5 ms·

> The board can ask you to leave at any time if you seem to be a liability... It's worth noting that many of the objections are about private information being

> The board can ask you to leave at any time if you seem to be a liability... It's worth noting that many of the objections are about private information being misused. Eich was actually outed from a donor list that was leaked. There's a lot of parallels here if the concern is about "doxxing" activities. I also have a really hard time with the "but CEOs are different argument". So could being a Democrat in a red state be a liability? Republican in a blue state? Evangelical in a secular area? Atheist in a religious one? Scientologists? Mormons? In other words, are we saying that only certain kinds of people can be CEOs?

pavlov 10y ago
That's how it works. The board decides who they want. You can always start your own company if you want to be CEO. In fact, that's what Eich has done - he's a startup founder nowadays.
noxToken 10y ago
> In other words, are we saying that only certain kinds of people can be CEOs? In short, yes. There are plenty of rational people out there who don't care what someone does in their private life as long as it doesn't have a readily apparent effect on business. It's a shame that all people cannot be like this, because there are others who take a hard line stance against certain private matter that someone else may hold. That is, the fact that a CEO is a Dom in a D/s relationship will resonate so negatively with some people that is can adversely impact business. Do you remember the Cheerios commercial[0] with the interracial family? People have much bigger skeletons in their closets, and from a business standpoint, that's a liability. It's not right. It's not fair. But it's reality. [0]: http://www.today.com/news/cheerios-ad-mixed-race-family-draws-racist-responses-6C10169988 http://www.today.com/news/cheerios-ad-mixed-race-family-draw...
- coldpie 10y ago
  > It's a shame that all people cannot be like this, because there are others who take a hard line stance against certain private matter that someone else may hold. In Eich's case, it wasn't a private matter. He used his money and influence to attempt to enforce his religious views on people who do not subscribe to his religion. When you are involving the government in public enforcement of your personal views, they are not personal any longer.
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    The donor list was not public. Some people believe private political behavior should stay private, just like voting. Saying "this is too important for privacy to apply" affects more issues than just politics advocacy. In this situation, people apparently are applying the template: "When you X, it's no longer personal anymore".
    - coldpie 10y ago
      Are you sure it wasn't public? Those kinds of donation rolls often are. In either case, I do think it is reasonable to reject a CEO who is actively attempting to harm their own employees through government enforcement of personal religious beliefs. Especially for an altruistic company like Mozilla.
      - Turing_Machine 10y ago
        Given that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were also opposed to gay marriage at that time, would you agree that that they should also have been disqualified? If not, why not?
        coldpie 10y ago
        I don't think it's an interesting comparison, given one is a choice between two "lesser evils" and elected by three hundred million citizens VS the other being a leader of a private company appointed by a board from a pool of presumably many (or at least several) valid candidates. Totally different scenarios. But yes, it was a big black mark against them and they, too, received lots of public pressure to change their public policy on the matter. And eventually, they did. Eich refused to even say he wouldn't make such a donation again, much less apologize for the harm he caused.
        Turing_Machine 10y ago
