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It’s pretty simple. Mozilla’s employees are fiercely liberal. For example, a small group of vocal employees managed to oust former CEO Brendan Eich over a tin

It’s pretty simple. Mozilla’s employees are fiercely liberal. For example, a small group of vocal employees managed to oust former CEO Brendan Eich over a tiny donation to a conservative political cause he had made many years before he became CEO. If you have a conservative bone in your body, you are not welcome on the Mozilla campus. So they don’t object to Facebook’s data privacy practices. They object to Facebook’s media-perceived role in Trump’s election. The reality is that if they applied the standard they are using to exclude Facebook from their advertising plan in a non-hypocritical way, they would quickly run out of places to advertise online. Most major online media outlets, including Google, have data practices that actual privacy activists consider to be abhorrent. Their policy isn’t about privacy - it’s about politics.

djsumdog 7y ago
> a small group of vocal employees managed to oust former CEO Brendan Eich over a tiny donation to a conservative political cause Eich was kinda a moron and I don't think they realized that after he was onboard. IIRC, he saw no reason to move forward with the Firefox Quantum support and generally had some other bad software decisions. I suspect the anti-gay stuff was more to justify a way to get rid of him and score some points in the process.
- roca 7y ago
  As a former Mozilla distinguished engineer --- your comment is insulting, totally wrong and betrays your ignorance. Not even Brendan's worst enemies have ever accused him of being a moron. Brendan was a leading figure at Mozilla since the very beginning of the project. Everyone very well knew who he was. I didn't agree with all of Brendan's decisions. For example I think we should have prioritized process separation higher than we did, and Brendan was partly responsible for deprioritizing that, which I viewed as a serious mistake. But Brendan made a lot more good decisions than bad ones and from that point of view, everyone I know was confident in him as CEO. Engineers certainly weren't looking for an "excuse to get rid of him". I assume executives and the board weren't either, or they wouldn't have made him CEO just before the controversy exploded.
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  Firefox Quantum was started in fall 2016, more than two years after I left: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum. Quantum (or part of it; much good work done in C++ code too) is based on Rust and Servo, projects for which I was sole executive sponsor from 2010 onward: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224047. It's fair to say Rust and Servo would not exist as such if I hadn't been at Mozilla. I'm among the actual founders of mozilla.org, we started working on it in fall 1997. Earliest wayback snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/19981202152141/http://www.mozilla.org:80/about.html https://web.archive.org/web/19981202152141/http://www.mozill...
  - djsumdog 7y ago
    Well now I feel like an ass. I apologize. That's what I get for just believing what I read in another HN comment somewhere without doing the research. The wayback link does take me back.
    - BrendanEich 7y ago
      What other HN comment?
BrendanEich 7y ago
Hi, Brendan Eich here. I was not ousted from Mozilla as "a conservative" and no one who might fit that label at Mozilla was forced out of their job or otherwise mistreated, either -- as far as I know. It may be that Mozilla-the-Corporation (vs. the Foundation) has become more inclined to ideological litmus tests, but that was not the issue for me in 2014. Please do not make stuff up.
- downandout 7y ago
  The public narrative was that you were pressured to resign because some employees were upset that you had made a donation to an initiative opposing gay marriage. I did not “make that up” - it was all over the Internet. I won’t bother posting all the links here, but a simple Google search reveals hundreds of articles all saying that my summation in my original comment is dead-on accurate. So please do not accuse me of “making stuff up”. I was simply repeating what literally every article on this matter says. If the entire media got that wrong, then fine. Ultimately only you know why you left. But I “made up” nothing.
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    Your words: “ If you have a conservative bone in your body, you are not welcome on the Mozilla campus.” This is wholly made up, no evidence for it as far as I can tell. Please cite anything you can adduce on this point. My exit is not on its face evidence supporting your statement. If things have changed since I left, let me know. You also seem to have assumed that the “employees” who called for my resignation reported to me. Not so: they all worked for the smaller Mozilla Foundation, which has arms-length structure as parent non-profit to the for-profit Mozilla Corporation of which I was CEO.
    - downandout 7y ago
      This is wholly made up, no evidence for it as far as I can tell. Again, that’s not “made up”. It’s a logical conclusion based upon the facts of what happened. You are saying that the facts of your case are not evidence that this could possibly happen to anyone else at that organization in the future. I hope you’re right. But the reality is that if they pushed one person out because of ideological differences, it is quite probable that it has happened to others and will continue to happen. The bottom line is this: You made a minor donation to a conservative political cause years before you became CEO. That ultimately led to your departure. I don’t think even you would dispute either of those facts. This pretty well supports the conclusion that anyone with even mildly conservative views is not welcome there. I’m not sure how else anyone would interpret that. You seem to have a much more charitable interpretation of it than the facts support, but that doesn’t mean that people interpreting what happened in the most obvious way are “making up” that interpretation.

