn't ask Mozilla employees to trust them with their livelihoods and the culture of the company. A lot of them changed their minds by 2014 too.
Eich expressed "sorrow at having caused pain" which is not the same as acknowledging having "hurt people." This is pedantic but if we're going to talk about what someone else said, we should be precise.
I don't understand your point about 2014. Did Eich make more "controversial donations" that year?
> He declined to say he wouldn't do the same thing again.
Was he presented with a loyalty oath that he refused to sign? What do you mean he "declined to say"? Was he asked to say "I won't do this again" or do you think he should have volunteered such a statement?
In the post you linked he acknowledges having "caused pain" & affirms that Mozilla is a 100% inclusive company. Do you think he should have done more than this?
For my part, I find loyalty oaths odious & refuse to ever participate in them. I support gay rights, gay marriage etc. but if you demanded that I state my support for gay marriage upon your command, I would tell you to get lost.
CNET asked him if he would donate to a Proposition 8 cause again. He said he hadn't thought about it and didn't want to answer hypotheticals.[1]
Eich claiming he wouldn't discriminate against anyone doesn't mean much. He also claimed stripping marriage rights from same sex couples wasn't discriminatory.
I think Eich should have thought about it in the intervening 6 years like many of his fellow Californians. He should have expected his promotion would be divisive since he got a preview of the backlash in 2012. He should have felt remorse for contributing to a campaign that demonized LGBT people even if he still believed they didn't deserve equality. He should have apologized. And he should have explained how he would be held accountable like he claimed he wanted.
I wouldn't want him to pretend to apologize if he didn't mean it. He should have expected the backlash though. He could have withdrawn from consideration and just been CTO.
> Eich should have realized that his actions as CEO of a highly visible entity would be viewed in a different light than if he were merely just another nobody.
You do realize that the donation occurred years before he was appointed CEO, right?
The sequence doesn't really matter though, does it? Eich felt strongly enough about the issue to donate money to it, then moved to become CEO of a company whose main charter is diametrically opposed to such a stance. I don't see how he would have been able to do that without it coming to a head sooner or later.
Also, and this is just a general observation, whether Eich would have been a good CEO or not is a complete unknown.
The other context that's important here is that it's a political topic where popular shifted massively in the same timeframe--circa 20 percentage points IIRC.
You're basically faulting him for taking a position which was reasonable and well within the center of public opinion at the time, which had subsequently become unpopular. And completely discounting the statement he made in the meantime showing that his opinions had, in fact, evolved over time, just as it had for a large fraction of the population.
(Another thing to point out is that the board was aware of the political contribution when he was appointed CEO, and did not feel it was any obstacle.)
Sorry, but no, it being a common opinion does not necessarily a reasonable one.
And one board member did resign over this prior to his appointment.
For us here in NL (where 90%+ of the population supports gay marriage) the whole idea that this is even worth arguing over seems strange, about as strange as coming out pro-slavery would be.
I do realize the exact timing, Eich was CTO when he made the donations, was proposed to the CEO role when this was already known, accepted the nomination, one board member resigned in protest and then it all blew up and Eich resigned from Mozilla entirely 11 days later. Clearly, he did not make the donations in those 11 days.
I could have worded that comment a lot better but the intention seems pretty clear to me: Your actions as a CEO (even past actions) are going to be viewed in a different light than your actions as just another employee, even a co-founder, and what wasn't a problem before the CEO nomination quickly became a real problem, both for Mozilla the progressive entity as well as for Eich himself. Whether the donations were made several years, months or weeks before his tenure as CEO are not important.
The one thing I did get completely wrong - and which I will also acknowledge - is that I thought Eich could have legally made those donations anonymously (it was argued quite strongly during that time that this should be a possibility). I did not realize that this was illegal.
Your original comment is right there for everyone to read. In effect, what you've managed to argue here is first that the sequence of events is very important (your whole argument being that Eich "as the CEO" should have made his donation anonymously), and then, when called on that, that the sequence of events matters not at all.
Sometimes the best response to a rebuttal is just "TIL".
I'm sure Eich is smart enough to figure that one out. He could also have chosen to simply not donate given his position as CEO of a very visible entity.
He must feel pretty strongly about this subject given the fact that he could have recanted but he chose to walk instead.
Fair enough, at the time he was 'just' a co-founder of Mozilla and had not yet made the play to become CEO in 2014, but as recently as 2010 he made another such donation, and there is zero evidence that he had changed his mind at the time.
The term "bigot" is highly loaded, ambiguous term and we seem to be using it in some random cancel-culture way that only applies to selective beliefs and ascribing some sort of "evil" property to the individuals we throw it at. I'll even go out and say that I am a bigot because I am unreasonable about a lot of different topics and points of view that I disagree with.
Here are a bunch of variations of the definition, for your perusal.
Oxford: "a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions."
Merriam Webster: "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices. Especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance"
Cambridge: "a person who has strong, unreasonable beliefs and who does not like other people who have different beliefs or a different way of life: "
Dictionary.com: "a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion."
Collins: "Someone who is bigoted has strong, unreasonable prejudices or opinions and will not change them, even when they are proved to be wrong. "
Oxford Learners: "a person who has very strong, unreasonable beliefs or opinions about race, religion or politics and who will not listen to or accept the opinions of anyone who disagrees"
bigot : a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions (google definition).
So maybe half of the country is made up of bigots but they are from both side. The other half are those that don't have strong opinions or simply don't care.
> Free Software is an extremely left wing philisophy
That's revisionist history. Free software, and the greater "hacker" community, has historically been libertarian. It's only recently that authoritarian leftism took over.
No. Anyone should be able to support any political cause at any time.
In a free society, we do not rely on force to produce morally correct behavior, except by force of state. We rely on law instead, which conversely requires complete freedom to participate in the democratic apparatus. Anything that messes with that messes with the very heart of a liberal democracy.
Corporations do not have unlimited freedom of association anyways. For instance, we already acknowledge that corporations can't refuse to associate with people on the basis of skin color. Saying that they could, say, fire a black CEO because otherwise their KKK customers would walk out, already doesn't fly; I don't see why it should have with Eich. I think racial equality is important, but political neutrality is at least equally important, because if that fails then liberalism is fucked, and liberalism is the best guarantor of racial equality as well.
Mozilla employees, volunteers, and others used their freedom of speech to say they would exercise their freedom to dissociate from Eich if he continued to support discrimination. Eich dissociated himself from Mozilla so the others wouldn't.
Okay, let me explain that one. I know he says that, and I know Mozilla says that, but "I've decided to leave of my own accord" has simply become such a cliche that it can no longer be distinguished from firing.
In any case, this mostly just supports my view that people don't understand liberalism and why we need it. When an atheist and a christian can sit down together and have a peaceful family dinner without talking about politics, despite the fact that at least one of them thinks that it's a matter of utmost moral importance that the other change his mind, this is a miracle of social cohesion that is crucial to keeping society together. And we're losing it.
Prop 8 banned gay marriage but not gay domestic partnerships. It's a highly technical issue more nuanced than you are saying, despite the unnuanced views of many of its supporters.
If you have a country where half of the population disagrees with the other half, and each half "cancels" the other and refuses to do business with them, the country will grind to a halt.
But we are all witness to the fact that it doesn't, at least so far.
The reason why it does not is that people don't typically wear their politics on their sleeves though the divisive nature of present day politics is not helping with that. So in fact, you may be prophetic, time will tell on that one.
Life in the US is fine. I have no idea what you're talking about. I have lots of friends saying controversial things on Twitter and social media and they're not only alive but have fulfilling and happy jobs.
You are aware that they only reached that number after placing armed guards at the polling places, with large parts of the opposition in prison, missing or exile? Hitler wanted to win that "election" with a majority by any means possible, getting 43% despite all the steps he took were a slap in the face.
Then go back a year to the election of Juli 1932, before the NSDAP got into power. Despite Nationalsocialists and Communists battling it out in the streets, the voter turnout was very high at 84.1%. The NSDAP doubled its previous result and became strongest party at 37.3%.
> Then go back a year to the election of Juli 1932, before the NSDAP got into power.
And by the November elections that same year they had already lost several percent.
