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I may be the odd one but I dropped FF after the drama over brendin eich and his support of prop 8. I just did not feel the same after seeing how he was attacked

I may be the odd one but I dropped FF after the drama over brendin eich and his support of prop 8. I just did not feel the same after seeing how he was attacked for his personal contributions. There was just some hateful stuff that came from both sides that really uncovered some toxic personalities in the FF legion.

toper-centage 5y ago
When you're a CEO, you're also the face of the company. His "personal contributions" were to support banning of same sex marriage, and it was just 5 years earlier. That's just unacceptable, even in 2014. It really showed how politics work inside companies like Mozilla. But you're not alone. That year lots of users dropped Firefox.
- Amezarak 5y ago
  Proposition 8 passed in California 52-47. [1] Slightly more than seven million people voted for it. That's a lot of people who did something unacceptable. I wish all disagreements didn't have to be framed in such stark terms. I don't live in or care much for California, so I had no dog in the fight, but I also did not like the gang-up on Eich and I don't understand the argument that he had to be kicked out because of how people might feel - it seems like it's the default position to work for someone who thinks you shouldn't have some right or another, or some other person should have more rights than you. It did not affect my usage of Firefox. I did eventually download Brave and I use it for maybe a quarter of my web browsing, but that happened because a site I like stopped working in Firefox. I use Edge for a lot of other stuff - known safe sites, basically. I use Firefox simply out of inertia and because I like NoScript and the exact way NoScript works. A lot of the stuff I like about it is gone now, as they keep removing features I use. I don't have any affection for Mozilla or Firefox anymore. Metrics-based development is always a fool's errand - removing feature after feature that 1% of your install base uses is a great way to lose half your users when you remove > 50 features. In the end, I don't think Mozilla understood where their strength came from. They weren't installed by default. They didn't have massive marketing campaigns like Google/Chrome. They weren't bundled in installers. They had one thing: power users, and power users evangelizing to their friends and family. They've alienated power users, and now all that's left is people running on inertia and people really worried about open source. Not a winning combination. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    Eich didn't just vote for Proposition 8. He publicly materially supported it. Refusing to follow someone isn't ganging up on them. Curtailing their civil rights is. Eich chose to resign.
    - Amezarak 5y ago
      Voting directly affects the outcome. Donating money indirectly supports the outcome. In the end, only votes decide the outcome - many times the side with more money loses. The side with more votes always wins, unless you count the Electoral College. A vote is a much more material support than a 1k donation. > He publicly materially supported it. Nobody knew about Eich's 2008 donation until 2014, years later. Many people who worked with him and knew him for years, like Baker, expressed surprise and said they had no idea he held these views. > Eich chose to resign. Eich was allowed to resign rather than be fired. When you have the board and Executive Chairwoman saying that it's impossible for you to work there with your views, and you resign, that's not exactly a free choice. > Curtailing their civil rights is. I don't think we can put things beyond debate simply by declaring them a civil right. The entire debate was over whether it was/should be a right or not. I don't think this is a productive way to frame it. It just leads to argument rather than discussion, and persecution rather than post-victory rapprochement. I also don't think it's uncommon. I find it hard to think of someone I've worked for or even know that would not like to curtail what I regard as my civil rights in one area or another.