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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla is a community with a corporation attached. That community (as with most communities) is built on a set of shared values, and arguably needs to be led by someone sharing those values.

Dropbox is a company who exists to enrich their shareholders, and has customers, not community members.

That's the fundamental difference here.

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Don't fool yourself: they're both corporations and thus money making entities. Clearly, the difference is minor at best, since this behavior is spreading beyond the community based organizations.

Don't agree. I like to see tech companies trying to become more than the old-fashion 9-to-5 grind without morals/ethic and only interested in the money. We have enough of those ruining the world already.

I'm happy to see mozilla rise above bigotry and get Eich out and I hope similar happens to Rice.

It's one thing to have your private opinion, I'm not calling for stormfront.org to be shut down(as extrememly disgusting as it is). It's another thing to put action to your opinions in the form of taking others' rights away(prop8) or wiretapping/murder/torturing people. It's time those of us in tech stop pretending we live in a vacuum without politics and make sure we send a clear message that we are(should be) very much against discrimination based on race/gender/orientation or gross human rights violations.

They didn't rise above it. Eich stepped down. He should not have had to do that. He was CTO for many years. He was at Mozilla for many years. During that time he never tried to codify his beliefs into Mozilla corporate policy and I have zero reason to believe that he would have done so as CEO.

The difference is not minor. Mozilla wouldn't exist, or at best be a tiny husk of what it is today without the community surrounding it.

Mozilla wouldn't exist without a search bar that defaults to a search engines that pay them back a share of resulting ad revenue.

Sure. Mozilla also needs revenue of some kind to stay afloat. But unless you are making the argument that only bigots are capable of running a successful business, I'm not really sure what your point is.

... that's not my point at all

Then what is your point?

He stated it quite clear.

Someone higher in this thread said that Mozilla is not like Dropbox because it's a "community" and he came to say that Mozilla is a "money making entitiy" just as much as Dropbox.

He never said or implied anything about "only bigots being capable of running a successful business".

If we are to assume anything from what he said, is that whether the CEO is a bigot or not is beside the point.

Except those are completely different commenter's?

Are you unable to follow a simple discussion thread?

nerfhammer wrote "Mozilla wouldn't exist without a search bar that defaults to a search engines that pay them back a share of resulting ad revenue", responding to you in order to support what burntroots said (that Mozilla is also a corporation, a money making entity, etc).

So that was "his point" as well -- in support of burntroots' argument.

What's difficult to understand? And where did anybody said that "only bigots are capable of running a successful business"?

It sounds like you're not aware of how the non-profit Mozilla Foundation own the for-profit Mozilla Corporation. This is not a minor difference.

(former Mozilla employee here)

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