> Despite Nationalsocialists and Communists battling it out in the streets
Paradoxically Hitlers campaign at that time ran less on antisemitism and more on restoring law and order as well as fixing the economy. Communism and the near endless pool of unemployed it could recruit from was the great enemy of the moment.
That's a hell of a controversial claim, it's still pretty hotly debated among historians. You could perhaps say that people used the treaty as a scapegoat, but as for Versaille being the actual cause, not so much.
> I have a problem with characterizing Brendan Eich as a bigot for donating to a non-fringe political group
Bigotry is not how, and never has been, a fringe position in the US. If you have a problem acknowledging that...well, it doesn't make it any less true.
That's great, but those of us who were directly affected by his actions—funding a group specifically intended to focus on ensuring we were prevented from accessing certain rights—will probably just dismiss this rather privileged view.
> a bigot for donating to a non-fringe political group. IIRC, the proposition campaign he donated to had close to a 50/50 split in support for/against
What?
What does people's support for a proposition that denies rights to homosexual people do to make it less discriminatory? What if it's worse? "You're not being discriminated against, because 80% of the population are in support of you being discriminated against". This makes no sense.
>I don't think you'll be able to attribute that quote to me. Eich fucked up, and should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other
Who asked Mozilla to be a "flagship of diversity"? What we wanted off them, and what their mission statement was, is a FOSS browser that supported the open web.
Plus, one can be/believe whatever on their personal life, as long as they don't bring it to the office.
Not to mention that penalizing people because they supported one side in a public vote is anti-democratic.
Let’s say that I’m a top notch software engineer working at Mozilla being paid half as much as I could be making at any other Big Tech company because I believe in the mission. Would I believe in the mission if my leadership opposed my fundamental right to be with the person I loved or would I go to one of the other tech companies that are always screaming diversity and pay more?
What side of the fence do you think Eich landed on when it came to health benefits for same sex couples?
Actually there is an "equal except for". Isn't that a pretty trivial concept for a software engineer?
Here's pseudocode that can be expressed in tons of languages:
func compare(a, b) {
if typeof(a) == "marriage" and typeof(b) == "marriage": return false;
return true;
}
Ironically, as we're speaking of Brendan, here's a trivial real-life example where this is the actual behavior: in JS all numbers are equal to themselves, except NaN.
> typeof 1
'number'
> 1 == 1
true
> typeof NaN
'number'
> NaN == NaN
false
In any case, it's quite possible for someone religiously motivated to think of marriage as some "holy" union that is only allowed between men and women because the Bible said so or whatever -- but otherwise have no issue with gay civil rights and would be ok with some civic contract with the same exact terms and rights, as long as it's not called "marriage". Marriage being one of the "sacred mysteries" in many versions of christianity and so on.
Well, if he believes that sane sex marriage is a “sin”, it’s his prerogative not to marry someone of the same sex. But why force his religious views on other people?
>But why force his religious views on other people?
Because religion is also a theory about how society should live, what is sacred/holy/profane/immoral/etc, not just what someone believes for themselves.
Plus, in a sense, he doesn't force his religious views on other people. He asks other people not to step on his religious concept (the marriage as a specific sacred mystery / holy union with specific rules, etc).
Now his objection might be outdated, but it's not some outlandish idea the "beyond the pale" kind, like being in the KKK. Just a few decades ago (not in some ancient ages) most of the US (not to mention the global population) would have agreed with this, including many progressives otherwise. Heck, it wasn't even one of the major demands of gay activists themselves back in the day.
Not allowing same sex marriage steps on some people's religious concepts. Allowing mixed race couples or heathens to marry steps on some people's religious concepts.
Should a priest be allowed to refuse to wed gay couples? I think so. They can go find another priest, so it doesn't mean I am against gay marriage. I just don't see why we should force people to do certain things in their religious ceremonies. Other than that marriage is just a join table, it means nothing so there is no reason to forbid anyone from doing it.
Instead of arguing about whether priests are forced to marry gay couples now (they are not, and this is an easily verifiable fact), I think a more interesting question is - what principle is it that says it's ok for priests to deny marriage to same-sex couples?
In other words, can you please explain why priests should not be forced to marry gay couples? "Force" is a loaded word, of course - I'm not necessarily talking about armed agents going into a church and demanding that a priest perform a marriage ceremony, but rather referring to the full range of coercive actions available to the federal government. For example, if a church refuses to perform same-sex marriages, why should they get tax-exempt status?
Nobody asked, but Mozilla took (and still takes) that role. Witness plenty of comments on HN from Mozilla employees reinforcing that.
I'm all for the FOSS browser company, the 'support for the open web' is already a step in the direction of losing focus. Just keeping up and having a viable alternative browser out there keeping Chrome at bay is a major job (and one they are currently miserably failing at).
> Not to mention that penalizing people because they supported one side in a public vote is anti-democratic.
Actually, it isn't. Actions have consequences, if Eich wanted to be a contributor to that cause he could have done so silently. By doing it in a publicly visible way as the CEO of a large company he made it a political statement and action begets reaction. Eich very explicitly brought his views into the office in a way that a substantial fraction of Mozilla's employees did not want to be associated with.
Besides that, money in politics is anti-democratic.
I've broadly agreed with you in this thread, mostly, but I have to say that last year one of the interview questions I was asked in a Mozilla interview was "What are you personally doing to encourage diversity?"
I felt that that was just a bit hamfisted. All my adult life I've been a feminist [insomuch as a man can be one] and supported this cause. But I had no idea how to answer that question, or I'm pretty sure my answer wasn't satisfactory to the person asking.
I would not work for Mozilla for that reason alone. I don't think such a question has a place in a job interview. I also would never ask such a question of an applicant. TMC is a pretty diverse group but we are so by accident, not by design and we take people on merit, not on their level of activism.
> "What are you personally doing to encourage diversity?"
What? Are you serious? After browsing through the comments, this here is what really ticks me off and solidifies that mozilla/firefox is in a rotting place right now. sad.
Yeah, serious, I mean I don't disagree with the overall goal of improving diversity in our industry. It's not really improving on its own. But as an established white male who is just an engineer, not a manager or HR staff or director of any kind, etc. almost anything I say in response to that question will just come across as patronizing ("some of my best friends are woman or minority engineers!")
I suspect the right answer could be: get out of the way. I did, they hired someone else. I dodged a bullet.
I don't think this embrace of social justice stuff has much to do with Mozilla's rot, BTW. Any business without a clear profit/success model and a reasonably sized workforce will just crumble under empire building and competing agendas. The "SJW" stuff is only notorious in our community because of the way the Eich stuff went down.
I would have been willing to work for half of what I am now to help make the open internet succeed (well, also to work from home, and to get to work with some friends, and with Rust, and other perks). But that whole interview really soured me. I dodged a bullet anyways.
> Actually, it isn't. Actions have consequences, if Eich wanted to be a contributor to that cause he could have done so silently. By doing it in a publicly visible way as the CEO of a large company he made it a political statement and action begets reaction. Eich very explicitly brought his views into the office in a way that a substantial fraction of Mozilla's employees did not want to be associated with.
He didn't bring his views into the office. He had them outside and the alphabet mob lit them as a Molotov cocktail and threw them into the building.
Those employees could have quit and worked somewhere else too. In a lot of ways that would have been great as they could have cut down on a couple of the pointless projects.
By your standard it's impossible for anyone to both have public views that disagree with your own and be the head of any large organization.
> Besides that, money in politics is anti-democratic.
Money in politics is the great equalizer. It's as democratic as it gets.
Otherwise you end up with a handful of media and tech oligarchs controlling all messaging.
> He didn't bring his views into the office. He had them outside and the alphabet mob lit them as a Molotov cocktail and threw them into the building.
He made a public donation in his own name to a very divisive cause. That is a political statement if there ever was one and set the stage for a confrontation with at least a sizeable fraction of the company he as supposed to want to lead.
> Those employees could have quit and worked somewhere else too.
Yes, they could have. And they might have had Eich stayed on.
> In a lot of ways that would have been great as they could have cut down on a couple of the pointless projects.
Contrary to managements' viewpoint programmers are not fungible, and you can't just drop them into each others projects on a whim. What if the bulk of those that left had worked on FireFox?
> By your standard it's impossible for anyone to both have public views that disagree with your own and be the head of any large organization.
