5 ms·

Mitchel, as leader of Mozilla, was essentially speaking for the entire organization; an organization, and set of ideals, Gerv devoted his entire adult life to.

by phonon 7y ago

Mitchel, as leader of Mozilla, was essentially speaking for the entire organization; an organization, and set of ideals, Gerv devoted his entire adult life to. Saying things like-- "Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult for people to participate. ... Gerv’s default approach was to see things in binary terms — yes or no, black or white, on or off, one or zero. Over the years I worked with him to moderate this trait so that he could better appreciate nuance and the many “gray” areas on complex topics. Gerv challenged me, infuriated me, impressed me, enraged me, surprised me. He developed a greater ability to work with ambiguity, which impressed me. Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall. ... To memorialize Gerv’s passing, it is fitting that we remember all of Gerv — the full person, good and bad, the damage and trauma he caused, as well as his many positive contributions. Any other view is sentimental. We should be clear-eyed, acknowledge the problems, and appreciate the positive contributions." I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief. David Anderson articulates some of my feelings on the obit better than I can. https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/ https://lwn.net/Articles/762345/

cookiecaper 7y ago
Ouch. I guess she's learned you've really gotta CYA in the Valley these days. Eich (inventor of JavaScript, for the record) was ousted over a private political contribution to a cause that a near-majority of Californians supported just a few years earlier. The matter was made an issue by so-called activists trawling the legally-required logs of political contributions and intentionally setting out to destroy Eich, if not Mozilla generally, merely because they disagreed with his political leanings. If you can get flayed for that, I'd guess there's a substantial chance that you'd also be on the hook for failing to lambast the beliefs of a deceased colleague. It would be nice to see Baker stand up against that, but one can only assume the thoughts of "Am I going to lose my job if I fail to call out the deceased's quote-unquote bigotry?" crossed her mind. Bonus consideration for Mozilla's top brass: "are we going to trigger another widespread blacklisting of the Firefox UA if we upset the mob?" It must be terrible to live under those auspices.
- booboolayla 7y ago
  The treatment of Eich, combined with Baker's eulogy and choice of hair color (SJW war colors) tell me all I need to know about the "culture" at Mozilla. The sooner they all get fired - the better.
- pdog 7y ago
  > Eich (inventor of JavaScript, for the record) was ousted over a private political contribution to a cause that a near-majority of Californians supported just a few years earlier. Minor correction: Prop 8 was supported by the majority (52%) in California. In fact, Prop 8 (which Brendan Eich donated in support of) passed by 600,000 votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    If you'd like to be properly pedantic. 52% of the folks surveyed in one poll were against Prop 8, 52% of the voters voted for Prop 8. Other polls ranged from 35 to 55% against. Prop 8 was designed to prevent a minority group from attaining equivalent rights of the majority so it's not really surprising that Eich got skewered for that. For fucks sake Prop 8 wasn't "quote-unquote bigotry" it was absolutely bigoted — bigoted enough to be struck down by the courts. Edit: to be clear what I'm getting at is that there is a difference between voters, voters who actually voted, and the overall California population.
    - SamReidHughes 7y ago
      Keep in mind that marriage law is still bigoted against pedophiles.
      - inferiorhuman 7y ago
        Keep in mind that marriage law is still bigoted against pedophiles. Is that to say you are equating homosexuality with pedophilia?
C14L 7y ago
Mozilla seems to be more like a political organization nowadays.
- burnte 7y ago
  As much as I poured into Mozilla and the community, I have always been critical of how political it has always been. It inherited a lot of that from the end of Netscape.
  - dependenttypes 7y ago
    Could you elaborate please? What happened near the end of Netscape that made them political?
    - burnte 7y ago
      Netscape had three phases, the startup, the amazing new big business, and then the slow decline. During the slow decline a lot of fiefdoms popped up. With some people control was more important than collaboration, process was more important than results. Too many suits took over without any real engineering prowess to understand how the things they wanted to do would actually work, and how long they'd take.
cookie_monsta 7y ago
Anderson's analysis feels very straw-mannish to me, giving the impression that Mitchell disagreed with Gerv being a Christian in the first place. > I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief. Well, maybe - you'd have to ask them. Quite likely they share Gerv's faith and outlook and possibly don't see anything negative there. But the point of the piece was obviously not to comfort the family, it was a message to the wider Mozilla community. And if he was the divisive character that he appears to have been, this sort of "he was a good person with some failings which he acknowledged and worked on" is just the sort of thing that prevents the truly ugly and grotesque internet pile-on that we are all so familiar with by now.
- wbl 7y ago
  Nihil nisi bonum. Imagine how his widow would feel reading it.
  - cookie_monsta 7y ago
    It's entirely impossible to say. One possibility would be "proud that the man she married stood up for what he believed in"
    - cookiecaper 7y ago
      Baker's post is utterly dehumanizing. She could've talked about his resilience in fighting cancer for 18 years or his fervor for free software. She could've talked about the actual work product he produced over 20-ish years at Mozilla and how it helped move the platform forward. Instead, more than just condemning his religious beliefs, she said that he didn't understand ambiguity and that she spent his entire career trying to nurse him toward wrapping his head around the general concept of abstraction and nuance. So even if the explicit condemnation of his private beliefs had been omitted, the post is still self-righteous infantilization. Baker did a terrible job hiding her contempt. Tacking on "something-something-whole-person" is transparent self-justification and it doesn't do anything to change the fact that she just spent the whole post talking about what she perceived to be his inadequacies. Baker could've talked about basically anything -- the ability to identify the humanity in your ideological opponents is crucial to civilized discourse -- but instead, she boiled it down to "Gerv couldn't understand middle ground, except for the tiny bit I was able to finally pound through his head, and his refusal to shut up on his personal blog caused a lot of damage here." I don't know, but somehow I doubt that the widow of this principled husband and father, who battled cancer for 18 years and worked hard to keep food on the table until the very end, feels anything good about Baker's post.
whatthefoxer 7y ago
I worked many years with gerv. I know that in the valley believing in Christ is seen as evil. I'm not a believer. Gerv was a good person, easy to work with and never put his faith or illness in the way of work as far as i could see. All he had was a signature in his emails about his faith. Nobody's perfect but he definitely never looked like Mitchell's description in my day to day interactions.

