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I wonder how much of this, has too do with social justice going to far in the harassment of Brendan Eich. I mean, maybe someone with his background in charge w

I wonder how much of this, has too do with social justice going to far in the harassment of Brendan Eich. I mean, maybe someone with his background in charge would know why its important for Mozilla to keep this kind of projects even if it looks they are not going anywhere, because this is what gives Mozilla meaning in the end. Im not a mozillian, so i might be totally wrong, but maybe this is a case of the MBA's taking over and trying to focus into what they have learned to do.. look at the profit margins and think they are spending too much in research projects. There are a lot of examples of other companies losing their engineering culture, starting to think more in terms of cash and profit, and finally vanishing its purpose and meaning. IBM(lost in the 80's), Microsoft almost loosing it in the Ballmer era, Sun, and the most proeminent case: Yahoo. Just to make it clear: Tech companies as any other company must have a good financial health and this is very important, but they cannot afford to loose their soul. Once their engineering and innovation culture is gone, they become void and suffer from a slow bleeding til the death. We must face it, our economical systems of incentives, the economical game generally speaking, its broken. And tech and arts are proeminent endeavors that tend to get trojan horsed by this yuppie mentality turning things that once had meaning, into meaningful cash cows that work for the few people that cash out from the corrupted source. (Apparently, it works a little better for industrial-level enterprises). My hope is that, with time, this will become more evident, and research find innovative ways to make a better economical game so that creative, art and engineering culture kind of companies can have a much larger life span. By the way, they had a pretty good leverage on Rust (and Rust was a really risk bet that ended doing great). The fact that they fired the people with this background just shows that they have no clue of what they are really doing. * Edit: just being clear about people with conservative views.. I dont like and even despise what he did politically speaking, but as long as he were a good fit for the job, and never forced his political and social views into the company, i dont agree with the outcome.. and the reason is starting to show up now.. Much more important things are starting to fall out, and in the end even people with progressive views and good engineering background ended fired in the long term.