djsumdog 7y ago

> a small group of vocal employees managed to oust former CEO Brendan Eich over a tiny donation to a conservative political cause Eich was kinda a moron and I don't think they realized that after he was onboard. IIRC, he saw no reason to move forward with the Firefox Quantum support and generally had some other bad software decisions. I suspect the anti-gay stuff was more to justify a way to get rid of him and score some points in the process.

roca 7y ago
As a former Mozilla distinguished engineer --- your comment is insulting, totally wrong and betrays your ignorance. Not even Brendan's worst enemies have ever accused him of being a moron. Brendan was a leading figure at Mozilla since the very beginning of the project. Everyone very well knew who he was. I didn't agree with all of Brendan's decisions. For example I think we should have prioritized process separation higher than we did, and Brendan was partly responsible for deprioritizing that, which I viewed as a serious mistake. But Brendan made a lot more good decisions than bad ones and from that point of view, everyone I know was confident in him as CEO. Engineers certainly weren't looking for an "excuse to get rid of him". I assume executives and the board weren't either, or they wouldn't have made him CEO just before the controversy exploded.
BrendanEich 7y ago
Firefox Quantum was started in fall 2016, more than two years after I left: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum. Quantum (or part of it; much good work done in C++ code too) is based on Rust and Servo, projects for which I was sole executive sponsor from 2010 onward: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224047. It's fair to say Rust and Servo would not exist as such if I hadn't been at Mozilla. I'm among the actual founders of mozilla.org, we started working on it in fall 1997. Earliest wayback snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/19981202152141/http://www.mozilla.org:80/about.html https://web.archive.org/web/19981202152141/http://www.mozill...
- djsumdog 7y ago
  Well now I feel like an ass. I apologize. That's what I get for just believing what I read in another HN comment somewhere without doing the research. The wayback link does take me back.
  - BrendanEich 7y ago
    What other HN comment?

BrendanEich 7y ago

Hi, Brendan Eich here. I was not ousted from Mozilla as "a conservative" and no one who might fit that label at Mozilla was forced out of their job or otherwise mistreated, either -- as far as I know. It may be that Mozilla-the-Corporation (vs. the Foundation) has become more inclined to ideological litmus tests, but that was not the issue for me in 2014. Please do not make stuff up.

downandout 7y ago
The public narrative was that you were pressured to resign because some employees were upset that you had made a donation to an initiative opposing gay marriage. I did not “make that up” - it was all over the Internet. I won’t bother posting all the links here, but a simple Google search reveals hundreds of articles all saying that my summation in my original comment is dead-on accurate. So please do not accuse me of “making stuff up”. I was simply repeating what literally every article on this matter says. If the entire media got that wrong, then fine. Ultimately only you know why you left. But I “made up” nothing.
- BrendanEich 7y ago
  Your words: “ If you have a conservative bone in your body, you are not welcome on the Mozilla campus.” This is wholly made up, no evidence for it as far as I can tell. Please cite anything you can adduce on this point. My exit is not on its face evidence supporting your statement. If things have changed since I left, let me know. You also seem to have assumed that the “employees” who called for my resignation reported to me. Not so: they all worked for the smaller Mozilla Foundation, which has arms-length structure as parent non-profit to the for-profit Mozilla Corporation of which I was CEO.
  - downandout 7y ago
    This is wholly made up, no evidence for it as far as I can tell. Again, that’s not “made up”. It’s a logical conclusion based upon the facts of what happened. You are saying that the facts of your case are not evidence that this could possibly happen to anyone else at that organization in the future. I hope you’re right. But the reality is that if they pushed one person out because of ideological differences, it is quite probable that it has happened to others and will continue to happen. The bottom line is this: You made a minor donation to a conservative political cause years before you became CEO. That ultimately led to your departure. I don’t think even you would dispute either of those facts. This pretty well supports the conclusion that anyone with even mildly conservative views is not welcome there. I’m not sure how else anyone would interpret that. You seem to have a much more charitable interpretation of it than the facts support, but that doesn’t mean that people interpreting what happened in the most obvious way are “making up” that interpretation.