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Comment by IanDrake | Hacker News Reader

To me this is a win for freedom of speech and free markets. You're free to express your close minded opinion, but the market is free to reject it and you.

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The way I see it, the exact opposite happened. There was no "free market" action that corrected for a bad choice of CEO. It was a minority of people with a large voice who were able to create and control a narrative and thus force a CEO out. This is the exact opposite of "free market".

There's no need to editorialize. "You're free to express your opinion, but the market is free to reject you." Remember that a generation ago, many of the opinions that we believe are simply open-minded were unthinkable, and people who thought them faced severe rejection by "the market".

This was the opposite of a win for freedom of speech.

"Freedom of Speech" does not mean "Freedom from the Consequences of your Speech."

Actually, it does. You can't be fired from your job for expressing a political view in the state of California.

No, freedom of speech means exactly that people shouldn't be punished for speech. What else could it possibly mean?

Freedom of speech only means the government cant supress your speech.

There is no freedom of speech when it comes to the corporate envirronment, and even less when you are a public figure of a business.

So this is not a freedom of speech issue. Eich is free to say whatever he wants, and Mozilla is free to decide wether what Eich says is compatible with its CEO position or not.

I guess the Freedom of Speech many refer to is from the US Constitution which means the government cannot restrict (to certain extents) what you say or your right to believe what you are saying. Your views (in speech or whatever medium you prefer) will definitely be judged by others. It's a bit silly to assume you can't be punished (diminutive or otherwise) for the freedom to speak (your mind).

No, it means freedom from state censorship and state punishment (imprisonment for instance). The public can punish you all they want.

Well, that's a bug in freedom of speech then. Other freedoms don't work like that. They protect you from all actors, not just the state. For example, your employer can't fire you for being gay. They shouldn't be able to fire you for your political views either.

Plenty of other freedoms work exactly like that.

The freedom to assemble doesn't mean that private owners can't keep you from assembling on their property. The freedom of press doesn't mean that the editors can't censor your work. The freedom to bear arms doesn't mean that private businesses can't bar you from the premises.

Which means, in practice, that people can't necessarily use those freedoms. If most or all public spaces are privately-owned how do you exercise your freedom to assemble? Now that most of the communication channels people use are privately owned, how much freedom of speech do we really have?

Actual freedoms themselves don't work that way, just the codifications of them in the US "Bill of Rights". Given what was discovered about complexity-induced logical contradictions in the 1930's and the subsequent wholesale implementation of such, this should be considered a P0 bug.

> For example, your employer can't fire you for being gay.

There are only 21 states in which this is the case.

I absolutely cringe every time someone pulls out the "freedom from government suppression" card. Its amazing how quick people are to put the principle of freedom of speech into a box when it suits their agenda. Absolutely shameful. Freedom of speech is an idea that permeates the very core of our society. That people now want to constrain it to simply government suppression is a sad commentary of our culture.

Just about every aspect of our lives are ruled by corporations, and definitely every avenue of communication. I absolutely refuse to accept that corporations can control what is acceptable for me to say. This is exactly the road you guys are going down when you make statements like this.

"Freedom of speech is the political right to communicate one's opinions and ideas using one's body and property to anyone who is willing to receive them."

How was that taken away from him? The freedom of speech doesn't include the ability to hold onto a specific job when you exercise your speech rights. That idea is downright silly.

In a free market, the market is perfectly free to reject your products because you are a woman. It is perfectly free to reject the business of handicapped people because making the establishment handicap friendly would hurt the company's bottom line. The free market seem pretty indifferent to whatever is going on around it. In this case it did 'the right thing', but that was because of the people using the free market, not the free market per se.

Bringing up the free market seems a bit stretched, though, since most people's relationship to Mozilla is their free browser. How much does Mozilla get from their users versus donations from companies like Google? Of course, goodwill is important for any big company, which was definitely at stake here.

To me this is a win for freedom of speech

How exactly was this a win for Eich's freedom of speech?

If being CEO is a prerequisite to having freedom of speech then free speech is worth very little in practice. If it's not, then he has not lost his freedom of speech.

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