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        Votes are private. Donations are public. The LA Times reported Eich's donation in 2012. Mozilla leadership including Baker knew about it before 2014. Eich knowing not to broadcast his support for discrimination is the minimum expected of most employees. Eich himself said he resigned because the controversy was hurting Mozilla. He also said it would have been illegal to fire him. Baker publicly supported Eich's promotion.[1] At least before he botched a predictable and winnable PR crisis. Other people did say his actions and standing by them meant he couldn't credibly promote Mozilla's claimed values. And his belief his discrimination wasn't discriminatory called into question how he could do the CEO's job of preventing discrimination. But basically no one said he couldn't work there with his views. He remained CTO after his views and actions were widely known. And board members asked him to stay in another role after he resigned. The US Supreme Court recognized marriage as a civil right in 1967. It's the law of the land. And same sex marriage was legal in California before Proposition 8. Believing reducing some people's rights is justified doesn't make it not reducing their rights. And calling it what it is isn't persecution. I've never worked for someone who publicly said I should be a 2nd class citizen. I feel sorry for you if you have. It sounds like you might have your own definition of civil rights though. [1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/26/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/26/
kevhsu 5y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-eich-covid-19.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-ei... I don't feel bad for this guy - He says and does things regularly that are hurtful to society with no signs of becoming a better person.
- wayneftw 5y ago
  > In recent months, Mr. Eich’s Twitter feed has largely alternated between promotion of the privacy-focused Brave browser and questions about the policy and science related to the coronavirus. > His posts on Twitter have expressed skepticism about many prevailing assumptions around the pandemic, including the effectiveness of masks and the honesty of Anthony Fauci. Oh no! What a bigot for having questions and skepticism about many prevailing assumptions around the pandemic!! Imagine how much better everything would be if everybody would just agree all the time without any skepticism?
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  And what does 'becoming a better person' entails in the US exactly? enlighten us, foreigners who aren't 'informed' about American identity politics.. Eich is a visionary and a talented engineer, that's all I ask of him when it comes to webtechs. Right now the current "better persons" team at Mozilla is certainly running Firefox into the ground...
- christophilus 5y ago
  Skepticism is a reasonable default position for most things, as is distrust of powerful political entities, as is an assumption that incentive-caused bias is at play when big pharma is involved. He may be wrong about all of this, but I don’t think we’ll be able to speak confidently about societal harm until this has all played out and can be viewed with the benefit of hindsight.
- BrendanEich 5y ago
  If you mean Fauci, then for once on HN, I agree! :-P
totony 5y ago
Yeah, that and the other political commentary + dropping most of their projects (rust, ffsend) really isn't helping. Really wish they'd focus on one mission (making the web free) and not address anything else.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  Instead of reworking the UI they should have just added an ad blocker out of the box (preinstall uBlock Origin for example). The main reason Brave is used and recommended is because a lot of people don't want to bother installing plugins. At least 90% of recommendations for that browser I've seen mention this as reason. Meanwhile most people either don't like the new Firefox UI or just don't care. And I agree, FF Send was great. It was really convenient to transfer a big file in a pinch without having to setup some cloud sync app with registration etc.
  - arepublicadoceu 5y ago
    > they should have just added an ad blocker out of the box (preinstall uBlock Origin for example). Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. They would antagonize their biggest “donor” google. And god knows they really need that huge yearly money influx to whatever the heck they do with that money.
saurik 5y ago
