8 ms·
They had one. Until he made a fatal mistake of giving a tenner to the wrong people.
by abcd_f 10mo ago
They had one. Until he made a fatal mistake of giving a tenner to the wrong people.
- neom 10mo agoHe gave $1000 donation to support a ban on gay marriage, to be clear.
- 4gotunameagain 10mo agoOh yes, totally worth it to risk THE FREE INTERNET because of that.
- joshstrange 10mo ago> risk THE FREE INTERNET because of that Come off it, as if he is the only one who can save us. Spare me.
- philipwhiuk 10mo agoHe's not defending "THE FREE INTERNET" at his new place. (Which for the record, is less important than physical freedom).
- LunaSea 10mo agoMaybe that has to do with Brave not getting a free check to the tune iof $500M Google every year. That makes it more difficult to create "free internet" type projects.
- Orygin 10mo agoProbably comes from the Crypto scam integrated into the browser. I find it funny some people shit on Firefox for adding Pocket, but defend Brave for adding crypto scams to the browser.
- LunaSea 10mo agoI don't defend Brave adding this feature or believe that it is even a good idea but how does this constitute a scam?
- Orygin 10mo ago> I don't defend Brave Maybe not, but you spend quite some time spitting on Mozilla for taking money from Google.
- LunaSea 10mo agoYes, because (1) they spent that money badly as can be seen from the non-Google revenue numbers of Mozilla and Firefox's market share and (2) people are comparing practices of a company that gets $500M for free and a practices of a company that is essentially bootstrapped, which makes no sense.
- cies 10mo ago[flagged]
- ecshafer 10mo agoAnd people don't have to all agree on the same things. People can get together to work towards cause X and then individually believe in mutually exclusive causes alpha, beta, gamma.
- lalaland1125 10mo agoIt's not really possible to do that when the opposing beliefs are so fundamental. Mozilla had, and has, a lot of LGBT staff. How could you expect those staff to work under and trust a CEO opposed to their very existence as equal members of society?
- 0x000xca0xfe 10mo agoWhat's so fundamental about marriage? I don't think childless couples (of any gender) should get any societal advantages yet I have no problem working with people that disagree. Why has everything to be black-or-white, left-or-right, with us or against us? That's not a productive way to think about others.
- dpkirchner 10mo agoIt has to be us vs against us because that's what law is all about -- outlawing certain actions. It's one thing to believe as you do, it's quite another to push for legislation that would (in your example) deny childless couples societal advantages, whatever that actually means. If you're not in favor of a-or-b arguments the answer is to allow a and b, eh?
- joshgachnang 10mo agoYour thinking applies equally to all people. His donation tries to take away a right from a minority group. They're quite different.
- lalaland1125 10mo agoWhat unjust "advantages" do you think childless couples get that you would want to get rid? Pretty much all of the legal benefits of marriage are contractual, not financial, and come at no cost to the public. Things like spousal medical rights, a joint estate, etc don't come at the expense of anybody else.
- sunaookami 10mo agoA ban that was supported by the majority at the time and the donation was six years old at the time he became CEO. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461541
- ceejayoz 10mo agoTo Godwin a little, sometimes the right thing is not the majority thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Landmesser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Landmesser
- bigstrat2003 10mo agoThe point was not "whatever the majority wants is therefore good". The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs. That is a pretty unreasonable standard to apply, imo. Also, come on man. It's in really bad taste to compare stuff to the Holocaust. Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.
- ceejayoz 10mo ago> The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs. Standards should be higher for folks with more power. The cashier at the grocery store expressing bigoted beliefs won't harm me much; my boss doing it is more serious. > Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same. I assure you, homophobia has its murder victims. (Including a good number of Holocaust ones.)
- RobotToaster 10mo ago> Standards should be higher for folks with more power. Joe Biden voted for the "Defense of Marriage Act", Yet many LGBT people supported him becoming president.
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- sunshine-o 10mo agoBrendan Eich is a rich nerd who probably got cornered in a party by someone smart and signed $1000 check. It is like blaming me for giving $10 to an bump without checking what he was gonna do with it.
- sfink 10mo agoNo part of this is true, fwiw. His salary at Mozilla was not high and he was a strong advocate of keeping executive compensation low (and as supporting evidence, that compensation shot up soon after he left). He may have made more from Brave, but that was obviously well after the donation. He also never backed down from his donation and the directly implied opposition to gay marriage, only stating that it comes from his personal beliefs and that he refused to discuss those openly. (I disagree with his position on gay marriage, or at least the position that I can infer from his donation, but I agree with his right and decision to keep it a private matter.) I had... complex but mostly positive feelings about Eich in the time I worked for him (indirectly), but I can state unequivocally that he's not someone who would bend his principles as a result of getting cornered at a party.
- sunshine-o 10mo agoWhat I meant is he is a guy who have evolved in the center of the tech revolution in the 90s and 2000s. If he is not horribly bad with money he probably made a lot at least in various investments. So I would guess $1000 was almost nothing to him. He is not really supporting anything by donating $1000. I listened to him in a interview once, he really feel like a nice guy.
- RobotToaster 10mo agoIn political terms $1000 is basically nothing.
- dabockster 10mo agoIn 2014, which is over a decade ago now. Wikipedia also says he's Catholic. From what I understand, the Church's positions on such things have evolved at least somewhat since then. His views could have totally changed or evolved since then (can't find anything publicly myself).
- phoronixrly 10mo agoTranslation: he had donated to ban same-sex marriage in California[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CEO_and_resignation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
- jsheard 10mo agoBut then he went on to make Yet Another Chromium Fork, so it doesn't seem like he was particularly attached to Gecko or what it stands for in the browser engine market anyway. What's to say that Mozilla wouldn't have given up the fight and pivoted to Chromium, like Opera and Edge did, if he was still in charge?
- sct202 10mo agoAnd he went in on integrating trendy things like Ads that pay crypto and AI integrated into the browser, so it's not like there wouldn't be AI if he were in charge.
- LunaSea 10mo agoMaybe that was necessary because they don't get a $500M check every year. Kinda makes things more difficult.
- afavour 10mo agoIs there a name for the fallacy where you assume the path not taken is much better? Because I agree, this is that. Mozilla’s challenges are foundational, Eich as CEO wouldn’t have made a dramatic difference in outcomes.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- sharps1 10mo agoThey originally started with Gecko and switched to Chromium. "There were a ton of issues using Gecko, starting with (at the time) no CDM (HTML5 DRM module) so no HD video content from the major studios, Netflix, Amazon, etc. -- Firefox had an Adobe deal but it was not transferable or transferred to any other browser that used Gecko -- and running the gamut of paper-cuts to major web incompatibilities especially on mobile, vs. WebKit-lineage engines such as Chromium/Blink." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941623
- smt88 10mo agoEich chose to resign due to internal and external protest in the form of petitions and resignations. No one forced him to do anything, and Mozilla itself certainly didn't force him out. His free speech was met with the free speech of others, and he decided it was too painful to stay in that spotlight. How would you prefer it to have gone?
- mm263 10mo agoNot to have him cancelled in the first place. No need to pretend that doing something under the mob pressure is the same as doing something entirely willingly
- smt88 10mo agoFar, far more people have protested the positions of power held by (for example) Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle. They ignored the cancellation attempts, and they're richer and more influential today than they were a few years ago. "Cancellation" is a state of being famous enough that your controversial beliefs upset a large, loud number of people. In Eich's case, it threatened to have no effect on his career. He chose to change his career because of it. Eich expressed his First Amendment rights, and other people expressed theirs in return. Why should either of them give up those rights for fear of offending the other?