11 ms·

Mozilla Moving Forward

175 points by tweakz 13y ago

simbolit 13y ago
also read: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2014/04/12/earth-to-mozilla-come-back-to-us/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2014/04/12/earth-to-mozilla... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7584900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7584900 was on HN homepage earlier in the day.
natural219 13y ago
I'm still mad about the Brendan Eich thing. Like, mad. I'm totally fine with anybody pursuing whatever kind of political agenda they want, but at the moment you start to derail real progress, the moment you attack one of the best organizations who has literally been busting its ass for the last decade to change the world for no profit... Well, you declared war. I think this whole debacle should be a rallying cry that we're not going to accept this kind of bullying anymore. The worst part is, the progressive platform has some really important things to say about the way we live. We're not an equal society yet. We still have more changes we need to make to secure the freedom and happiness of everybody, especially groups that have been historically marginalized. All the more reason to shut down the bullies who have domineered the narrative, produced nothing but useless bickering, and have sought nothing but divisiveness at every turn in the everlasting quest for more pageviews. I'm looking at you, Gawker. Don't tolerate this any more. Brendan Eich was just one casualty. It's time to start sticking up for ourselves.
- pgrote 13y ago
  "It's time to start sticking up for ourselves" Can you clarify what group does "ourselves" reference?
  - k__ 13y ago
    Probably people with other opinions than the masses.
    - kourt 13y ago
      Proposition 8 was an opinion of the masses: it received 7,001,084 (52.24%) of the votes.
      - MrZongle2 13y ago
        It amazes me that you've been downvoted for posting a fact. Proposition 8 was passed by a majority: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_%282008%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_%28200... However one feels about the result, only a fascist would want to shove that bit of history down the memory hole.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        MrZongle2 13y ago
        Why it happened doesn't matter in this context. Suppressing the record of what did happen is Soviet-style revisionism. But to address your point, according to at least one SF-based news organization, Proposition 8 spending had no effect on the vote: http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Prop-8-spending-found-to-have-swayed-no-voters-3184734.php http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Prop-8-spending-found... Edit: apparently decrying revisionism and citing a reference in response to a now-deleted post is downvote worthy. Thanks, free thinkers of HN!
        wwweston 13y ago
        > Prop8 was passed based on propaganda and a lot of out-of- state funding... Under normal circumstances prop8 would never have passed in California of all places. "The campaigns for and against Proposition 8 raised $39.0 million ($11.3 million or 29.1% from outside California) and $44.1 million ($13.2 million or 30.0% from outside California), respectively"[1] If money distorted normal circumstances, presumably it did so to a greater degree on the "against" side of Prop 8. If you take Prop 22 as the earlier norm ("61% in favor to 39% against"[2]), that makes some sense. I think it's a lot more likely, though, that the advertising probably only affected a minority of participants (if any) and Eich's support put him in company with the then majority of the state. That doesn't mean it was the right thing. It does, however, have something to say about whether his support puts him beyond the pale for a leadership role. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008)#Campaign_funding_and_spending http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008)... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_22_(2000) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_22_(2000...
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- bkor 13y ago
  "the moment you attack one of the best organizations" Nobody attacked Mozilla. You're totally off base.
  - i80and 13y ago
    Some people fell just one step shy of demanding that others boycott Firefox. I'd call that an attack on Mozilla.
    - weaksauce 13y ago
      there actually were websites that called for a boycott of firefox.
    - bowlofpetunias 13y ago
      Some people would call attacking the decision of the Mozilla leadership supporting Mozilla. I would not have given a f* about Eich if I didn't care about Mozilla.
  - M2Ys4U 13y ago
    Plenty of people did attack Mozilla, though, and it was quite disheartening to watch.
    - bkor 13y ago
      No, they strongly disliked Brendan Eich to be a CEO of Mozilla. Their dislike is with the CEO, not the company. But because of the strong dislike, they cannot support the company. Boycotting a company because of not wanting the CEO is not an attack on the company. It is expressing that you really don't like / disagree / hate / whatever the company. I strongly dislike Brendan Eich was made a CEO. I don't want to support Mozilla in any way and I would've been very critical about Mozilla. Knowing that he supported prop 8 and then knowingly making him a CEO is not the company / organization I supported (fyi: I've triaged 600+ bugs, used to be a Bugzilla developer, have git.mozilla.org commit access, etc).
