Not every bad thing that happens to someone, or every time someone is criticized counts as cancel culture.
Cancelling has a heavy element of being ostracised from a community and having your reputation destroyed.
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.
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.
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!