Is there anything you could imagine he could be doing with personal contributions that you would consider worth "attacking" him over (at which point I guess we could reverse engineer that you consider that activity notably "worse" than what Brandon Eich actually did) or do you feel like there is nothing that someone could be doing in their "personal" lives that should cause them to not be a good public face of a project like Firefox?
- crmrc114 5y ago
  The world is a big place - we don't all share a monolith of values. There can be some claims made to natural law or objective truths. However; Your truth is not mine, Plato's cave, etc. Ask yourself why there is no outrage at every company that posts rainbow flags on US brand pages but refuses to do the same on their UAE brand pages. In a nutshell: I am glad that the Christian monks kept the work of all those 'evil pagans' through the dark ages. The candle of Western Civilization could have gone dark if they had religiously burned the works of those they disagreed with... I worry this is a direction we are headed as a cyber culture. I want discourse because that is how we learn and bring others to enlightenment. I (correctly) saw that move with firefox as a broad move in the general us political ecosystem to "unperson" those on the right/left who don't feel the same as you. I.e. "Trump is Hitler", "Obama is a Terrorist" the schoolyard branding in concerning because it does not help any of us get better or connect on a human level. I guess I feel like what happened with Brandon is a good example of that fear manifest. What if, for example, my support of Edward Snowden makes me the next Emmanuel Goldstein, target of two minutes hate for the altar of some agenda? That scares the shit out of me- I don't like it.
  - saurik 5y ago
    > The world is a big place - we don't all share a monolith of values. I am not asking the world: I am asking you, an individual human who assuredly stands for something (and hell: we know you at least stand for this, as you decided to stop using Firefox over it ;P). > Ask yourself why there is no outrage at every company that posts rainbow flags on US brand pages but refuses to do the same on their UAE brand pages. FWIW, I would presume the answer is "because most people don't realize that companies might be doing that"; however, I also take issue with the example: not going out of your way to display support for something is, in fact, different than actively taking action to undermine it... someone who doesn't show a flag might still support something, but someone who actively donates against something clearly doesn't. > In a nutshell: I am glad that the Christian monks kept the work of all those 'evil pagans' through the dark ages. The candle of Western Civilization could have gone dark if they had religiously burned the works of those they disagreed with... I worry this is a direction we are headed as a cyber culture. You do realize that no one has suggested deleting all the copies of Firefox, to prevent future generations from seeing it--the equivalent of your pretty-ridiculous scenario--right? That hasn't even been in question AFAIK even in jest, as Brandon Eich didn't even personally make Firefox. Nor, FWIW, is this about people deciding to abandoning JavaScript or something, unless I missed something? Hell: your framing here is extremely strange when you realize that this isn't even about Firefox the product... except for you! You are in fact the person who decided to "cancel" (as they say) Firefox: you are the person who decided to stop using Firefox because it was being made by people who refused to actively stand up and support a man who donated money towards Prop 8. The people you are upset with were not attempting to destroy the work that is Firefox, they wanted to not work with the person who is Brandon Eich. And that's solely what this is about: "should Brandon Eich have been removed as CTO of Mozilla?". Remember both that CTO is a a very public position for an organization like that, and that CTO is a position of power over a number of people who work on tech at the company... some of whom Brandon Eich was actively saying "I don't respect your existence" by way of his donating to ban gay marriage. I'm not gay, but I know and care deeply about a number of gay people... hell, I would be surprised if you didn't also (even if you didn't know they were gay). By saying that you have decided to stop using Firefox because the employees of Firefox should not have revolted against Brandon Eich, you are thereby not only cancelling the