Why do you think CEOs are normally speaking quite careful about such public statements? Precisely because there is the possibility of backlash.
Surely this isn't news.
> Money in politics is the great equalizer. It's as democratic as it gets.
Abject nonsense. Money in politics means that wealthy people get to vote many more times than poor people. An equalizer should make everybody more equal, not less equal.
> Otherwise you end up with a handful of media and tech oligarchs controlling all messaging.
> Contrary to managements' viewpoint programmers are not fungible, and you can't just drop them into each others projects on a whim. What if the bulk of those that left had worked on FireFox?
Salaries are paid in dollars and all dollars are fungible. That money could have been saved for a future date, which is coming sooner than they think, when search referrals will no longer pay the bills.
> Abject nonsense. Money in politics means that wealthy people get to vote many more times than poor people. An equalizer should make everybody more equal, not less equal.
Oh but it does. The issue you seem to be having is that you do not want anyone to hear opposing view points. If your ideas are so great they should be able to stay standing when the masses learn about alternatives.
Or are you scared that it might actually change their minds?
>> Otherwise you end up with a handful of media and tech oligarchs controlling all messaging.
> Yes, like Rupert Murdoch for instance. Oh, wait.
Yes exactly. And also like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai...
At least with the free flow of money someone working in a non-media industry can channel the fruits of their labors to pay to spread their message.
Without that ability you're limited to whatever your media masters decide to let you hear.
> Salaries are paid in dollars and all dollars are fungible.
Dollar donations made to political causes are not fungible when done in the name of the donor (as per the law). And that's the root cause. Whether or not employees would have walked or not you can not know, they very well might have because Mozilla made a big point of attracting those very people.
> Oh but it does. The issue you seem to be having is that you do not want anyone to hear opposing view points. If your ideas are so great they should be able to stay standing when the masses learn about alternatives.
I think you have your parties muddled up here and I think that you are not so much arguing for Eich's benefit as you are arguing for your own and your own views which you have made plenty visible on HN in the past. The people that don't agree with you are 'leftists'.
For instance: "That's part and parcel the strategy of the left, shifting the Overton Window of what you're allowed to support publicly until anything representing traditional conservative values is safely out of range. "
Traditional conservative bigoted values are what they are, if you want to publicly associate yourself with those then you are opening yourself up to - at a minimum - ridicule.
> Or are you scared that it might actually change their minds?
No horse in the race, so not scared. Why would I be?
> Yes exactly. And also like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai...
In other countries it is called bribery, in the USA it is normal. But that is an aberration, one that is hard to fix because both of the powerful parties in the USA are benefiting from this and effectively manage to keep out any outside contender that does not manage to take over one of the parties (like what just happened to the Republicans).
Or do you honestly believe that Trump embodies 'traditional conservative values'?
> At least with the free flow of money someone working in a non-media industry can channel the fruits of their labors to pay to spread their message.
Which effectively limits the speech of those not so privileged that they have money to spare, who - coincidentally - also happen to be the ones disenfranchised by tricks like Gerrymandering, voter identification, roll purges and a host of other strategies.
Fairness doesn't enter into it.
> Without that ability you're limited to whatever your media masters decide to let you hear.
I read manufacturing consent the year it came out.
> Dollar donations made to political causes are not fungible when done in the name of the donor (as per the law). And that's the root cause. Whether or not employees would have walked or not you can not know, they very well might have because Mozilla made a big point of attracting those very people.
And they might not have cared and moved on with their lives as well. The point of the exercise was to get a scalp to scare anyone else in an executive position from making a public donation. The end result was losing a competent executive.
>> Oh but it does. The issue you seem to be having is that you do not want anyone to hear opposing view points. If your ideas are so great they should be able to stay standing when the masses learn about alternatives.
> I think you have your parties muddled up here and I think that you are not so much arguing for Eich's benefit as you are arguing for your own and your own views which you have made plenty visible on HN in the past.
I'd argue you're doing the same in reverse.
> The people that don't agree with you are 'leftists'.
> For instance: "That's part and parcel the strategy of the left, shifting the Overton Window of what you're allowed to support publicly until anything representing traditional conservative values is safely out of range. "
You also manage to both quote my reply and misquote me back to back. I did not say, "leftists", I said, "the left", which is a standard term to refer to that side of the political aisle. Just as "the right" is a standard term to refer to the conservative side.
> Traditional conservative bigoted values are what they are, if you want to publicly associate yourself with those then you are opening yourself up to - at a minimum - ridicule.
You're free to have whatever opinions you'd like. I really don't care. If you want to label everyone that disagrees with you with terms like that it's your prerogative.
> No horse in the race, so not scared. Why would I be?
You're arguing that anyone that who disagrees with you and has the means ($$$) to promote those disagreements should not be able to do so.
People who are confident that their beliefs will win out in the market of ideas tend not to act that way.
> In other countries it is called bribery, in the USA it is normal.
So buying advertising is bribery now but operating a newspaper at a loss to continue to publish a liberal agenda is somehow perfectly fine?
> But that is an aberration, one that is hard to fix because both of the powerful parties in the USA are benefiting from this and effectively manage to keep out any outside contender that does not manage to take over one of the parties (like what just happened to the Republicans).
Interestingly Donald Trump spent less on advertising in the 2016 primaries than his opponents. IIRC, Jeb Bush spent something like $120M for 3 primary electoral votes and Hillary Clinton spent $1.2 B (yes billion!) in the general election (double Trump's amount). Now that is trying to buy an election.
> Or do you honestly believe that Trump embodies 'traditional conservative values'?
Ha! Not at all. But I believe he's done more to promote conservative ideas and ideals than any other politician of the past thirty years.
In particular reshaping the federal bench and the SCOTUS will have a lasting impact for the next 30-40 years.
> Which effectively limits the speech of those not so privileged that they have money to spare,
Breaking news, people with money can spend it more freely than people without it!
They also get to eat better food and live in safer neighborhoods. There's a lot of advantages to having money and there's not necessarily something wrong with it.
> ...who - coincidentally - also happen to be the ones disenfranchised by tricks like Gerrymandering, voter identification, roll purges and a host of other strategies.
Okay so now that you've given up on arguing against freedom of expression you're trying shift the topics.
> I read manufacturing consent the year it came out.
>You also manage to both quote my reply and misquote me back to back. I did not say, "leftists", I said, "the left", which is a standard term to refer to that side of the political aisle. Just as "the right" is a standard term to refer to the conservative side.
Except what you term "the left" in the US is actually center-right on the political spectrum.[0]
I'm all about freedom of expression and personal liberty. However, I believe that government (because government is the people) has a valid role to play in creating equality of opportunity and assisting those who are, for whatever reason, having difficulty surviving in our society.
> Contrary to managements' viewpoint programmers are not fungible,
In any reasonably written project they actually are. If your experience is that they are not then you have worked with badly written and badly documented projects.
> and you can't just drop them into each others projects on a whim.
Indeed you don't want to mix and match too much. Programmers need a ramp up time and teams need time to have cohesion.
Essentially programmers are replaceable but there is a non zero cost to replacing them.
> if Eich wanted to be a contributor to that cause he could have done so silently.
He did not deliberately publicise his donation. It was not publicly known until 2012 when someone dug up the records.
> Eich very explicitly brought his views into the office in a way that a substantial fraction of Mozilla's employees did not want to be associated with.
> should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other
Is it ridiculous to suggest we should just ignore what people think and do in their private lives?
I both fully support gay marriage and couldn't give a rat's ass about what the maker of my browser thinks about it (Eich donated 1000$ to Prop 8, 12 years ago). The real problem is that you can pay to have laws changed!
These "acts of protest" like OkCupid's banner need to stop. Most likely they care as much as I do (= not), they're just preemptively trying to get on the right side of the argument, trying to win the social justice olympics, to avoid the same fate as Eich.
It's not about you and me. It is about Eich's ability to effectively lead Mozilla while being on the record about this stance regarding gay marriage. How many of Mozilla's employees are gay and/or in favor of gay marriage? If you alienate roughly 55% (possibly much more) or so of a group you are supposed to lead you have just made your life quite impossible. Eich probably did the right thing to resign, he would have had to either come around on the subject (which he did not) or he'd have to walk.