Brakenshire 6y ago
It’s not even a question of losing their soul, this is their core product.
XMPPwocky 6y ago
Would you feel the same way about, say, a CEO donating to NAMBLA? I mean, if they have a good technical background, does it really matter if the public face of the company is out there advocating for relationships between adults and young boys? It's just politics, after all.
- YarickR2 6y ago
  Why do you even want to know, or judge, anyone's donations ? Do you ask store clerks who did they donate today ? Their manager ? Private life and personal decisions should be left personal.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    I think once you get to people in leadership roles they start having to set a good example for subordinates and a positive image for the company. Donor lists are also often public, especially at higher amounts. Not sure at what level within a company that becomes a relevant question. It's not for store clerks and store managers. It is for the CEO.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    Political donations are a matter of public record in US, so yes - we as a society have decided that we do want to know and judge.
    - pitay 6y ago
      Isn't that more to prevent corruption and dealing with conflicts of interest?
- skissane 6y ago
  One is a proposal, which at the time, was mainstream enough to gain the support of a majority of California voters. (And, even today, although I don't think it would get a majority any more, it probably still would get a significant minority of California voters supporting it.) The other is an extremely fringe view which has only ever been supported by a tiny percentage of the population. I also don't think Eich was "out there advocating" for something. He made a private donation, which was not a significant amount in the grand scheme of things ($1,000 either way was not going to make any difference to the outcome). The law required that fact to be made publicly available, and then others publicised it; he didn't voluntarily choose to publicise his donation. When people publicly asked him about his beliefs on the topic, he avoided answering the question.
cherrycherry98 6y ago
I think there's some truth to this. Mozilla has become less of a technology organization and more of a political one. There have been quite a few instances over the past few years of Mozilla demonstrating its left leaning politics: * The Brendan Eich situation where his private contribution to a conservative cause impacted his employment * Baker calling a former conservative employee's views "traumatic and damaging" in their obituary - https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gervase-markham/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva... * The removal of "meritocracy" from the governance document in the name of D&I - https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-meritocracy/ https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-... * Promoting BLM and anti-racism content via Pocket and their homepage * Replacing "master password" with "primary password" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replacing-master-password https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac... Agree with their positions or not, they are definitely alienating to some. Even if just delivering a great browser and getting people to use it is not their primary mission (and it's not directly if you've ever read the Mozilla Manifesto), it is the means by which they retain the ability pursue those goals. Recall Michael Jordan's reason for staying away from politics, "Republicans buy sneakers too".
- regularfry 6y ago
  Alienating to some, welcoming to others.
- ptx 6y ago
  > left leaning politics It doesn't matter which way their politics lean, does it? The point is that a software company can't put politics over technology. Unless it's specifically software politics and relevant to the organization's purpose, like the FSF. But if Mozilla had a political stance expressed through software (e.g. openness, user empowerment?) it has been somewhat muddled for quite some time now.
  - jes5199 6y ago
    there’s no such thing though- all organizations are political. You can pretend that libertarian technocrat capitalist is neutral, but that says more about your politics than anything else
chipotle_coyote 6y ago
> I wonder how much of this has to do with social justice going too far? Zero, and with all respect, "could it be... SOCIAL JUSTICE?" was an awfully silly way to open an otherwise reasonable comment. (One that I'm about to go on to disagree with, granted, but still.) Mozilla is not being run by "the MBAs"; it's being run by Mitchell Baker, who was actually CEO before Eich and has been there since before Mozilla was a separate corporation. She wrote the Mozilla Public License. She may not be the technologist Eich is, but it's awfully hard to fault her historical commitment to open source, the open web, and Mozilla. There's a lot of conspiratorial thinking about how Mozilla's moves over the past week or so are being driven by some kind of ruthless corporate greed, but a less nefarious explanation seems more likely. 90% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google's contract to be Firefox's default search provider, that contract is up this year, and according to news reports, the contract hasn't been renewed. these moves are being driven by a desperate desire not to go under when their income stream drops by orders of magnitude. They aren't becoming more commercial because of a "yuppie mentality"; they're becoming more commercial because they see no alternative.
- oscargrouch 6y ago
  You should pardon me if in your linguistic-cultural background some wording i pick might sound more sensitive than im aware of, as its not my mother language, so i might miss some nuances. As you can see reading further the core of the point i was trying to make is; we are all imperfect, thats a fact of life. Than we have fitness, and as more sophisticated things get, fitness is harder to achieve. To be fair, i dont know how much Eich was a good fit as a CEO for Mozilla, all i can deal with is that he was booted not because of performance, but a political stuff that got uncovered and that was against the image Mozilla was known to defend. Fair enough.. is it serious? Yes, because it damages the image of Mozilla even if its not the fault of the corporation, because it sounds like an endorsement.. Ok, but its all a matter of weighting, but not only looking for the short term, but the long term.. maybe there was someone in Mozilla that had the technical baggage and also the socio-political views Again, i dont know how well the person picked to be the next CEO can evaluate and weight decisions in the deepest level not only of policy but also engineering. But i´ve seen the external movements of the chess board, and this last one, made it more clear where Mozilla is heading and how they are evaluating their decisions. Mozilla did bold movements that did not worked out, but they were not tottally misguided, as they could actually succeed, so they were not maded by a totally unaware person. Its just that its super hard to do everything right and have luck at the same time. But i think, the real problems were not in those bold movements (and right now when you look at them in the rear window, they look just like cash burned) but in the innability to follow and keep their core projects moving. For instance, the browser took too much time to keep up with the multi-process architecture in Chrome. It took like 4 years if im not mistaken.. Meanwhile there were a lot heat being dispersed in moonshots.. again, is not that the moonshots were wrong per-se, but as long as the most of the energy were being expended in keeping up in the core of what make mozilla matter today. But hey, the moonshots maybe were misguided somehow, but here, there this one or two that we invested in the past that is starting to bear fruits.. we were lucky.. so why now shutdown the projects that might actually be the ones that can save mozilla in the future? If it was just a matter of closing the offices elsewhere in the world(like the one in Berlin), but we know that part of the engineering not only now, but in the beggining of the year were booted of the company, and some of them in things that should be strategic for Mozilla in the comming years. The pressure is hard, but the good CEO´s will make a stand and defend the things that might not look very good now, but that will be key in the future.. And i wonder, how much a CEO or boarding that could go deeper in the engineering rabbit hole could have helped into making the right decisions. Again, i dont know very well the CEO or the board, all i see is the chess pieces moving from here.. and from what i can see, joining the pieces of the pass movements, i have a sour taste in my mouth that what was once one of the greateast, shiny companies of high technology, a role model to me and to many people, are starting to repeat the misguided steps of companies like Yahoo. Sorry for "the MBA´s", as i dont want to offend anyone, but what i meant is the pattern in the moves, it looks a lot like things Ballmer would do, not Gates. And the difference lies in how much they are informed to take the good decisions they need to make. And tech people often lack the philosophical, social and political baggage to make the good decisions on those kind of matters, so in my opinion they must be helped not chased. Because in the end this might be important to the survival of the entity, that might look good on the paper and in its image, but might be lost in its direction. It sounded like a rant, and i think it was harsh on my part, but its because i care and really like Mozilla. Its when the times are rough that the good decisions are really needed. so i just wonderered.. and i would love to be proved wrong, really.