        Sorry, why should a public official should be held to a lower standard than the director of a private company? I'm not seeing that. Most observers believe that the passage of Proposition 8 in California had far more to do with black churches turning out for Barack Obama than it did with contributions from people like Eich. Edit: updating with citation. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/06/AR2008110603880.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11... 70% of black voters supported Proposition 8, which means that they were against gay marriage.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  Sorry. I should have said "should be CEO", not "can". My question was about how much we cater to others' intolerance. It seems backward to me that we throw up our hands and accept that we'll, say, never have a fat president again because people just don't respect fat people. Or that a major political party should never nominate an out atheist because they are not electable (a self-fulfilling prophecy). The silver lining to the Trump candidacy, I think, is that there is more tolerance of unconventional leadership than we have suspected. I swore up and down that Trump was unelectable.
lr4444lr 10y ago
CEOs serve at will. Their job duties include being an emissary to the industry, and leading the company's reputation. I say what happened to Garfield was wrong, but agree that the Mozilla board made the right decision on Eich, who could not effectively carry out his general duties given the PR liability he became - not of his own making even. They didn't say he couldn't be a part of the org. as a lead software architect, for example; he just couldn't be allowed to continue as CEO given the mission of defending and promoting Mozilla which the board is bound to do. It was strictly business.
- dorfsmay 10y ago
  To me, the message was "Mozilla is about promoting trendy idea", rather than openness. If we cannot support and debate "wrong" ideas, then we're not very open in my opinion.
  - bonaldi 10y ago
    Saying that homosexuals are equal to heterosexuals is not a "trendy idea", it's basic equality. I'm not sure why you think "employment as CEO" is the metric for whether "we" "support and debate [inequality] as an idea"
    - humanrebar 10y ago
      It was literally a new trend in this case. The proposition that Eich supported actually passed with a majority of votes in California. The trend is that opinions have slowly evolved in the subsequent decade. The shift was from "we can treat people equally while keeping marriage heterosexual" to "gay marriage is an inalienable human right". Nobody was advocating for oppressing people in their minds.
      - bonaldi 10y ago
        Sure, to be fair, few people think they're advocating for evil. But the Supreme Court found it was an unjustified removal of rights, so it turned out that the holders of that opinion were, in the opinion of the court's interpretation of the US Constitution, in fact advocating oppression. All of which begs the question of whether removing a CEO on the losing side of such a debate is tantamount to the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy.
driverdan 10y ago
The donor list was not leaked, it's public information. > In other words, are we saying that only certain kinds of people can be CEOs? Yes. When you're the leader and figure head of an org your views and opinions are seen as representing that org. If you're anti-gay marriage it's seen as if you may treat gay employees negatively. That's bad for hiring and bad for public opinion.
mapgrep 10y ago
>Eich was actually outed from a donor list that was leaked There was no "leak" or "outing." Campaign contributions are public information. I just pulled up his donation (to Prop 8 and a Lt Gov campaign) here. http://dbsearch.ss.ca.gov/ContributorSearch.aspx http://dbsearch.ss.ca.gov/ContributorSearch.aspx I'd link directly but the form uses POST so there's no unique URL for his contributions.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gotothedoctor 10y ago
The donor list was not "leaked" and Eich was not "outted." Donations to CA ballot propositions has been public information since the 1970s, when voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative in response to the Watergate scandal. http://www.fppc.ca.gov/the-law.html http://www.fppc.ca.gov/the-law.html Even leaving overlapping federal law aside, in CA, where Democrats have a permanent majority for the foreseeable future, it is beyond unlikely that such transparency rules will change. If anything, it seems more likely that we'll increase transparency around SuperPacs, rather than the reverse. After all, isn't more accountability better than less? And, yes, as it turns out, historically, we've only ever permitted certain kinds of people to be CEOs. They are also not chosen--or removed--democratically. But this is way off-topic.

