> And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The legal world has "managing partner" as the equivalent for LLPs.
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.
If they are not, the roles should be separate.
Their patron should rectify this, but it's possible they don't care.
The 'plan' may be to kill Firefox.
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.
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.
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.
It's not good optics.
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?
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.
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.
Shuttleworth did that with Ubuntu and it's barely surviving.
What trend should Firefox ride ? And how will it keep that project a secret for long enough, Given that it's all open-sourced ?
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.
And which they have shamelessly done.
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.
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.
Netscape was not “still hugely popular” when Firefox was created. IE market share was upwards of 90%.
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.
And there are interesting parallels, Apple too was kept alive by their competitor as a fig leaf in light of anti-trust troubles.
Edit: Cal Peterson's article clearly shows how we got here. Such a shame.
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.
Could you expand on this?
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Added link to Palemoon.
Yes and in Apple's case, no one could have pulled it off other than Steve Jobs.
So basically the answer to the original question is none, zero.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
And there was me thinking he was just leading browser development.
Not only has Mozilla an overpaid management that doesn't do what it is supposed to do but the it seems that the staff fits into that same category.
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
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.
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?
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.
You do realize that you're contradicting yourself, right?
Promoting cancel culture (ousting Eich) isn't exactly focusing on tech. Generally you can only pick one or the other
The actions of the CEO and the actions of the employees are two entirely different things.
The CEO could have been just focused on tech and could have left his political flags in the proverbial closet. Instead he chose to bring them out.
Mozilla was already an entity that had made some pretty strong statements about diversity, inclusivity and their view of the open web.
If you then stir up a shitstorm you will find you can no longer effectively focus on the tech either.
So you can very well pick both: make all those statements, live by them, attract employees who see things likewise and then focus on the tech.
But that's a glass house of your own making and if you then start hurling bricks it will have a terrible effect.
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.
I highly doubt that.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Edit: Fixed spacing.
Agreed Brave is a terrible concept.
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.
Also, I am on the left.
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).
So it very much matters what the split was.
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?
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.)
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.
What does that even mean? 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.
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.
moral, not immoral
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.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/incest-laws...
Yeah, but I was going for where it's moral/casual, not for where it is legal :-)
Do you have data to support that? It may well exist, but I haven't seen anything that makes such a claim.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/atyhay/us_states_m...
He must feel pretty strongly about this subject given the fact that he could have recanted but he chose to walk instead.
He would have needed a time machine or a crystal ball, since the donation was made in 2008 and he became CEO in 2014.
Clearly it didn't work out well for him, but I'm not sure it rises to the level of stupidity so much as naïvety.
After all, he'd probably seen plenty of his peers publicly supporting other political causes without problems.
He just didn't realise the situation was "Leader of open source nonprofit, right-wing, publicly political, pick any 2"
If the political cause is to take away freedom from others, you can expect resistance.
What if he was donating to support miscegenation? Would that be over the line?
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.
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.
That's revisionist history. Free software, and the greater "hacker" community, has historically been libertarian. It's only recently that authoritarian leftism took over.
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"
You do realize that the donation occurred years before he was appointed CEO, right?
Also, and this is just a general observation, whether Eich would have been a good CEO or not is a complete unknown.
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.)
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10654651 has more on the story you are misrepresenting even on its own terms.
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.
Sometimes the best response to a rebuttal is just "TIL".
Good faith doesn't mean "be very afraid to criticize others when they lie".
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.
> 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.
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.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firestorm...
[2] https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
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.
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)
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.
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.
[1] https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
I don't understand your point about 2014. Did Eich make more "controversial donations" that year?
If 100% of Americans voted that way that would just make all of them bigoted.
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.
Saying it's not bad because it only happens to people to assert their Constitutional right to free speech is, besides not true... Orwellian.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Says who? 50% of voters?
The employees of any large organisation are bound to have differing views, particularly on divisive political issues.
Why should somebody be forced out of a role because their views differ with those of some of their 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.
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>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?
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.
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_.
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.
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.
Interesting that we've gone from "kicked our for actively opposing" to "kicked out for not supporting" in the span of just a few comments.
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].
* 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.
George Bernard Shore: Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.
Your word choice is your business. But why would a bigot become not-a-bigot because there were more of them?
Morality is not a popularity contest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you have to shut up and kowtow to the popular opinion?