OkCupid is not a part of FireFox, they were simply trying to virtue signal at Eich/FFs expense, and the empire behind OkCupid (not the original founders) has done a lot worse than anything that Eich ever did.
That would have been easy enough to ignore. But the Mozilla employees were another matter.
Money in politics is a problem in and of itself, that doesn't mean that CEOs living in glass houses should not be aware that if they start throwing stones there will be consequences.
That is the problem, the inability of a lot of people to disagree with each other. This completely good/bad classification of people. People can be wrong about gay marriage, abortion, climate change, immigration and a lot of different issues and still be right about a lot of other things and have other virtues and be good persons overall.
Of course. But as a CEO if you decide to wear your politics on your sleeve (which nobody forces you to) then you are making a statement which will likely beget a response.
If a dutch CEO would come out to vote for Geert Wilders' PVV (our ultra rightwing populist party) I'm pretty sure that would have an immediate effect on the company and on its remaining employees.
Employees as a rule want to be associated with companies and CEOs that they feel have their interests at heart. Plenty of them can be 'bought', which is why so many terrible companies with terrible leadership flourish. But Mozilla made it quite plain that they weren't going to be 'that sort of company' and if you say that loud enough and often enough then there are certain things you should not do.
Brendan Eich chose to apply for a leadership position in an organization which wears its stance on diversity issues on the proverbial sleeve. For some Mozilla folks that I know, this stance was a contributing factor in deciding where to work. Going on public record with an opposing stance on this was obviously controversial.
Given that access to health care is a major pain point for queer people in general and health care benefits are employer provided in the US made the matter even more pressing.
So yes, if you choose to apply for a position in an org that has a public stance on an issue, choosing to wear the opposing flag on your sleeve may not be the best move. You’re however, absolutely entitled to your opinion - you just have to deal with the results of your statements.
To be clear, the blacklisting was not, in theory, over "political leanings": it was for belonging to an organization that explicitly advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. There were a lot of issues with the McCarthy era, but this detail is important and generally glossed over.
I see your point but seen in historical light, if he would have more successful (than current management) in bringing Mozilla profit, the same employees might still have their jobs.
The 'argument from alternative universe' is not one that can be won from either side of a debate. What happened happened, this is where we are. All the people here arguing that Eich should not have been ousted are making an argument that might have held up but we will never know. Maybe half of Mozilla would have resigned and then they would not have had those particular jobs either, maybe Eich would have come around after a discussion with employees that were directly affected by his donation.
But we'll never know so this is not a fruitful branch of the discussion.
>Funny you think giving gays and lesbians the same rights as everyone else in this country
I'm a straight, white male with a long-time significant other. We never got married because marriage is a religious ceremony, and we don't share those values (for example, the church's views on gay marriage). At least in my country, being married doesn't give a person any more "rights".
> Is it ridiculous to suggest we should just ignore what people think and do in their private lives?
The problem is that Eich was supposed be leading a team that prides itself for being supportive of the causes that Eich donated against. Bridging that gap became impossible once he was on public record for that.
Having any leadership position requires at least a fundamental trust of the people you’re supposed to be leading.
That is one of the core problems Mozilla has to solve. Are they a browser manufacturer or some 'force for good' (or just there to fatten Bakers' piggy bank on the way down).
It was this event that actually led me to stop caring about Firefox and allow myself to default to Chrome, and I downloaded Phoenix from Blake's blog the day he posted it.
The root of Firefox's problems start with San Francisco. It's inflated salaries and political sideshow have caused an existential threat to Mozilla.
If your opposition to gay marriage was enough to get you to throw away the benefits of Firefox, I think you're not necessarily the target market that Firefox evangelists are.
None of the code of the browser changed when Eich resigned. It still had the same pros/cons, didn't it?
Says someone who is well versed in commenting on an online forum but not an executive for a large nonprofit. Look, I have nothing for or against Baker, but the constant “she knows nothing about her job because she isn’t a programmer” is just tiresome. You don’t have to be technical to be an effective leader. However, it usually does help and you surely do need to know when your company is going under.
I've been CEO of various companies in the past, and am CEO of a much smaller company today (by choice). Not 'large non-profits' but large enough for it to matter to those around me and the people that I employ.
When COVID-19 hit the first thing I did was reduce, then totally stop my pay. This has caused me to take a significant personal hit but it means that the company now has a year and a half of runway left at the current rate of expense.
Nobody got laid off even though we are down to some fraction of our pre-COVID income. Morale is not super high because of course people are still suffering personally because of the whole affair, several people working with/for us including me have been infected, and all of our lives are significantly impacted. But we are still afloat and will get through this crisis with all hands on board and when we do I will make sure to send extra compensation to those people that took a pay cut to make this happen.
So, as one CEO commenting on the actions of another: this excuse is bordering on the ridiculous and I'm surprised that she even mentioned it.
I am not commenting on Baker, I am commenting on you commenting on Baker. Whether or not she should take a pay cut is not the question, although personally I would say that it would be good if she did even if only for optics at this point. My issue is the one where you claim she is unfit to lead because she is non-technical in your eyes: again, this is not a requirement to be a good CEO.
It is not a requirement but it certainly helps when running a technology company. I know some very good companies run by lawyers: investment funds, legal companies and a medical institution.
None of them would run their companies into the ground to maintain their executive pay because they felt that would be 'unfair to their families', this is a CEO that is so self centered that nothing good can come of it.
But besides that, Mozilla - or rather, FireFox - is an important (though now much less important) technology component and a lawyer is not going to run a company making such a component effectively because this is not a regulated industry or a financial vehicle where having a legal background might give you an edge.
When three years from now Baker will have her nest egg completed the husk of Mozilla will quietly die and Firefox right along with it whereas right now there might (and that's a very small might) still be a chance to turn this around.
Regardless of whether you think lawyers make good CEOs, this lawyer is not a good CEO for this company, witness the performance of the flagship product, recent layoffs, the company financials and their recent statements.
Why is that not a valid position to take? Sure you can have good non-specialist or non-technical leaders. Are they better or worse?
I would say without a personal understanding of the challenges of the core business, their judgement would lack that influence. This lacking will absolutely effect the direction of the org. The numbers don’t lie as to the effect.
>This CEO needs to go, needs to be replaced by someone who is well versed in technology instead of in law.
Baker was officially appointed CEO in April, though has been doing the job since December when Chris Beard resigned.
I'm very confused as to how everybody seems to have missed this. I had the first couple hundred posts opened and can not find a single mention of Beard
Previously they had appointed an excellent CEO from within that is universally well respected for his technology contributions and then they fired him after 11 days without cause. Now that guy is a CEO at a different company.
Thanks for the link, wasn't aware of the details. While I 100% disagree with him on marriage equality I don't understand why he was driven from his role that has nothing to do with Proposition 8. Why did his freedom to support a cause with his own money result in him having to resign, seems anti-democratic to me.
I don't know, man. It's easy to get all abstract with phrases like "support a cause" but we live in a concrete world. Mozilla employs a lot of gay people. Prop 8 was viciously homophobic, both in concept and especially in execution of its campaign. How would you feel going to work knowing your boss's boss thinks you don't deserve rights?
A few people commenting is not widespread support. I was at Mozilla at the time and I didn't get the impression that the views you linked were broadly representative.
And FWIW: I didn't personally feel the backlash at Brendan was appropriate, but given that it existed the outcome was probably unavoidable.
I say this as someone who, while living in Virgina and having never lived in California at the time prop 8 was on the ballot (I moved here a few years later), I donated to opposition to CA prop 8 and decided to not get married to my (opposite sex) partner out of solidarity with gay people who couldn't get married in our state.
I never felt that I should be or would be persecuted at Mozilla (which employed a lot of christians, and particularly Catholics), if it had become public that I funded opposition to prop 8. Nor, by the same token, did I think it was appropriate for Brendan to come under fire for funding support for it. I have sympathy for the theoretical argument that it might be difficult to work for someone with personal views incompatible with yours or your identity, but in practice Mozilla was an an extremely open and inclusive place that employed people of all kinds and treated them with respect. (In other words, a theoretical problem which wasn't in this instance a practical problem by any report I heard.)
Although I don't have any actual knowledge, if I had to speculate I would guess there were other Mozilla employees who supported prop 8 (many?). -- especially considering that prop 8 _passed_ with >52% support.