pavlov 10y ago

That's how it works. The board decides who they want. You can always start your own company if you want to be CEO. In fact, that's what Eich has done - he's a startup founder nowadays.

noxToken 10y ago

> In other words, are we saying that only certain kinds of people can be CEOs? In short, yes. There are plenty of rational people out there who don't care what someone does in their private life as long as it doesn't have a readily apparent effect on business. It's a shame that all people cannot be like this, because there are others who take a hard line stance against certain private matter that someone else may hold. That is, the fact that a CEO is a Dom in a D/s relationship will resonate so negatively with some people that is can adversely impact business. Do you remember the Cheerios commercial[0] with the interracial family? People have much bigger skeletons in their closets, and from a business standpoint, that's a liability. It's not right. It's not fair. But it's reality. [0]: http://www.today.com/news/cheerios-ad-mixed-race-family-draws-racist-responses-6C10169988 http://www.today.com/news/cheerios-ad-mixed-race-family-draw...

coldpie 10y ago
> It's a shame that all people cannot be like this, because there are others who take a hard line stance against certain private matter that someone else may hold. In Eich's case, it wasn't a private matter. He used his money and influence to attempt to enforce his religious views on people who do not subscribe to his religion. When you are involving the government in public enforcement of your personal views, they are not personal any longer.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  The donor list was not public. Some people believe private political behavior should stay private, just like voting. Saying "this is too important for privacy to apply" affects more issues than just politics advocacy. In this situation, people apparently are applying the template: "When you X, it's no longer personal anymore".
  - coldpie 10y ago
    Are you sure it wasn't public? Those kinds of donation rolls often are. In either case, I do think it is reasonable to reject a CEO who is actively attempting to harm their own employees through government enforcement of personal religious beliefs. Especially for an altruistic company like Mozilla.
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      Given that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were also opposed to gay marriage at that time, would you agree that that they should also have been disqualified? If not, why not?
      - coldpie 10y ago
        I don't think it's an interesting comparison, given one is a choice between two "lesser evils" and elected by three hundred million citizens VS the other being a leader of a private company appointed by a board from a pool of presumably many (or at least several) valid candidates. Totally different scenarios. But yes, it was a big black mark against them and they, too, received lots of public pressure to change their public policy on the matter. And eventually, they did. Eich refused to even say he wouldn't make such a donation again, much less apologize for the harm he caused.
        Turing_Machine 10y ago
        Sorry, why should a public official should be held to a lower standard than the director of a private company? I'm not seeing that. Most observers believe that the passage of Proposition 8 in California had far more to do with black churches turning out for Barack Obama than it did with contributions from people like Eich. Edit: updating with citation. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/06/AR2008110603880.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11... 70% of black voters supported Proposition 8, which means that they were against gay marriage.
humanrebar 10y ago
Sorry. I should have said "should be CEO", not "can". My question was about how much we cater to others' intolerance. It seems backward to me that we throw up our hands and accept that we'll, say, never have a fat president again because people just don't respect fat people. Or that a major political party should never nominate an out atheist because they are not electable (a self-fulfilling prophecy). The silver lining to the Trump candidacy, I think, is that there is more tolerance of unconventional leadership than we have suspected. I swore up and down that Trump was unelectable.

lr4444lr 10y ago

CEOs serve at will. Their job duties include being an emissary to the industry, and leading the company's reputation. I say what happened to Garfield was wrong, but agree that the Mozilla board made the right decision on Eich, who could not effectively carry out his general duties given the PR liability he became - not of his own making even. They didn't say he couldn't be a part of the org. as a lead software architect, for example; he just couldn't be allowed to continue as CEO given the mission of defending and promoting Mozilla which the board is bound to do. It was strictly business.

dorfsmay 10y ago
To me, the message was "Mozilla is about promoting trendy idea", rather than openness. If we cannot support and debate "wrong" ideas, then we're not very open in my opinion.
- bonaldi 10y ago
  Saying that homosexuals are equal to heterosexuals is not a "trendy idea", it's basic equality. I'm not sure why you think "employment as CEO" is the metric for whether "we" "support and debate [inequality] as an idea"
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    It was literally a new trend in this case. The proposition that Eich supported actually passed with a majority of votes in California. The trend is that opinions have slowly evolved in the subsequent decade. The shift was from "we can treat people equally while keeping marriage heterosexual" to "gay marriage is an inalienable human right". Nobody was advocating for oppressing people in their minds.
    - bonaldi 10y ago
      Sure, to be fair, few people think they're advocating for evil. But the Supreme Court found it was an unjustified removal of rights, so it turned out that the holders of that opinion were, in the opinion of the court's interpretation of the US Constitution, in fact advocating oppression. All of which begs the question of whether removing a CEO on the losing side of such a debate is tantamount to the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy.

driverdan 10y ago

The donor list was not leaked, it's public information. > In other words, are we saying that only certain kinds of people can be CEOs? Yes. When you're the leader and figure head of an org your views and opinions are seen as representing that org. If you're anti-gay marriage it's seen as if you may treat gay employees negatively. That's bad for hiring and bad for public opinion.

mapgrep 10y ago

>Eich was actually outed from a donor list that was leaked There was no "leak" or "outing." Campaign contributions are public information. I just pulled up his donation (to Prop 8 and a Lt Gov campaign) here. http://dbsearch.ss.ca.gov/ContributorSearch.aspx http://dbsearch.ss.ca.gov/ContributorSearch.aspx I'd link directly but the form uses POST so there's no unique URL for his contributions.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

gotothedoctor 10y ago

The donor list was not "leaked" and Eich was not "outted." Donations to CA ballot propositions has been public information since the 1970s, when voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative in response to the Watergate scandal. http://www.fppc.ca.gov/the-law.html http://www.fppc.ca.gov/the-law.html Even leaving overlapping federal law aside, in CA, where Democrats have a permanent majority for the foreseeable future, it is beyond unlikely that such transparency rules will change. If anything, it seems more likely that we'll increase transparency around SuperPacs, rather than the reverse. After all, isn't more accountability better than less? And, yes, as it turns out, historically, we've only ever permitted certain kinds of people to be CEOs. They are also not chosen--or removed--democratically. But this is way off-topic.