Society is going to weird places.
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.
If you hold strong opinions that are counter to your company’s manifesto, you might not want to be in charge of it.
But we'll never know so this is not a fruitful branch of the discussion.
No other way to describe this contempt for basic human rights than "vice signalling"
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".
What happens in your country is irrelevant to this discussion
The root of Firefox's problems start with San Francisco. It's inflated salaries and political sideshow have caused an existential threat to Mozilla.
None of the code of the browser changed when Eich resigned. It still had the same pros/cons, didn't it?
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.
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.
Then those employees are part of the problem!
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 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.
Yes, like Rupert Murdoch for instance. Oh, wait.
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.
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.
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. "
And this thread has a perfect example of it in reply to that very comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24565502
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.
It shows.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a lie.
What side of the fence do you think Eich landed on when it came to health benefits for same sex couples?
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;
}
> typeof 1
'number'
> 1 == 1
true
> typeof NaN
'number'
> NaN == NaN
false
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.
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?
Maybe churches shouldn't have tax exempt status at all. Taxing some religious organizations and not others sounds unconstitutional though.
Because part of the whole point of a religion / creed is that you do some things and not others.
"Forcing priests" means no freedom of religion expression, one of the older democratic rights.
THAT IS "bringing it in the office"
(The point of the phrase "It was 12 years ago" being that:
(a) people change with time
(b) we should not hold things people did long ago against them forever
And thus, that a reaction "but he did X bad thing" to the suggestion of bringing Brendan back is not relevant anymore...
This must be some novel notion of "bringing it in the office"...
Note the weasel phrasing "so that his gay and lesbian employees" -- to imply that he did it specifically to target his employees.
If he gave money in favor of e.g. stricter weed laws, would he have done it to target his "weed using employees" or generally society's use of weed?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Mozilla employees did NOT support the firing of Eich. Don't use them as human shields for your assault on civility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2008/08/obama-says-...
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.
It used to be that it was OK to know and be friends with people who had different views than you. It was called "being an adult."
Now we're all in these ever-shrinking thought bubbles where if someone's views don't line up with yours 100%, they're the devil.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia couldn't be farther apart on most issues. But they were the best of friends.
We're all children by comparison.
That's a generous way to say he opposed equal rights for a minority group, some of whom he employed.
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?
"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."
See also https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff... and https://brave.com/ios-browser-first-run/.
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.
Vivaldi seems like the better Chromium wrapper to me. But my daily driver is Firefox.
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.
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?
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.
Eich was perfectly capable of working with others. He had a demonstrated track record of doing so since he co-founded Mozilla.
>a large chunk of Mozilla/FireFox' employees may have walked if he had tried to hang on
A group of people intolerant of a political difference would have left rather than continue working with him. That's the definition of bigot.
Bigot: One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.
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.
No, I meant as in genuinely doing that. People are typically capable of learning. I'm pretty sure Eich is smart enough to do so.
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.
If he had shown actual remorse for doing this, he would have been fine. But he didn't.
How many of those that "cancelled" Eich are still going to vote for Biden?
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firestorm...
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.
Look up the Popper's paradox of tolerance.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
You are the one doing the denigrating (“to criticize unfairly, to disparage”) here.
They did have a person with that profile but then he was asked to resign.
I'm pretty sure they want to milk this to the end though, there's a reason their salary skyrocketed after the co-founder, Eich, left Mozilla...
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.
Cancelling has a heavy element of being ostracised from a community and having your reputation destroyed.
- 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/mozil...
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.
I do know of Corporation employees who said they left or were prepared to leave because Eich was promoted. They didn't want publicity though.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Most people would probably think it is worse to get their marriage annulled than to lose a job, but YMMV.
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?
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).
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.
He took concrete actions to damage LGBT people. That's not just an opinion.
Well, this person already existed. It was Brendan Eich.
"Get woke go broke" Mozilla.
Sorry if I sound bitter, but I love Firefox and hate to see it loosing users.
Interesting that any comment stating this is getting downvoted. Tells it all really.
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_?
I can't believe what I'm reading here. We all have different principles. Lying whilst "apologizing" isn't really apologizing is it?
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?
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.
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.
His stance was known, maybe, but it wasn't until after he was appointed that the backlash ramped up to its peak.
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.
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.
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.