  - carlio 13y ago
- danso 13y ago
  Sorry, but "sticking up" for what exactly? Eich's defenders seem to treat him like a child...like, he doesn't know how to phrase a statement like, "I'm against civil unions, not gays, which is why I donated to Prop 8". This isn't about Eich being punished for a "mistake" back in 2008, his detractors are unhappy that Eich does not believe that Prop 8 was a mistake, back in 2008 and today, six years later. I'm not going to get into a debate about whether Prop 8 was right or wrong. But don't treat this like it's a witch hunt for long past grievances. Until he says otherwise, Eich is a supporter of Prop 8. That doesn't make him evil, that doesn't make him incapable of holding leadership. But for people for whom Prop 8 is a big deal, I think it's understandable why they would continue to press the issue with Eich and his leadership.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Effectively, people are saying that we should defend Eich for the same reason we should defend weev: less that they are people and more that they are pawns.
  - smsm42 13y ago
    Prop 8 was not about civil unions. If you want to discuss it, at least get your facts right. Benefits equality, etc. that is commonly understood under civil union umbrella existed in California long before prop 8, and prop 8 was not going to change that. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo... For people for whom prop 8 is a big deal it would be a good thing to at least know what it was about.
    - bunderbunder 13y ago
      Well, it depends on what you mean by "commonly understood under civil union umbrella". A lot of people mistakenly believe that civil unions are just a separate-but-equal version of marriage. That version of civil unions is a fairy tale. Speaking as one member of a couple that finally gave up on making a civil union work and went ahead with an actual marriage a few years back, I can say that there's a night-and-day difference between the two. The institutional benefits that were available to us as a legally recognized civil union could be counted on one hand, and most of them were still not quite the same as what married people get. People who only have a civil union aren't allowed to share health savings accounts the way married people can, for example. The number of finacial and convenience perks we acquired the day after our marriage license got filed with the county clerk, on the other hand, are practically innumerable. We feel like shits for exercising the privilege we enjoy as a heterosexual couple. But we're getting pragmatic in our old age, so here we are.
- patrickg_zill 13y ago
  I think your point is (paraphrasing), we canned a very productive engineer and manager over his un-PC views expressed in his personal life, but which no one at his organization was affected by; and in return, since none of the people criticizing him or pushing for his departure has the ability to truly replace his talent, we have the prospect of the unproductive people criticizing the people who actually get things done. How accurate am I in understanding your view?
  - rjzzleep 13y ago
    i think the real bitter irony here is that brendan eich not only helped build, but also protected the platform that helped oust him. when i say the platform, I don't mean the web, I mean the open web, where you can freely express yourself as aggressively as you want(which is a good thing). not to step on anyones toes, but we effectively ousted a very productive engineer from a company he helped found to replace him with a marketing guy(no offense really, i know he's been with mozilla forever, and loyalty deserves to be rewarded). i really hope i won't have this moment in 10 years thinking back, man where did mozilla ideals move so much away from mine, and i know everyone is going to jump on this part of cynic good ol me, especially all the mozillians here, but i still very well remember the time i spent in irc ~20 years ago, where the people thinking about mass surveillance were a select few stamped as insane anti social paranoid geeks.
  - king_jester 13y ago
    > but which no one at his organization was affected by; Uh what? There are most certainly LGBTQ folks who work for Mozilla in some capacity or another and they most certainly are affected by nationally focused political efforts to deny them access to a basic institution.
    - Crito 13y ago
      Particularly any LGBTQ Mozilla employees that lived in the state of California between 2008 and 2013, which I assume is many of them.
    - patrickg_zill 13y ago
- crystaln 13y ago
  I read this twice, and I still have no idea what you are trying to say, which side of any issue you are on, or what makes you any different from over-reacting haters on either side.
  - ffbellfhtlflf 13y ago
    How can you not understand it? He's saying the progressive left has started to go too far in the mechanisms they use to bring about admittedly needed change. You don't go about winning the hearts and minds of people you disagree with by harassing them and getting them fired from their jobs. This only sets movements back. "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it"
  - bane 13y ago
    He must be talking about Eich, since he was clearly supporting the group of bullies who were so flagrant and pernicious that they'd even pass a law to prevent grown consenting adults from having meaningful relationships with each other.
  - kourt 13y ago
    "which side of any issue you are on" Maybe he's on everybody's side. What freedom is more important than the freedom to be true to one's self? What good is free speech[1] when the private, individual exercise thereof results in the professional equivalent of capital punishment? [1] Whether campaign contributions are always identical to speech in all contexts is immaterial here: in this case, they're close enough.