work of a number of people you disagree with--which is something you claim to have serious moral issues with while not being something the people you are seemingly trying to punish were doing (so you can't claim "I'm only doing it because they would do it to me" or whatever)--but you are seriously saying that you expect that all of those people who were at Mozilla should suck it up and keep working with and for someone who, in his "personal life", worked to undermine their lives. Truly: all of your fretting over people destroying the work of the "evil pagans" is off topic, whether it makes you feel better to frame it like that or not. > I want discourse because that is how we learn and bring others to enlightenment. I (correctly) saw that move with firefox as a broad move in the general us political ecosystem to "unperson" those on the right/left who don't feel the same as you. I.e. "Trump is Hitler", "Obama is a Terrorist" the schoolyard branding in concerning because it does not help any of us get better or connect on a human level. Ummm... are you missing that Brandon Eich made the first move here, taking action against gay people by fiscally supporting a ban on gay marriage, which I will strongly claim is "unpersoning" those whom he disagreed with? I haven't seen any kind of mass movement of gay people going out of their way to attempt to ban Christianity, or did I miss that also? Why should everyone be forced to tolerate him? > I guess I feel like what happened with Brandon is a good example of that fear manifest. Well, Brandon Eich seems to want gay people to fear him, so... :/. > What if, for example, my support of Edward Snowden makes me the next Emmanuel Goldstein, target of two minutes hate for the altar of some agenda? That scares the shit out of me- I don't like it. This just seems super unrelated, as I'm not sure what group of people you would be actively showing disrespect for by supporting Edward Snowden. Maybe you could expand on this analogy?
deleted 5y ago
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roenxi 5y ago
The Mozilla corporation has to contend with a substantial portion of their community that thinks a $1,000 donation (an unrelated donation, no less) weighs similarly on the scales as something like 20 years in service vigorously supporting the open internet and a long history of technical success. They're going to struggle to focus on their mission with friends like that.
- approxim8ion 5y ago
  That's their right as consumers. Just as it's Eich's right to be a bigot. That said, I agree that Moz have failed to find a stable business model,which is a pity.
  - rvz 5y ago
    Which is why they have no choice but to continue to take in Google's money which accounts to 80% of their entire revenue. Not only they failed to find a sustainable business model, they completely failed in their mission of promoting a privacy-focused browser. The users couldn't care less on this message or 'advantage' and are dumping them for Chrome. The only message Mozilla has stuck to for years is 'if you can't beat them, join them.' (and get paid by them).
- saurik 5y ago
  So let's say you work for Mozilla and you are gay, or your sibling is gay, or your best friend is gay, or hell: you just are willing to care about people who aren't that close to you and you know that some people somewhere are assuredly gay; and so now, you have to come in to the office every day to work under a guy who, sure, has made an invaluable contribution to the web... but also actively dislikes gay people and wants to make their lives harder, donating to a political cause that deeply affects gay people. Remember: that's what is at stake here... Mozilla is a tech company, and Brandon Eich was their CTO, acting as the public face of the company and as a leader internally; asking them to continue to support him is not some academic question of whether to leave his name on a plaque somewhere... it is a very practical daily question of them having to read e-mails and take direction from someone who actively--and fairly directly... prop 8 wasn't some extremely indirect mechanism or one with a ton of tradeoffs--works to undermine the lives of either themselves or someone they care about.
lucb1e 5y ago
Now you're using Lynx or what? Because something tells me you will find people with stupid opinions in every corporation of a reasonable size. Moving to Google is a really counter-productive move if you value minorities.