Even though I strongly disagreed with him on this subject (apparently! not that I'd have any way to know other than the media coverage of this), the incident made me feel slightly less safe and welcome there-- because clearly your lawful and constitutionally protected outside-of-work personal/political/religious views were potentially subject to scrutiny. Although not very much so, because it appeared clear to me that the events were primarily being driven by public noise, and not by some internal wrong-think witchhunt.
His views weren't the problem. His actions were. And not thinking his actions were discriminatory.
The CEO is the face of the company and oversees HR. Most people who objected to Eich being CEO didn't have a problem with him being CTO.
Believing different races shouldn't mix is legal. Just saying it in public will disqualify you from being CEO at most companies. Never mind funding a constitutional amendment.
In my experience it's been about a half-and-half split between managers I respect and those that I don't. It's certainly not my preference but I have worked for people who don't really respect me and, very likely, didn't believe I deserved all sorts of things (a living wage being among them).
That said, Mozilla works in a competitive environment. Perhaps it would have made more sense to wait for valuable employees to start leaving before dismissing their CEO. While I find his position on Prop 8 offensive, as others have pointed out, they are entitled to their beliefs.
If I earn $100,000 am I allowed to ask for people advocating for tax increases to be ejected from the company for being wealthophobes?
That isn't as idle a question as you might think on first glance. Denying someone marriage rights is waaay down the list of ways voters can screw each other over through government policy. Most high income earners are in companies with co-workers who literally argue that they should be less well off.
Being anti-gay-marriage is more stupid because the upside is unclear, but we expect people in the same company to put up with bigger differences of opinion on a routine basis. Different religions have gone to war in the past. I don't think many battles have been fought over official marriage rights.
Are you seriously comparing civil rights to a tax increase? Spend 10 minutes today learning about marriage and the rights it includes. I used to think it wasn't a big deal until I actually learned about it. Marriage includes hundreds of legal rights that have a huge impact on a couple's life (and death).
I one time notice that strict job descriptions are incredibly rare. I've only really seen them on factory floors. For laughs I ask a bunch of people in the same function to describe their job. Having asked this a few times it was fun to chat about how different their idea was from their colleagues. Some of them were surprisingly clueless. They thought their job was the stuff that currently consumed most of their time.
I think in programming we've learned (the hard way) that fuzzy input should be rejected. Stuff should do exactly what it says on the can. No mather how sophisticated, if a date object returns political opinion they are not parsed.
Perhaps one day we can do modular job descriptions or functional employment. Accurate task descriptions with actual specs. Well formed execution and response text. The most professional people I've worked with were already strict about what everyone's job was.
Doesn't basically everyone feel they are being denied some basic human rights all the time? Progressives are being denied healthcare rights. Libertarians are being denied property rights. etc.
Looking at from the other side of the globe, as a non-american. I get the impression that in silicon valley, technology is all about skin color, what you have between your legs and what you want to do with what you have between you legs - end of story. Those are the really important bit. Everything else is just the details.
It looks like pure politics, keep conservatives out and keep liberals in. His fault wasn't the donation. His fault was being outed as a conservative.
I think someone should try wearing a trump hat to work at a technology company for a week and see how long they last in the organization.
If you aren't in America, and you're frequenting (largely) American discussion boards, you're going to see the topics that get a lot of discussion - things where not everyone is on board with one side or the other. This of course tilts heavily toward culture issues.
Some people like to wax poetic about getting along with people with whom you disagree. But there's a difference between disagreeing on, say, tabs vs. spaces or fiscal policy or something, and disagreeing about what sort of people do or do not deserve rights. This situation clearly falls in the latter category and attempts to conflate it with the former are very unconvincing.
I'd say the answer to that is the same reason why there was a front page article the other day about which was more important: revenue stream or culture. Comments almost made it feel like people would gladly ride a company to the grave so long as they could feel good about what they haven't accomplished (making money).
How is this anti-democratic? Democracy means the reign of the people - nothing in that concept involves that corporations can't remove someone (pressure someone to step down) because of his views/actions.
To be more precise: In a democracy corporations can still be concerned with their public image and distance themselves from (particularly high-ranked) employees, if they consider them detrimental for their business.
I'll say it again: If Eich remaining CEO would have resulted in Firefox bundling a cryptocurrency (not to mention ads) like Brave does, then I'm really glad Eich left.
I'll also note that Brave went for Chrome's Blink engine, and while that calculus might have been different if he were running Firefox, it doesn't give me confidence that he would have preserved the Gecko engine.
Well, if Brendan Eich stayed CEO of Mozilla, maybe we would now have a kind of firefox/brave mixed browser.
But instead, we can choose between Firefox, and Brave. 2 competitors for Chrome, from which users can choose. So, in the end, maybe it was for the best?
Brave is just chrome with a few additions it’s much worse than a Braved-Firefox would be. I’m guessing he rightly feels he couldn’t use Firefox as his base due to the history.
"We study six browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox,
Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex
Browser. For Brave with its default settings we did not find
any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP address over
time, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited with
backend servers. Chrome, Firefox and Safari all share details
of web pages visited with backend servers."
Of course it says that he left. That's how business works. "We agreed upon parting ways, so XY can focus on other projects." It's never "we kicked his ass and threw his stuff out".
He was asked to resign by Mitchell Baker at which point he presented a resignation letter. That is an involuntary termination, which for everybody outside the "C" suite is being fired.
I founded Brave with a pay-cut to $160K/year. Note that due to my not taking anything near $2M+ salary+bonus annual comp when I was at Mozilla, I am not independently wealthy.
I'm not complaining (it was worth doing Brave on many non-material grounds), but you are disparaging out of malice and ignorance. This will not work well for you in life — my two cents!
My correction then but of course as some have said here, $160k/yr for heading the modification of an existing browser and stealing donations of those who don't claim them is considered overpaid.
That said, I wanted to use and like Brave but no gestures so I moved back to Vivaldi to support another overpaid decadent CEO. You can't seem to escape them.
Oh, and 'disparaging out of malice and ignorance', well some have made a good living out of it as we see in our current climate. Not going to name names here but I'm sure you know who I'm talking about.
"stealing donations" is a lie. Brave gave out grants to anonymous browser instances which users could direct to be tipped. For one month we had these flow into a common wallet but we were the source and sender of funds. We fixed this by making the browser hold for 90 days retrying every 30.
You are still maliciously and ignorantly defaming me, with false claims anyone can verify from open source. This reflects badly only on you. Will Rogers' advice, free then and now, applies: when in a hole, stop digging.
I'm just going on what I've read here but I think the biggest point of contention that others have pointed out is if they don't sign up for Brave's choice of proprietary monetary systems [0], including its own which it/you has a stake in, the donatee receives nothing. It seems you're trying to reinvent the wheel (browser), or rather pre-existing technology, and make a profit off of it when even decades ago a donate button worked fine without another middleman trying to shove their greedy hands between you and the donatee. You understand why this irks some people, right?
And threatening people online to basically shut up, who you view as misunderstanding, you're vastly underestimating the expected demeanor of a CEO. As a user you'd expect me to be frustrated sometimes and complain but as CEO, honestly, you should just answer the questions as it doesn't make you look professional when denigrating those who used to be in your userbase. And if anything, the fact that I among many have these questions and they've ran so rampant and unanswered even on this very tech-related forum reflects at least poorly on your company's PR department.
If the recipient does not verify in time, the funds go back to their source: our grant pool, in the case you misrepresented; the user wallet if the user actually provided the tokens.
You are the one doing the denigrating (“to criticize unfairly, to disparage”) here.
We see Eich with his own browser vision and executive style over at Brave, where he is unencumbered by legacy bureaucracy or codebases. He wouldn’t have been as free if he were at Mozilla.
The problem is that we have the person who arguably most understands the domain of web browsers, online privacy, and all the legal and ethical aspect thereof, working on another Chromium-based browser.
I do not need to elaborate on why a diverse browser ecosystem is important, there are enough threads on that already.
Mozilla had this jewel, exactly what it needed to succeed and make the web a better place. He was attacked for his personal beliefs regarding gay marriage, which went against the current popular liberal attitudes, who attack anything they perceive as against them with a fury on the scale of lynch mobs. The web, for better or for worse, gives huge leverage to whoever is willing to make the most noise and be the most unruly.