    - crystaln 13y ago
      Sure, he could be on everyone's side and trying to clarify the issue. If so, he's doing a rather poor job. However, it seemed rather obvious that he had an intention to take some sort of stance on an issue, something he also failed at.
  - homulilly 13y ago
    Pretending to be on one side while implicitly supporting the other. Fairly common line of thinking amongst self-proclaimed moderates who try to hide, or wont acknowledge their own reactionary politics.
- jhonovich 13y ago
  "produced nothing but useless bickering" Brendan Eich produced _nothing_ but useless bickering?
- kaonashi 13y ago
  I find absolutely nothing wrong with the way he was treated. To say that somehow he was the victim of bullying, when he was the one who was taking action to deny other people their rights, is so morally backwards I have a hard time conceding that you're arguing in good faith.
  - radmuzom 13y ago
    It's strange that this is getting downvoted. Nobody went and physically abused Eich to remove him as CEO. It's strange that those who are supporting Eich for his right to his own views are against our right to express outrage.
    - bzbarsky 13y ago
      The right to express outrage is not an absolute. See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/2014/04/speech_and_consequences.html http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/2014/04/speech_an... for what I consider some obvious limitations on it. You're saying there were no instances of item #1 on my list, and I believe you are correct. However, there certainly were instances of item #2.
    - zheshishei 13y ago
      > Nobody went and physically abused Eich to remove him as CEO. I hope you're not saying that bullying only occurs when physical abuse happens, because if you are, you're pretty much denying that cyber-bullying happens. Whether or not the response to Eich counts as cyberbullying, I'm making no comment on that.
- nostromo 13y ago
  And where do you draw the line? Are you going to defend people that oppose Women's Suffrage too? What about slavery supporters? These were just political opinions once too. But today you'll find that they get you fired as CEO. And for good reason: blacks and women (and gays) are your customers and employees and business partners.
  - batmansbelt 13y ago
    And friends, family, and neighbours.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    I'm genuinely curious where you would draw your line. Would you support firing Mozilla's CEO if it's revealed he voted for Mitt Romney? What if he gave his campaign $1000?
    - davidw 13y ago
      Maybe we can all agree that it's a fuzzy, gray line, and move on to talking about things that can actually move our businesses forward, or are cool hacks, interesting phenomenon or otherwise generate more light than heat.
      - twoodfin 13y ago
        A fuzzy, gray line that cost a smart hacker a job he was otherwise incredibly well-suited for? If it's really that indistinct, it's scary: I might want to work for a company some day that cares about where that line is, and I'd like to stay on the right side of it.
        davidw 13y ago
        "Working for" and "being the leader and representative of" are two different things. Eich's views were known to Mozilla for a while before this blew up. If you want an honest answer, I think if you want to play the political game, you need to keep your cards close to your chest. You may not like that answer, and you folks can furiously click on the downvote arrow all you like, but I think that's the reality of it: for an extreme example, look at how closely every single aspect of US presidential candidates' lives are picked over, both present and past. I'll add to that: not everyone should do that - I'm glad that some people have stuck their necks out in the past. We all owe some of them a debt of gratitude. But, by and large, they're probably not the same people aiming at the top job in a large corporation.
- macrael 13y ago
  I actually really liked Marco Arment's take on this. http://www.marco.org/2014/04/04/political-views http://www.marco.org/2014/04/04/political-views As time marches forward our society's tolerance for certain viewpoints has changed. This is a good thing.
  - zobzu 13y ago
    Or.. this is a bad thing. It goes totally both ways. What if tolerance for your viewpoint is lower? You're not longer allowed to have an opinion not shared by the majority? Not sure how that's a good thing at all. Imagine you are 100 years ago and your viewpoint is "gay marriage should be allowed"? in fact, back then, some people would probably be killed for thinking that. The vast majority of the collective conscientiousness certainly thought this was wrong. And look where we are today.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  I would take a step back and reflect on why you're so upset. The reaction you've posted is almost awkwardly inappropriate given the circumstances.
- arrrg 13y ago
  “I don’t think having a CEO who represents the company that donated to prevent gay marriage is cool. I will stop using the product of the company. I ask you to do the same.” That was the most common reaction. I think that’s completely harmless and unproblematic. That’s how responsible adults should act. So I’m not really sure what you are angry about.