by phonon 7y ago

cookiecaper 7y ago

Ouch. I guess she's learned you've really gotta CYA in the Valley these days. Eich (inventor of JavaScript, for the record) was ousted over a private political contribution to a cause that a near-majority of Californians supported just a few years earlier. The matter was made an issue by so-called activists trawling the legally-required logs of political contributions and intentionally setting out to destroy Eich, if not Mozilla generally, merely because they disagreed with his political leanings. If you can get flayed for that, I'd guess there's a substantial chance that you'd also be on the hook for failing to lambast the beliefs of a deceased colleague. It would be nice to see Baker stand up against that, but one can only assume the thoughts of "Am I going to lose my job if I fail to call out the deceased's quote-unquote bigotry?" crossed her mind. Bonus consideration for Mozilla's top brass: "are we going to trigger another widespread blacklisting of the Firefox UA if we upset the mob?" It must be terrible to live under those auspices.

booboolayla 7y ago
The treatment of Eich, combined with Baker's eulogy and choice of hair color (SJW war colors) tell me all I need to know about the "culture" at Mozilla. The sooner they all get fired - the better.
pdog 7y ago
> Eich (inventor of JavaScript, for the record) was ousted over a private political contribution to a cause that a near-majority of Californians supported just a few years earlier. Minor correction: Prop 8 was supported by the majority (52%) in California. In fact, Prop 8 (which Brendan Eich donated in support of) passed by 600,000 votes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  If you'd like to be properly pedantic. 52% of the folks surveyed in one poll were against Prop 8, 52% of the voters voted for Prop 8. Other polls ranged from 35 to 55% against. Prop 8 was designed to prevent a minority group from attaining equivalent rights of the majority so it's not really surprising that Eich got skewered for that. For fucks sake Prop 8 wasn't "quote-unquote bigotry" it was absolutely bigoted — bigoted enough to be struck down by the courts. Edit: to be clear what I'm getting at is that there is a difference between voters, voters who actually voted, and the overall California population.
  - SamReidHughes 7y ago
    Keep in mind that marriage law is still bigoted against pedophiles.
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      Keep in mind that marriage law is still bigoted against pedophiles. Is that to say you are equating homosexuality with pedophilia?

C14L 7y ago

Mozilla seems to be more like a political organization nowadays.

burnte 7y ago
As much as I poured into Mozilla and the community, I have always been critical of how political it has always been. It inherited a lot of that from the end of Netscape.
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  Could you elaborate please? What happened near the end of Netscape that made them political?
  - burnte 7y ago
    Netscape had three phases, the startup, the amazing new big business, and then the slow decline. During the slow decline a lot of fiefdoms popped up. With some people control was more important than collaboration, process was more important than results. Too many suits took over without any real engineering prowess to understand how the things they wanted to do would actually work, and how long they'd take.

cookie_monsta 7y ago

Anderson's analysis feels very straw-mannish to me, giving the impression that Mitchell disagreed with Gerv being a Christian in the first place. > I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief. Well, maybe - you'd have to ask them. Quite likely they share Gerv's faith and outlook and possibly don't see anything negative there. But the point of the piece was obviously not to comfort the family, it was a message to the wider Mozilla community. And if he was the divisive character that he appears to have been, this sort of "he was a good person with some failings which he acknowledged and worked on" is just the sort of thing that prevents the truly ugly and grotesque internet pile-on that we are all so familiar with by now.

wbl 7y ago
Nihil nisi bonum. Imagine how his widow would feel reading it.
- cookie_monsta 7y ago
  It's entirely impossible to say. One possibility would be "proud that the man she married stood up for what he believed in"
  - cookiecaper 7y ago
    Baker's post is utterly dehumanizing. She could've talked about his resilience in fighting cancer for 18 years or his fervor for free software. She could've talked about the actual work product he produced over 20-ish years at Mozilla and how it helped move the platform forward. Instead, more than just condemning his religious beliefs, she said that he didn't understand ambiguity and that she spent his entire career trying to nurse him toward wrapping his head around the general concept of abstraction and nuance. So even if the explicit condemnation of his private beliefs had been omitted, the post is still self-righteous infantilization. Baker did a terrible job hiding her contempt. Tacking on "something-something-whole-person" is transparent self-justification and it doesn't do anything to change the fact that she just spent the whole post talking about what she perceived to be his inadequacies. Baker could've talked about basically anything -- the ability to identify the humanity in your ideological opponents is crucial to civilized discourse -- but instead, she boiled it down to "Gerv couldn't understand middle ground, except for the tiny bit I was able to finally pound through his head, and his refusal to shut up on his personal blog caused a lot of damage here." I don't know, but somehow I doubt that the widow of this principled husband and father, who battled cancer for 18 years and worked hard to keep food on the table until the very end, feels anything good about Baker's post.

whatthefoxer 7y ago

I worked many years with gerv. I know that in the valley believing in Christ is seen as evil. I'm not a believer. Gerv was a good person, easy to work with and never put his faith or illness in the way of work as far as i could see. All he had was a signature in his emails about his faith. Nobody's perfect but he definitely never looked like Mitchell's description in my day to day interactions.