Brakenshire 6y ago

It’s not even a question of losing their soul, this is their core product.

XMPPwocky 6y ago

Would you feel the same way about, say, a CEO donating to NAMBLA? I mean, if they have a good technical background, does it really matter if the public face of the company is out there advocating for relationships between adults and young boys? It's just politics, after all.

YarickR2 6y ago
Why do you even want to know, or judge, anyone's donations ? Do you ask store clerks who did they donate today ? Their manager ? Private life and personal decisions should be left personal.
- asveikau 6y ago
  I think once you get to people in leadership roles they start having to set a good example for subordinates and a positive image for the company. Donor lists are also often public, especially at higher amounts. Not sure at what level within a company that becomes a relevant question. It's not for store clerks and store managers. It is for the CEO.
- int_19h 6y ago
  Political donations are a matter of public record in US, so yes - we as a society have decided that we do want to know and judge.
  - pitay 6y ago
    Isn't that more to prevent corruption and dealing with conflicts of interest?
skissane 6y ago
One is a proposal, which at the time, was mainstream enough to gain the support of a majority of California voters. (And, even today, although I don't think it would get a majority any more, it probably still would get a significant minority of California voters supporting it.) The other is an extremely fringe view which has only ever been supported by a tiny percentage of the population. I also don't think Eich was "out there advocating" for something. He made a private donation, which was not a significant amount in the grand scheme of things ($1,000 either way was not going to make any difference to the outcome). The law required that fact to be made publicly available, and then others publicised it; he didn't voluntarily choose to publicise his donation. When people publicly asked him about his beliefs on the topic, he avoided answering the question.

cherrycherry98 6y ago

I think there's some truth to this. Mozilla has become less of a technology organization and more of a political one. There have been quite a few instances over the past few years of Mozilla demonstrating its left leaning politics: * The Brendan Eich situation where his private contribution to a conservative cause impacted his employment * Baker calling a former conservative employee's views "traumatic and damaging" in their obituary - https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gervase-markham/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva... * The removal of "meritocracy" from the governance document in the name of D&I - https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-meritocracy/ https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-... * Promoting BLM and anti-racism content via Pocket and their homepage * Replacing "master password" with "primary password" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replacing-master-password https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac... Agree with their positions or not, they are definitely alienating to some. Even if just delivering a great browser and getting people to use it is not their primary mission (and it's not directly if you've ever read the Mozilla Manifesto), it is the means by which they retain the ability pursue those goals. Recall Michael Jordan's reason for staying away from politics, "Republicans buy sneakers too".

regularfry 6y ago
Alienating to some, welcoming to others.
ptx 6y ago
> left leaning politics It doesn't matter which way their politics lean, does it? The point is that a software company can't put politics over technology. Unless it's specifically software politics and relevant to the organization's purpose, like the FSF. But if Mozilla had a political stance expressed through software (e.g. openness, user empowerment?) it has been somewhat muddled for quite some time now.
- jes5199 6y ago
  there’s no such thing though- all organizations are political. You can pretend that libertarian technocrat capitalist is neutral, but that says more about your politics than anything else