So Eich was attacked, Firefox market share plummeted, the new CEOs take home four times what Eich was taking home yet add "Pocket" and other misfeatures while funding for Rust and MDN is being cut. Instead of a 95% monoculture of a Microsoft product we now have a 95% monoculture of a Google product. But hey, the guy who doesn't support gay marriage is out of the picture, right? That's a win, right?
Sorry, but you're not going to paint Eich as a victim over what is a totally self inflicted wound.
And there is no argument from utility to be made here either along the lines of 'oh Eich may be a bigot, but look at that nice browser he gave us'. He has to work with the people around him and that scenario would have likely not panned out.
Instead, a large chunk of Mozilla/FireFox' employees may have walked if he had tried to hang on, or maybe he could have come around on the subject in a halfway believable way.
But he chose to walk instead, his loss, and ultimately, possibly our loss too.
> He has to work with the people around him and that scenario would have likely not panned out.
Or it would, since he worked with the same people before the wokefest with absolutely zero complaints from anybody. If people didn't decide having ideological purity and expelling wrongthink is more important than having a good independent browser. Well, they have their purity now. Hope they are happy. Their usage may be in the drain and their perspectives bleak, but at least nobody dares to form an unapproved opinion!
> Instead, a large chunk of Mozilla/FireFox' employees may have walked if he had tried to hang on
Or, somebody adult would explain to them it's actually ok to disagree on some subject, and that't the thing adults do sometimes. Unfortunately, looks like there's no adults in the industry anymore. Or at least not at those quarters.
Out of curiosity, do you know of any companies in your field where the CEO believes you personally don't deserve rights? Would you work for that company? Why or why not? If there is no such company, why do you feel qualified to level this opinion here?
All of the poly people I know work for companies that don't support their right to marry.
I think it's worth pointing out that the ballot prop that Eich supported actually won. It wasn't a niche belief, certainly not at the time. I don't think Eich was the only CEO in America that didn't support gay marriage. What set him apart was that he didn't do a better job hiding his beliefs.
I have no idea what's most CEO's opinions are on political subjects, and prefer to keep it that way. I would certainly work with CEO that has different opinions than I do - in fact, for all I know, I may already be.
My CEO believes only the people who have a baby should receive a bonus (a stimulus of a kind) for having a baby. Those who don't have a baby a specific year have no rights to that kind of a bonus. No group of childless people formed with the intention to cancel him.
It's obscene to paint Eich as the perpetrator of a self inflicted wound for not "coming around on the subject in a halfway believable way", for not trying to appease the mob. "Stop hitting yourself."
My understanding is that Mozilla employees protesting his politics were not actually planning to walk and were disappointed and a little embarrassed that he left. They just wanted some sort of apology.
It looks like the closest they came to working with Mozilla was porting a simple game to Firefox OS. Getting attention at the time doesn't mean they spoke for anyone else. It sounds like you don't know how Mozilla employees felt.
"My gut reaction, is that they [homosexuals] are security risks, but I must admit I haven't given this much thought…I’ll be darned!’” -- Joe Biden, 1973
How many of those that "cancelled" Eich are still going to vote for Biden?
Ignoring the very clear bias/agenda you're trying to present, the lag time of 47 years is huge compared to some other high-profile instances of people being "cancelled". Also you can apologize for something and lack sincerity, which is even more insulting.
Personally I'm not a huge fan of the intense court of public opinion of cancelling, but it's absurd to paint it both as a leftist-specific act, or that if you're a leftist then you're allowed to get away with it.
I believe in people being able to actually talk and treat each other like human beings instead of monsters. The conversation unfortunately is hyper-polarized and many people aren't willing to even engage with someone who doesn't share the same belief set, and to me that is a shame. I don't think it's fair to paint this as a left/right issue. This total lack of engagement occurs on both sides.
I'm not a Biden fan, but Biden has since been a decent supporter of LGBT rights and pushed Obama on the issue. Eich never showed any kind of contrition like that. People can change. I am friends with a number of formerly homophobic people. However, Eich, at least in 2014, displayed no evidence that he had.
Did Eich make any statements at all? I recall he was cancelled out because someone found a donation of his to a political cause. He literally just gave money to a cause.
Imagine if who you supported on Patreon or Ko-fi caused you to be harassed until you quit your job? Imagine if someone says you're a hateful bigot because you openly donated to a podcast. Imagine if a donation to the Trump or Biden campaign caused all your employees to turn against you?
If he was firing homosexuals for being gay, that would be one thing and unacceptable. I grew up around Christians who would say they find x or y morally wrong, but that wouldn't prevent them from working with people who supported x or y, or believing they were human beings who are entitled to their own opinions.
Real tolerance is accepting people who have different beliefs about core issues, and working with them despite those differences.
A piece of paper promising fidelity is a fundamental human right? At most it is a religious construct, by definition not fundamental and far from universal. At a minimum, it is a government or social formality. And in both cases, it is designed to provide stability for the offspring birthed of such a union in societies unaccepting of bastard births.
A marriage is a legal contract, not a piece of paper promising fidelity. Fidelity has not mattered legally for a while now.
Romantic pairing is a common enough human thing that it makes sense to have legal constructs to protect both parties. If you are affording these protections to opposite-sex couples, then it is blatant discrimination not to do the same for same-sex couples. There is no rational basis for making such a restriction, after all.
Legal marriage, as in a civil arrangement, isn't really a right. However, being treated equally under the law is a right.
I am an atheist and yet I am married. I know other atheists who are married. Marriage can have religious aspects, but it doesn't have to.
> Romantic pairing is a common enough human thing that it
> makes sense to have legal constructs to protect both parties.
Why does either party need protection in a romantic pairing? I've been in dozens of romantic pairings but I did the religious ceremony only with the pairing that was expected to produce children.
Wait, "pushed Obama"? So Obama actually needed to be "pushed", because he was of the same opinion as Eich? But it's OK for the President of the United States to be of such opinion, because unlike CEO of Mozilla, he has no authority over the vast giant powers of Federal Government that actually decides what is allowed and not allowed in the country... Priorities!
I'm not going to dig into this, but from other comments on this post, it seems he did make statements that walked back the position specifically regarding lgbtqqiaap+
Yeah Brave's business model always seemed incredibly scummy to me. For ad blocking arguments can be made both ways, but Brave's "let's replace them with our ads" model (I know it's opt-in) just seems like a way to hold site revenue hostage. Either join Brave's network or miss out.
Vivaldi seems like the better Chromium wrapper to me. But my daily driver is Firefox.
FF is my daily driver too, but since Google properties increasingly only work reliably in Chromium, I use Brave for those (without opting in to BAT, which doesn't appeal to me). It's not bad, works fine on Ubuntu, built-in adblocking (but you can install uBo etc.)
He would've had an iconic brand, elite staff, an established business model & userbase, etc. I'd posit he'd have been a much better technology focused CEO then the leaders of Mozilla's current titanic trajectory into obsolescence.
Instead of Brave where he's having to build a product, brand & userbase from scratch & try to force a niche unproven VC business model with Brave.
FWIW, Brave's VC funding is < 10%. No "VC business model", whatever that is, either — I carved nature at the joint using science, proceeding from ad/tracker blocking and reconnecting the necessary parts of the Web's funding ecosystem via crypto.
Yes, that is legal. But what matters is control of the board and how the structure of the foundation is set up. With six voting board members assuming things like who is the CEO of the company is something that they are allowed to vote on (it normally would be) she could technically be out of there tomorrow. But this is politics, it is not a merit based affair and there is a fair chance that two or more of the board members are beholden to Mitchell and that would protect her from any attempt to oust her.
Common in the US, but viewed as bad corporate governance elsewhere. A separation of the roles has been a recommendation in the UK Corporate Governance Code since 1992, for instance.
Not just member, Mitchell is chair of both the parent (Mozilla Foundation) and wholly owned subsidiary (Mozilla Corporation) boards. This is unusual, in my experience.
This is my kneejerk but why do a CEO ever has to be replaced by an engineer?
I mean, when company fails, isn’t the cause that the corporate failed to lead the company, right? They sucked at their job, not at someone else’s job.
Letting managers pretend their lack of some stinky nerdy ability outside of their job description was the direct cause of their failure don’t sound right to me.