- benatkin 13y ago
  Cool story. A more marketing-oriented person being CEO is a better choice for a community-oriented organization, and should have been made by the board in the first place. This [1] puts it succinctly. "The mistake made was not made by Brendan Eich" and "The people who messed up here are the board of the Mozilla Corporation." This is Mozilla's board doing what they should have done all along, except that Brendan Eich can't be CTO anymore. 1: http://seldo.com/weblog/2014/04/04/on_brendan_eich_equality_and_freedom http://seldo.com/weblog/2014/04/04/on_brendan_eich_equality_...
- homulilly 13y ago
  Brendan Eich was working pretty hard to derail real progress too, ironically. It's pretty understandable for people to be upset about the appointment of someone unqualified to CEO of an organization they strongly care about and someone who actively works against equal rights is incredibly unqualified to lead an organization like Mozilla, no matter their technical or business expertise.
  - hackuser 13y ago
    > Brendan Eich was working pretty hard to derail real progress I don't support what he did, but did he do anything beyond make the donation?
- ebbv 13y ago
  Oh please. Bullying my ass. People found his views repugnant and reacted accordingly. Maybe you don't think supporting Prop 8 is repugnant, but lots of us do. This isn't a question of him supporting second amendment rights, or thinking the ACA is over-reaching. This is him actively supporting the squashing of the civil rights of a minority group because he doesn't approve of their relationship. Not only the donating to Prop 8, but even now in 2014 standing by those views. It is certainly his right to hold those views, but they are repellant enough that I no longer felt OK using Mozilla products. Other people shared my view. Enough people that Mozilla felt compelled to react. This is not bullying. This is freedom of speech all around and a free market, and a result of that. You and Andrew Sullivan pretending Eich is a victim of bullying are being ridiculous. If he had been a member of NAMBLA would anyone say it was bullying? No. Prop 8 support may not be as bad as NAMBLA, but it's pretty awful in my view all the same.
- lotsofmangos 13y ago
  I think it was good that Eich stepped down as he was a bad choice for CEO as it is a leadership role in which politics matters. Your militancy on this however is poisonous, there is a need for people building things here, not preparing for one of these abstract wars on concepts that folk seem to so love. Mozilla is a software collaboration and it needs to ship, the last thing they need is social warriors stirring the pot. If you want to help, fix bugs. Nobody won anything here, at best we all maybe learned something.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  > I'm totally fine with anybody pursuing whatever kind of political agenda they want, but at the moment you start to derail real progress, the moment you attack one of the best organizations who has literally been busting its ass for the last decade to change the world for no profit 1) So you're contradicting yourself in one sentence. I wish to pursue an equal rights agenda, and in so doing protest, loudly, when people who publicly act against equal rights are promoted to prominent positions. Now, I didn't expect Brendan Eich to be fired (he wasn't) or step down (which he did) but maybe to actually explain himself (he didn't). If his feelings are so strongly held, and he values free speech so much, then by all means let him make his case. 2) Mozilla is a non-profit, but plenty of the people working for it make perfectly decent salaries. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Mozilla-Salaries-E19129.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Mozilla-Salaries-E19129.htm > All the more reason to shut down the bullies who have domineered the narrative, produced nothing but useless bickering, and have sought nothing but divisiveness at every turn in the everlasting quest for more pageviews. I'm looking at you, Gawker. 3) Seems to me like it's the pot calling the kettle black.
- king_jester 13y ago
  I feel like there's a bingo card that has all of your half-assed excuses on it. > I'm totally fine with anybody pursuing whatever kind of political agenda they want, but at the moment you start to derail real progress, the moment you attack one of the best organizations who has literally been busting its ass for the last decade to change the world for no profit... I'm fine with pursuing your politics until I feel your politics are inconvenient. > Well, you declared war. I think this whole debacle should be a rallying cry that we're not going to accept this kind of bullying anymore. Not tolerating bullies that seek to curtail your existence through law does not make you a bully. > The worst part is, the progressive platform has some really important things to say about the way we live. We're not an equal society yet. We still have more changes we need to make to secure the freedom and happiness of everybody, especially groups that have been historically marginalized. How exactly are you going to do that by letting the CEO of Mozilla be a supporter of Prop 8? How exactly are you helping anyone by outright enshrining in law a discrimination against gay folks? > All the more reason to shut down the bullies who have domineered the narrative, produced nothing but useless bickering, and have sought nothing but divisiveness at every turn in the everlasting quest for more pageviews. I'm looking at you, Gawker. Of course, all those people who are affected by this are just being decisive and mean, leave Brendan Eich alone! > Don't tolerate this any more. Brendan Eich was just one casualty. It's time to start sticking up for ourselves. Sticking up for ourselves is what people were doing by voicing their complaints with Eich and his support for Prop 8. Nobody was launching a campaign to strip him of his rights in law.