chipotle_coyote 6y ago

> I wonder how much of this has to do with social justice going too far? Zero, and with all respect, "could it be... SOCIAL JUSTICE?" was an awfully silly way to open an otherwise reasonable comment. (One that I'm about to go on to disagree with, granted, but still.) Mozilla is not being run by "the MBAs"; it's being run by Mitchell Baker, who was actually CEO before Eich and has been there since before Mozilla was a separate corporation. She wrote the Mozilla Public License. She may not be the technologist Eich is, but it's awfully hard to fault her historical commitment to open source, the open web, and Mozilla. There's a lot of conspiratorial thinking about how Mozilla's moves over the past week or so are being driven by some kind of ruthless corporate greed, but a less nefarious explanation seems more likely. 90% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google's contract to be Firefox's default search provider, that contract is up this year, and according to news reports, the contract hasn't been renewed. these moves are being driven by a desperate desire not to go under when their income stream drops by orders of magnitude. They aren't becoming more commercial because of a "yuppie mentality"; they're becoming more commercial because they see no alternative.

oscargrouch 6y ago
You should pardon me if in your linguistic-cultural background some wording i pick might sound more sensitive than im aware of, as its not my mother language, so i might miss some nuances. As you can see reading further the core of the point i was trying to make is; we are all imperfect, thats a fact of life. Than we have fitness, and as more sophisticated things get, fitness is harder to achieve. To be fair, i dont know how much Eich was a good fit as a CEO for Mozilla, all i can deal with is that he was booted not because of performance, but a political stuff that got uncovered and that was against the image Mozilla was known to defend. Fair enough.. is it serious? Yes, because it damages the image of Mozilla even if its not the fault of the corporation, because it sounds like an endorsement.. Ok, but its all a matter of weighting, but not only looking for the short term, but the long term.. maybe there was someone in Mozilla that had the technical baggage and also the socio-political views Again, i dont know how well the person picked to be the next CEO can evaluate and weight decisions in the deepest level not only of policy but also engineering. But i´ve seen the external movements of the chess board, and this last one, made it more clear where Mozilla is heading and how they are evaluating their decisions. Mozilla did bold movements that did not worked out, but they were not tottally misguided, as they could actually succeed, so they were not maded by a totally unaware person. Its just that its super hard to do everything right and have luck at the same time. But i think, the real problems were not in those bold movements (and right now when you look at them in the rear window, they look just like cash burned) but in the innability to follow and keep their core projects moving. For instance, the browser took too much time to keep up with the multi-process architecture in Chrome. It took like 4 years if im not mistaken.. Meanwhile there were a lot heat being dispersed in moonshots.. again, is not that the moonshots were wrong per-se, but as long as the most of the energy were being expended in keeping up in the core of what make mozilla matter today. But hey, the moonshots maybe were misguided somehow, but here, there this one or two that we invested in the past that is starting to bear fruits.. we were lucky.. so why now shutdown the projects that might actually be the ones that can save mozilla in the future? If it was just a matter of closing the offices elsewhere in the world(like the one in Berlin), but we know that part of the engineering not only now, but in the beggining of the year were booted of the company, and some of them in things that should be strategic for Mozilla in the comming years. The pressure is hard, but the good CEO´s will make a stand and defend the things that might not look very good now, but that will be key in the future.. And i wonder, how much a CEO or boarding that could go deeper in the engineering rabbit hole could have helped into making the right decisions. Again, i dont know very well the CEO or the board, all i see is the chess pieces moving from here.. and from what i can see, joining the pieces of the pass movements, i have a sour taste in my mouth that what was once one of the greateast, shiny companies of high technology, a role model to me and to many people, are starting to repeat the misguided steps of companies like Yahoo. Sorry for "the MBA´s", as i dont want to offend anyone, but what i meant is the pattern in the moves, it looks a lot like things Ballmer would do, not Gates. And the difference lies in how much they are informed to take the good decisions they need to make. And tech people often lack the philosophical, social and political baggage to make the good decisions on those kind of matters, so in my opinion they must be helped not chased. Because in the end this might be important to the survival of the entity, that might look good on the paper and in its image, but might be lost in its direction. It sounded like a rant, and i think it was harsh on my part, but its because i care and really like Mozilla. Its when the times are rough that the good decisions are really needed. so i just wonderered.. and i would love to be proved wrong, really.