The cancel culture surely goes both ways here - Eich was working actively to cancel the marriages of certain people he didn't like. So people cancelled the browser in retaliation and he had to quit his job (or was forced out, who knows).
Most people would probably think it is worse to get their marriage annulled than to lose a job, but YMMV.
If I read the “Appointment to CEO, controversy and resignation” section[1] of Brendan Eich's Wikipedia page then it appears he was cancelled:
- employees publicly speak out, telling him to resign
- widespread media reporting
- an online campaign to have him removed starts
- “online dating site OkCupid automatically displaying a message to Firefox users with information about Eich's donation, and suggesting that users switch to a different browser”
- “CREDO Mobile collected more than 50,000 signatures demanding that Eich resign”
- Eich resigns
I'm not sure how that could be anything other than part of cancel culture, other than it being ahead of the current trend by a few years.
There isn't anything in there about "employees publicly speak out". Some board members (not employees) stepped down but IIRC they did not actually speak out and call for Brendan to resign.
Everyone on that list worked for the Mozilla Foundation, and would not have reported to Brendan as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation (which made that tweet misleading at best). I referred to that group already in the comments here.
AFAIK no Mozilla Corporation employees spoke out publicly in this manner, and internally I did not hear any such sentiments from Corporation employees. On the contrary, a lot of Corp employees expressed anger at that Foundation group ... not because they supported Brendan's Prop 8 position, but because that Foundation group poured fuel onto a fire that was doing great harm to Mozilla.
Mozilla employees were very much against the hatred directed at Eich.
There was even a blog post from a homosexual woman who worked for Eich, where she said what a great boss and friend he had always been to her, how well he treated everyone including gay employees, and how much the hatred directed at him was misguided.
The logical conclusion we have to make is that a political donation or opinion does not necessarily indicate bigotry.
There is an obvious selection bias in support for the boss though. If you like your job it is not smart to publicly speak out against your boss. Perhaps especially if you belong to a group the boss may have some grudge against.
There's also another selection bias against talking in support of somebody who's being cancelled by an internet outrage mob. Perhaps the only reason anybody would feel safe in doing so is if they were a member of the group the mob was purporting to be outraged on behalf of.
Yes, and I'd argue this is the strongest form of selection bias in such circumstances -- and the one that takes the most courage to avoid falling to.
First they came for ... and I didn't say anything.
Then they came for ... and I didn't say anything.
...
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
When people select themselves out of speaking up for others because of fear, the purity/outrage spiral can get out of control.
Good point - the pressure goes both ways. Supporting an ousted boss and thereby criticizing current leadership is also risky.
I think the real problem was that Mozilla had built a strong community support on representing certain values and freedoms in contrast to Microsoft (which was the dominant competitor at the time) as being perceived as more trustworthy. Firefox only became successful because lots of supporters advocated it and web sites made an effort to support it.
But this support only exist as long as you are perceived as honest. During his week (?) as CEO Eich (and other Mozilla spokesmen) emphasized that Mozilla as an employer recognized same-sex marriages and provided equal benefits to same-sex spouses. The CEO clearly disagreed strongly with this policy, but at the same same swore to uphold it. Who cares if he believes in it then, right? But it clearly shows that the leadership does not actually care about the values they espouse, which is a broader problem that this particular issue.
I don't really think a browser or other software should have a stance on marriage equality. But the fact remains that Mozilla as organization and employer did have a stance, and the CEO disagreed with this stance - but claimed it wouldn't matter at all.
If the mission of Mozilla has just been to make money, nobody would have considered it problematic. But then again it would never have become successful in the first place without the community support, based on trust.
I think that’s the sort of perverse reasoning that gets you into a purity spiral in the first place. I disagree with plenty of things, morally or otherwise, why would that mean I don’t think other people shouldn’t be able to make up their own minds, and decide for themselves how to live their own lives? The premise of this seems to be that anybody who has a stance on anything can not be expected to tolerate anybody else having a difference stance. I can see how the people of Silicon Valley might come to expect that, but it’s not normal.
But a CEO is expected to lead representing certain values. Often a CEO is chosen exactly due to their values and expected to further them through leadership. You would also think it was weird if the Mozilla CEO was funding campaigns against open standards or open source. Whatever your personal stance on marriage, Mozilla as organization had one stance which the CEO strongly opposed. So it would not be crazy to expect he would want to change their policies.
The damage control strategy was to insist that his values would not affect Mozilla, which is kind of a weird stance to have as CEO.
> would that mean I don’t think other people shouldn’t be able to make up their own minds, and decide for themselves how to live their own lives?
In this context it is worth noting prop 8 was exactly about preventing other people from living their lives a certain way. There is a big difference between disagreeing with somebody life choices and then to actively try to destroy their marriage!
> This CEO needs to go, needs to be replaced by someone who is well versed in technology instead of in law.
i wonder how things would have turned out if mozilla was some kind of cooperative instead of top-down traditional structure
ceo chosen from someone who actually worked there, or brought in from outside, would they have chosen someone different... in this case, would they have already voted them out?
> This CEO needs to go, needs to be replaced by someone who is well versed in technology instead of in law
There are people who are well versed in both. There are several HN posters for instance who are or have been both lawyers and engineers (although I can't recall any specific names at the moment).
I think the big problem is that Mozilla/FireFox receiving money from Google served essentially as a bribe that allowed Google to pull a bunch of anti-competitive behavior that cost FF marketshare.
If not for that we could have easily seen a repeat of Netscape vs Microsoft, but it is hard to consciously decide to bite the hand that feeds you, especially when it is connected to the proverbial 800 lbs gorilla.
I suspect FF would have lost marketshare in any "under Eich" scenario too, maybe not as fast and maybe he would have re-focused the company earlier.
But that's all water under the bridge we are where we are today.
The first year of Chrome's release, I absolutely hated it, not because of the browser itself, but because it felt like a shot to the gut of Firefox and open source development in general.
This is an extraordinarily easy view to take from a position where your boss isn't proudly making an effort to try and prevent you from gaining access to certain rights.
I reckon if everybody who felt like chipping in with their lazy armchair analysis of "SJW mobs ruining Firefox" instead spent their time fixing a bug or two, then maybe they'd be happier with the state of the browser they claim to love so much.
You're right in that he's views are very "20th Century". I don't agree in witch-hunts and the way he was dealt with by the mob (as is very common in today's Western society).
I'm very happy with the state of the Firefox software, and have in the past contributed finanically to Mozilla (not anymore :().
The portrayal of this situation as a "witch-hunt" or being "dealt with by the mob" is a good demonstration of how you personally are contributing to this problem.
I'll say it again – it's easy to portray something as a "witch-hunt" when you personally have nothing at stake. I'm sure it seems pretty abstract, to be honest – a nice and easy thought-experiment about how we should all have respect for everybody else's views and all that.
On the flip-side, we're talking about a situation in which somebody was happy to campaign to prevent a number of their own employees and other people in the wider community from gaining a set of rights. Eich was an active participant in trying to disadvantage me, personally. This is something that I would consider unacceptable for an organisation I would support, and others feel the same way. They are entitled, and should be encouraged, to express that view.
We will each draw our own lines in terms of what we consider to be acceptable behaviour from public figures. Most people would probably object if Mozilla were to appoint a CEO that promoted some other controversial cause – say, mandatory deportation of all non-white Americans. I doubt you'd cast objecting to that appointment as a "witch-hunt".
Personally, I consider funding a campaign against same-sex marriage to be behaviour I'm not willing to accept. And you consider this to be behaviour that you are willing to accept – that is, in this case the benefits of appointing a particular CEO outweigh any concern about the views they hold. It would be way easier for you to be honest about that than to pretend this is anything other that a group of people who don't agree with you.
I didn't sign up to fight a huge internet fucking hate mob.
Dudes an out and proud homophobe and accepted a position of public interest in California. That was always going to be a showdown between the only the tech matters and social justice types. There's no way he didn't know it and there's no way the board members didn't know it. A board member resigned about it before he took the position.
He signed up for and was sent out of the gate as a champion for team tech only and promptly fled the battlefield. Team tech only refuses to accept their defeat.
CEOs tend to have a pretty thick skin. If you think it is a fun job you should try it for a while. And it didn't stop Eich from starting up another company.