toper-centage 5y ago

When you're a CEO, you're also the face of the company. His "personal contributions" were to support banning of same sex marriage, and it was just 5 years earlier. That's just unacceptable, even in 2014. It really showed how politics work inside companies like Mozilla. But you're not alone. That year lots of users dropped Firefox.

Amezarak 5y ago
Proposition 8 passed in California 52-47. [1] Slightly more than seven million people voted for it. That's a lot of people who did something unacceptable. I wish all disagreements didn't have to be framed in such stark terms. I don't live in or care much for California, so I had no dog in the fight, but I also did not like the gang-up on Eich and I don't understand the argument that he had to be kicked out because of how people might feel - it seems like it's the default position to work for someone who thinks you shouldn't have some right or another, or some other person should have more rights than you. It did not affect my usage of Firefox. I did eventually download Brave and I use it for maybe a quarter of my web browsing, but that happened because a site I like stopped working in Firefox. I use Edge for a lot of other stuff - known safe sites, basically. I use Firefox simply out of inertia and because I like NoScript and the exact way NoScript works. A lot of the stuff I like about it is gone now, as they keep removing features I use. I don't have any affection for Mozilla or Firefox anymore. Metrics-based development is always a fool's errand - removing feature after feature that 1% of your install base uses is a great way to lose half your users when you remove > 50 features. In the end, I don't think Mozilla understood where their strength came from. They weren't installed by default. They didn't have massive marketing campaigns like Google/Chrome. They weren't bundled in installers. They had one thing: power users, and power users evangelizing to their friends and family. They've alienated power users, and now all that's left is people running on inertia and people really worried about open source. Not a winning combination. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Eich didn't just vote for Proposition 8. He publicly materially supported it. Refusing to follow someone isn't ganging up on them. Curtailing their civil rights is. Eich chose to resign.
  - Amezarak 5y ago
    Voting directly affects the outcome. Donating money indirectly supports the outcome. In the end, only votes decide the outcome - many times the side with more money loses. The side with more votes always wins, unless you count the Electoral College. A vote is a much more material support than a 1k donation. > He publicly materially supported it. Nobody knew about Eich's 2008 donation until 2014, years later. Many people who worked with him and knew him for years, like Baker, expressed surprise and said they had no idea he held these views. > Eich chose to resign. Eich was allowed to resign rather than be fired. When you have the board and Executive Chairwoman saying that it's impossible for you to work there with your views, and you resign, that's not exactly a free choice. > Curtailing their civil rights is. I don't think we can put things beyond debate simply by declaring them a civil right. The entire debate was over whether it was/should be a right or not. I don't think this is a productive way to frame it. It just leads to argument rather than discussion, and persecution rather than post-victory rapprochement. I also don't think it's uncommon. I find it hard to think of someone I've worked for or even know that would not like to curtail what I regard as my civil rights in one area or another.
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      Votes are private. Donations are public. The LA Times reported Eich's donation in 2012. Mozilla leadership including Baker knew about it before 2014. Eich knowing not to broadcast his support for discrimination is the minimum expected of most employees. Eich himself said he resigned because the controversy was hurting Mozilla. He also said it would have been illegal to fire him. Baker publicly supported Eich's promotion.[1] At least before he botched a predictable and winnable PR crisis. Other people did say his actions and standing by them meant he couldn't credibly promote Mozilla's claimed values. And his belief his discrimination wasn't discriminatory called into question how he could do the CEO's job of preventing discrimination. But basically no one said he couldn't work there with his views. He remained CTO after his views and actions were widely known. And board members asked him to stay in another role after he resigned. The US Supreme Court recognized marriage as a civil right in 1967. It's the law of the land. And same sex marriage was legal in California before Proposition 8. Believing reducing some people's rights is justified doesn't make it not reducing their rights. And calling it what it is isn't persecution. I've never worked for someone who publicly said I should be a 2nd class citizen. I feel sorry for you if you have. It sounds like you might have your own definition of civil rights though. [1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/26/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/26/

kevhsu 5y ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-eich-covid-19.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/business/brave-brendan-ei... I don't feel bad for this guy - He says and does things regularly that are hurtful to society with no signs of becoming a better person.

wayneftw 5y ago
> In recent months, Mr. Eich’s Twitter feed has largely alternated between promotion of the privacy-focused Brave browser and questions about the policy and science related to the coronavirus. > His posts on Twitter have expressed skepticism about many prevailing assumptions around the pandemic, including the effectiveness of masks and the honesty of Anthony Fauci. Oh no! What a bigot for having questions and skepticism about many prevailing assumptions around the pandemic!! Imagine how much better everything would be if everybody would just agree all the time without any skepticism?
throw_m239339 5y ago
And what does 'becoming a better person' entails in the US exactly? enlighten us, foreigners who aren't 'informed' about American identity politics.. Eich is a visionary and a talented engineer, that's all I ask of him when it comes to webtechs. Right now the current "better persons" team at Mozilla is certainly running Firefox into the ground...
christophilus 5y ago
Skepticism is a reasonable default position for most things, as is distrust of powerful political entities, as is an assumption that incentive-caused bias is at play when big pharma is involved. He may be wrong about all of this, but I don’t think we’ll be able to speak confidently about societal harm until this has all played out and can be viewed with the benefit of hindsight.
BrendanEich 5y ago
If you mean Fauci, then for once on HN, I agree! :-P

totony 5y ago

Yeah, that and the other political commentary + dropping most of their projects (rust, ffsend) really isn't helping. Really wish they'd focus on one mission (making the web free) and not address anything else.

