4 ms·
> your "Eich chose to step down due to community pressure" line, which you made up. You are correct. That was conjecture. I don't know the actual thoughts in y
by near 10y ago
> your "Eich chose to step down due to community pressure" line, which you made up.
You are correct. That was conjecture. I don't know the actual thoughts in your mind when you stepped down, because you won't tell me.
Right now, the only solid evidence we have is that mozilla.org blog post that you voluntarily stepped down. Unless you will renounce it, then to the public record, it will remain what is believed to be true. And anything else, "you were forced out", "you were fired", "you resigned due to pressure", etc is hearsay.
> This does not exclude other possibilities that are none of your business.
I believe it is the business of the public whether you were given an ultimatum or not. It would greatly influence how many felt toward the senior leadership of Mozilla.
> "Forced or resigned" is a false dilemma in general.
I disagree strongly. There's a world of difference between me choosing to leave my job to protect my company; and my company firing me, making me sign an NDA, and lying and saying I left voluntarily. The former is commendable (if unfortunate) on your part; the latter is absolutely reprehensible on Mozilla's part.
> Oppression does not remove agency from the victim.
It can. There was no serious option for me to move to a country with full marriage equality (the world does not have open borders - even permanently moving to Canada requires hosting by a family member, substantial capital to invest, or an asylum request); and only partial redress (state-level) were I to choose to move to, say, Massachusetts. Which also wasn't much of a possibility as my spouse did not want to leave his family behind in Ohio. But I guess you could say the latter was a matter of prioritizing.
Those ballot initiatives were definitely aimed at removing agency from gay and lesbian couples, that much is for sure.
> Can we agree on this much?
In the general case that the two can be true at once, yes. But I don't see how your resignation can possibly exist in a quantum state where you were both forced to resign and weren't. It can only be one or the other.
I can understand there being subtle hints and allusions that a firing would have been inevitable should you choose not to resign, but unless they were substantiated, they were just that. I'm not going to read between the lines to speculate on what might have happened had you chosen to stay onboard.
I'm dead serious: if you really were forced out but just can't tell me, then you have my sympathy. I never once called for you to be fired. Free speech only works when we all have it. The only thing I did, and stand by, is my own free speech to voice disapproval for your donation. I also stopped using Firefox until you had resigned.
(I do have some thoughts on money not being the same as speech, but that's a whole different issue.)
- dragonwriter 10y ago> I don't see how your resignation can possibly exist in a quantum state where you were both forced to resign and weren't. It can only be one or the other. There's a whole lot of middle ground between absolutely forced and absolutely not forced. He could have not been absolutely forced (in that the board might not have said "Quit or be fired"), but could have lost sufficient support from the board, other executives, and/or staff that there was no realistic way to meet expectations that the board had set (implicitly or explicitly) so that it seemed likely that the situation was as if an quit-or-be-dumped threat had been made, even if it wasn't. For just one example.
- BrendanEich 10y agoHN is for many things: wasting time, trying to persuade reasonable fellow hackers of the virtues of Blub, practicing rhetoric and dialectic, etc. etc. It's not for you to cross-examine me, though. You are not entitled. Ask Mozilla if you want more info about my exit. > I disagree strongly. Please see my edit, adding "in general" before "remove" and "all" before "agency". I made that edit before you replied (but it seems after you cited my earlier text) because I suspected you would turn "must" to "can" on loss of agency. As you did. Of course oppression can at the limit remove all agency, by killing the victim. Duh! But your move from "must" to "can" dodges the crucial disagreement that we seem to be having, over whether any force always and exclusively overrides a choice like resigning, or and/or other non-exclusive and exclusive alternatives. It's nonsense to make complex human interactions involving mobs, boycotts, hidden C-suite action, and finally resignation into an either/or in every single case. Some people feel that "the mob" forced me out (whether they disagree or agree with the result). This does not mean those people all believe I was "fired". To take another example and leave out "Oppression": did Nixon resign? Of course. Did he face force from his opponents in Congress and the press? Yes, obviously -- in the case of Congress, he faced the full force of the U.S. Constitution, up to an impeachment trial and conviction. Both force and choice were operative; no either/or. > There's a world of difference between me choosing to leave my job to protect my company; and my company firing me, making me sign an NDA, and lying and saying I left voluntarily. You are doing it again, right here! Use your imagination. Can you not conceive of excluded middles left out by the two alternatives you pose as if mutually exclusive and exhaustive of all possibilities? I think you can. You should, just as a matter of intellectual honesty and rigor, even if I keep mum. Using my silence as justification for your fallacy is a further fallacy.