Besides that, he wasn't forced out, that part of the narrative is simply false. CEOs have been - rightfully, in many cases - accused of far worse than this and have sailed through just fine. That said, if my employees en-masse demanded that I resigned I might have done so as well. After all, the internet hate mob is easy to ignore but the employees you work with every day are not.
No one working for me demanded I resigned when I was at Mozilla. Six people working for the Mozilla Foundation, under separate management up to a separate board with only the board chair in common between the Corporation where I worked and the Foundation, did tweet demands.
Well, to be fair, he contributed $1000 to a huge real-life fucking hate mob.
Ramble on about 'SJWs' or 'cancel culture' or whatever if you like, but the fact is that social actions have social consequences, and this is an example.
But this kind of consequence is just way over the line. We have a legal system where everyone sat down and agreed on very clearly defined appropriate consequences, while cancel culture is just emotionally driven people taking matters into their own hands, not really different from medieval witch hunts.
You do have a legal system, but nobody in this situation did anything illegal. Clearly what "everyone sat down and agreed on" is insufficient, when both sides are saying that "thing X the other party did was legal but inappropriate".
But they are (attempting to) use ballot initiatives to deny civil rights to certain people, which if anything is worse than getting people fired.
Bottom line: if you contributed to Proposition 8, you did a bad thing, and it needs to hurt. Without a feedback mechanism of some sort, the original 'cancel culture' -- the one that brought us the Dark Ages -- will prevail.
As a straight white cis-male, I have no dog in the fight. But I know right from wrong, and Proposition 8 was wrong.
Proposition 8 did not go through because our legal system was doing its job. That’s the feedback mechanism right there.
Now if you set up a ballot initiative to fire anyone who contributed to it, then that’s fair game, but obviously any remotely sane judge will deny it. (Which is also the feedback mechanism telling you you’re proposing something extremist here.) Now, circumventing the law to serve your own arbitrary version of justice? Who the hell do you even think you are? Fucking Batman?
But nobody suggested a ballot initiative to fire anybody. Not everything requires an act of government. Sometimes social pressures are, and should be, sufficient.
I suggested it, because it would be the correct way to do it, and a good way to realize you’re asking for something extreme.
The social pressures you’re advocating are not a weaker form of serving justice. They are stronger. They circumvent our legal system, they’re arbitrary, they’re simply mob justice. No one can keep them in check and indeed they frequently go too far. This is not ok.
That's rich, considering the "mob" is only asking for the same rights you and I have.
It sounds like you've made up your mind on this issue (or, more likely, had it made up for you as a child), so we'll probably have to agree to disagree.
The mob ultimately has no power, while the government does. Whoever uses force first -- or in the case of Proposition 8, attempts to -- is the bad guy.
It really is that simple. Don't want a culture war? Don't start one.
There's a difference between using force within a legal framework (Proposition 8), and using extrajudicial force (cancel culture).
And that difference is that a sane instance (the law) can reject you if you're being insane, which did happen in the case of Proposition 8, but can't happen with cancel culture.
So you're justifying the usage of extrajudicial force with an already rejected attempt to use judicial force.
And you think that's fair, and you're the good guy.
'Cancel culture' isn't force, it's culture. That's why they call it 'cancel culture', and not 'cancel force.' Funny, it turns out a lot of people would rather not do business with racists, misogynists, homophobes, neo-Nazis, and assorted religious bigots, whodathunkit.
Someone from the government showing up with a gun and telling me I can't marry a consenting adult of my choice is a much better example of the use of force.
The point is that the means used to get those rights are harassing the family members of the opposition and getting them fired.
No matter how noble your goal, this is just not how politics is supposed to work in a healthy nation. At all. Quite the opposite, this is analogous to how politics worked when the Soviets killed millions and millions of their own people in order to attain a communist utopia. Do you not see that?
> or, more likely, had it made up for you as a child
I think I've articulated quite precisely why I have my opinions.
Quite the opposite, this is analogous to how politics worked when the Soviets killed millions and millions of their own people in order to attain a communist utopia. Do you not see that?
Yes, I see that misusing government power to enforce unequal treatment for a disfavored subgroup is exactly like what the Soviets did.
Now that you've steamrolled your own position more effectively than I managed to, we're done here.
> misusing government power to enforce unequal treatment for a disfavored subgroup is exactly like what the Soviets did.
It is, which is why Proposition 8 was rejected.
> Now that you've steamrolled your own position more effectively than I managed to, we're done here.
Dude, are you seriously going to be that snide while poorly strawmanning my argument? I’m not at all saying we need to stop gay marriage via govt. I’m saying cancel culture sucks.
Turns out if most of your employees dislike you then it's going to be hard to be an effective leader! This is despite him having had many opportunities to take outs/apologize etc. He could have even lied when apologizing! He made a choice to stick to his "principles" instead. Of course you face consequences for this kind of behaviour.
This is extremely non-controversial in any other social setting, why would running a company be different? Why is being forced out for being a bad person seen as this new phenomenon when people stop interacting with people they dislike _all the time_?
right but it doesn't actually matter. He had a choice and a way to keep his job if he wanted to. People do stuff in bad faith all the time! It's not the sign of perfect morals but it's a thing one can do if they want to keep certain relationships healthy.
He actively chose between "have a good relationship with employees at Mozilla" and "stick to his guns on the issue at hand". He made that decision, and had a hell of a lot of agency in how things turned out.
Granted this was a while ago, but imagine being so committed to anti-marriage equality that you do what he did? Why do you feel the need to carry water for somebody doing that?
Just to be clear. You prefer people lying while apologizing over people who disagree with you?
Do you, at all, consider, at least sometimes, that people that disagree with you might have to say something intelligent about their position? I am not trying to defend homophobism, irrespective of the question of Brendan Eichs action or believes are homophobe, or not. But, I do believe that somebody disagreeing with me, might have something to tell me. I believe even that it is boring to talk to people with whom I agree on everything, although it is comforting and easy. There is value in communicating with people of different believes, standpoints, intellectual fields, religions, or sexual orientation or ... . Therefore, I cannot fathom how people can prefer being lied to.
Have you considered that I _have_ heard these arguments and _have_ listened to these positions, and decided the person is wrong?
In your worldview at what point can I start rejecting people's positions? Why do I have to give ground here?
"you can just lie" is a cynical position, of course, but people are faced with much larger dilemnas. I would like for people to have basic empathy and _not_ finance anti-civil rights movements. But hey, at least a public apology/fix does a bit of damage to the reactionary movement.
And maybe they are actually a different person or have reflected on their actions, and it's not a lie. Nobody's a mind reader.
And when you are directly affected/targeted by the movement that Eich is donating too, it's not just a conversation. The guy was funding an effort to take away your rights.
Maybe consider that "you have to be nice to people trying to take away your rights" is something that relatively few people would actually subscribe to.
Both he and the board say otherwise and his stance was known prior to his appointment. Hell, one of the board members resigned over his coming appointment and that wasn't enough to get the others to not back him.
They "say otherwise" because that's the polite thing to do in this situation. A "voluntary" resignation keeps everyone on good terms instead of producing an inevitable slapfight between Mozilla and Brave. The resignation was pretty clearly under duress, no matter what the official / publicly stated reasoning might have been.
His stance was known, maybe, but it wasn't until after he was appointed that the backlash ramped up to its peak.
If all of the main participants making public statements about something does not convince you that it went down the way it did then I don't think there are any arguments that would convince you at all.
> n I don't think there are any arguments that would convince you
Of course there are arguments. The arguments would be if there wasn't a huge controversy about it. But there was.
Thats the evidence that he was forced out.
If, instead, there was no controversy of note, and nobody had called for his resignation, internally or externally, then in that situation I would believe that they were not forced out.
But thats not what we saw. What we saw was a huge controversy, and we saw people, and even other companies, calling for him to be pushed out of the company.
If this evidence had not existed, then I would believe that they were not forced out.
The last CEO was Chris Beard. Eich was CEO for 11 days. He donated to Yes on 8 not a Christian organization. Donations are public. He resigned under pressure from Mozilla employees and the public. It wasn't because of a formal code of conduct.
That must be a real comfort to all the people they laid off.
This CEO needs to go, needs to be replaced by someone who is well versed in technology instead of in law.