alpaca128 5y ago
Instead of reworking the UI they should have just added an ad blocker out of the box (preinstall uBlock Origin for example). The main reason Brave is used and recommended is because a lot of people don't want to bother installing plugins. At least 90% of recommendations for that browser I've seen mention this as reason. Meanwhile most people either don't like the new Firefox UI or just don't care. And I agree, FF Send was great. It was really convenient to transfer a big file in a pinch without having to setup some cloud sync app with registration etc.
- arepublicadoceu 5y ago
  > they should have just added an ad blocker out of the box (preinstall uBlock Origin for example). Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. They would antagonize their biggest “donor” google. And god knows they really need that huge yearly money influx to whatever the heck they do with that money.

saurik 5y ago

Is there anything you could imagine he could be doing with personal contributions that you would consider worth "attacking" him over (at which point I guess we could reverse engineer that you consider that activity notably "worse" than what Brandon Eich actually did) or do you feel like there is nothing that someone could be doing in their "personal" lives that should cause them to not be a good public face of a project like Firefox?

crmrc114 5y ago
The world is a big place - we don't all share a monolith of values. There can be some claims made to natural law or objective truths. However; Your truth is not mine, Plato's cave, etc. Ask yourself why there is no outrage at every company that posts rainbow flags on US brand pages but refuses to do the same on their UAE brand pages. In a nutshell: I am glad that the Christian monks kept the work of all those 'evil pagans' through the dark ages. The candle of Western Civilization could have gone dark if they had religiously burned the works of those they disagreed with... I worry this is a direction we are headed as a cyber culture. I want discourse because that is how we learn and bring others to enlightenment. I (correctly) saw that move with firefox as a broad move in the general us political ecosystem to "unperson" those on the right/left who don't feel the same as you. I.e. "Trump is Hitler", "Obama is a Terrorist" the schoolyard branding in concerning because it does not help any of us get better or connect on a human level. I guess I feel like what happened with Brandon is a good example of that fear manifest. What if, for example, my support of Edward Snowden makes me the next Emmanuel Goldstein, target of two minutes hate for the altar of some agenda? That scares the shit out of me- I don't like it.
- saurik 5y ago
  > The world is a big place - we don't all share a monolith of values. I am not asking the world: I am asking you, an individual human who assuredly stands for something (and hell: we know you at least stand for this, as you decided to stop using Firefox over it ;P). > Ask yourself why there is no outrage at every company that posts rainbow flags on US brand pages but refuses to do the same on their UAE brand pages. FWIW, I would presume the answer is "because most people don't realize that companies might be doing that"; however, I also take issue with the example: not going out of your way to display support for something is, in fact, different than actively taking action to undermine it... someone who doesn't show a flag might still support something, but someone who actively donates against something clearly doesn't. > In a nutshell: I am glad that the Christian monks kept the work of all those 'evil pagans' through the dark ages. The candle of Western Civilization could have gone dark if they had religiously burned the works of those they disagreed with... I worry this is a direction we are headed as a cyber culture. You do realize that no one has suggested deleting all the copies of Firefox, to prevent future generations from seeing it--the equivalent of your pretty-ridiculous scenario--right? That hasn't even been in question AFAIK even in jest, as Brandon Eich didn't even personally make Firefox. Nor, FWIW, is this about people deciding to abandoning JavaScript or something, unless I missed something? Hell: your framing here is extremely strange when you realize that this isn't even about Firefox the product... except for you! You are in fact the person who decided to "cancel" (as they say) Firefox: you are the person who decided to stop using Firefox because it was being made by people who refused to actively stand up and support a man who donated money towards Prop 8. The people you are upset with were not attempting to destroy the work that is Firefox, they wanted to not work with the person who is Brandon Eich. And that's solely what this is about: "should Brandon Eich have been removed as CTO of Mozilla?". Remember both that CTO is a a very public position for an organization like that, and that CTO is a position of power over a number of people who work on tech at the company... some of whom Brandon Eich was actively saying "I don't respect your existence" by way of his donating to ban gay marriage. I'm not gay, but I know and care deeply about a number of gay people... hell, I would be surprised if you didn't also (even if you didn't know they were gay). By saying that you have decided to stop using Firefox because the employees of Firefox should not have revolted against Brandon Eich, you are thereby not only cancelling the work of a number of people you disagree with--which is something you claim to have serious moral issues with while not being something the people you are seemingly trying to punish were doing (so you can't claim "I'm only doing it because they would do it to me" or whatever)--but you are seriously saying that you expect that all of those people who were at Mozilla should suck it up and keep working with and for someone who, in his "personal life", worked to undermine their lives. Truly: all of your fretting over people destroying the work of the "evil pagans" is off topic, whether it makes you feel better to frame it like that or not. > I want discourse because that is how we learn and bring others to enlightenment. I (correctly) saw that move with firefox as a broad move in the general us political ecosystem to "unperson" those on the right/left who don't feel the same as you. I.e. "Trump is Hitler", "Obama is a Terrorist" the schoolyard branding in concerning because it does not help any of us get better or connect on a human level. Ummm... are you missing that Brandon Eich made the first move here, taking action against gay people by fiscally supporting a ban on gay marriage, which I will strongly claim is "unpersoning" those whom he disagreed with? I haven't seen any kind of mass movement of gay people going out of their way to attempt to ban Christianity, or did I miss that also? Why should everyone be forced to tolerate him? > I guess I feel like what happened with Brandon is a good example of that fear manifest. Well, Brandon Eich seems to want gay people to fear him, so... :/. > What if, for example, my support of Edward Snowden makes me the next Emmanuel Goldstein, target of two minutes hate for the altar of some agenda? That scares the shit out of me- I don't like it. This just seems super unrelated, as I'm not sure what group of people you would be actively showing disrespect for by supporting Edward Snowden. Maybe you could expand on this analogy?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

roenxi 5y ago

The Mozilla corporation has to contend with a substantial portion of their community that thinks a $1,000 donation (an unrelated donation, no less) weighs similarly on the scales as something like 20 years in service vigorously supporting the open internet and a long history of technical success. They're going to struggle to focus on their mission with friends like that.

approxim8ion 5y ago
That's their right as consumers. Just as it's Eich's right to be a bigot. That said, I agree that Moz have failed to find a stable business model,which is a pity.
- rvz 5y ago
  Which is why they have no choice but to continue to take in Google's money which accounts to 80% of their entire revenue. Not only they failed to find a sustainable business model, they completely failed in their mission of promoting a privacy-focused browser. The users couldn't care less on this message or 'advantage' and are dumping them for Chrome. The only message Mozilla has stuck to for years is 'if you can't beat them, join them.' (and get paid by them).
saurik 5y ago
So let's say you work for Mozilla and you are gay, or your sibling is gay, or your best friend is gay, or hell: you just are willing to care about people who aren't that close to you and you know that some people somewhere are assuredly gay; and so now, you have to come in to the office every day to work under a guy who, sure, has made an invaluable contribution to the web... but also actively dislikes gay people and wants to make their lives harder, donating to a political cause that deeply affects gay people. Remember: that's what is at stake here... Mozilla is a tech company, and Brandon Eich was their CTO, acting as the public face of the company and as a leader internally; asking them to continue to support him is not some academic question of whether to leave his name on a plaque somewhere... it is a very practical daily question of them having to read e-mails and take direction from someone who actively--and fairly directly... prop 8 wasn't some extremely indirect mechanism or one with a ton of tradeoffs--works to undermine the lives of either themselves or someone they care about.

lucb1e 5y ago

Now you're using Lynx or what? Because something tells me you will find people with stupid opinions in every corporation of a reasonable size. Moving to Google is a really counter-productive move if you value minorities.