  - jdp23 13y ago
    > I feel like there's a bingo card that has all of your half-assed excuses on it. You mean something along these lines? https://twitter.com/eassumption/status/451921312609361922 https://twitter.com/eassumption/status/451921312609361922
- qwerta 13y ago
  I think most people hate him subconsciously for inventing JavaScript abomination. The current back splash is just an camouflage for that :-)
- generalk 13y ago
  I don't understand a thing you're saying. but at the moment you start to derail real progress, the moment you attack one of the best organizations who has literally been busting its ass for the last decade to change the world for no profit...Well, you declared war. I'm not familiar with anyone that attacked Mozilla. The heaviest I saw were boycotts. That doesn't sound like "war" to me, that sounds like the right tack to take. Calling it "war" is overly-dramatic. Don't tolerate this any more. Brendan Eich was just one casualty. It's time to start sticking up for ourselves. Let's start looking at reality. Brendon Eich had MANY opportunities to assure both his detractors and Mozilla's LGBTQ employees that he was dedicated to ensuring that Mozilla would remain inclusive regardless of sexual orientation. He pursued none of them. Look, I can't speak to Eich's effectiveness as CEO, but it seems like handling a PR situation is part-and-parcel of being a CEO. Eich chose to resign. We're not an equal society yet. We still have more changes we need to make to secure the freedom and happiness of everybody, especially groups that have been historically marginalized. Steps that include speaking out against and boycotting entities that put bigots in charge. (Bigot may be a strong word here, I don't know Eich personally, but he did donate to get Prop 8 passed, which certainly sounds like bigoted behavior.) What else would you have the aggrieved parties do? All the more reason to shut down the bullies that [...] produced nothing but useless bickering The irony burns.
- msbarnett 13y ago
  To crib a very old phrase: I cannot rightly apprehend the confusion of ideas that would lead one to believe that it was ok for Brandon Eich to exercise his Freedom of Speech to support an attempt to relegate many mozillans and other Californians to second-class citizenship, but that it was not ok for others to exercise their Freedom of Speech to express their feelings about Eich and his suitableness as a public-facing representative of Mozilla.
  - invalidOrTaken 13y ago
    >...to express their feelings about Eich and his suitableness as a public-facing representative of Mozilla. But who made him "unsuitable?" Was Eich trumpeting his donations? This whole thing has a "Answer me when I talk to you, boy! ----> Don't talk back to me, boy!" feel to it.
    - msbarnett 13y ago
      > But who made him "unsuitable?" Was Eich trumpeting his donations? Eich fundamentally believes that many mozillans are second-class human beings, worthy of less rights and respect than others. That makes him enormously unsuitable to lead Mozilla.
  - sergiosgc 13y ago
    Do a mental exercise. Imagine a very vocal group of anti-gay activists causing a tech company to get cold feet about promoting an LGBT supporter to CEO. That's the dual scenario. Does your opinion still hold? This is the Pandora box that was opened here.
    - msbarnett 13y ago
      It's not much of a Pandora's box. They're certainly well-within their rights to try to do so. And civil rights activists would call for counter-boycotts, etc. That's how society shakes this stuff out. That's, fundamentally, how free speech and freedom of association and voting with your money works. And more to the point, this is the exact world we already live in. Conservative groups pressured World Vision into reversing their stance of accepting gay marriage just a couple of weeks ago. The Mozilla-Eich brouhaha didn't open any strange new Pandora's box, this kind of thing has been a fundamental part of the American civil landscape for well over a century!
- pjbrunet 13y ago
  "we're not going to accept this kind of bullying anymore." What are you proposing? Can you force OKCupid to treat all browsers the same?
- mbrutsch 13y ago
  The way I understand it, you're free to say what you please, and free to get called out for it. Having the internet harass your business is a distraction, regardless of how "right" it may be, and it's understandable that concessions mus be made to keep the business running smoothly, lest you endanger the livelihoods of everyone who works there.
- LaGrange 13y ago
  "I'm totally fine with anybody pursuing whatever kind of political agenda they want, but at the moment you start to derail real progress," Exactly why Eich had to go. "Well, you declared war." Yes, the right wingers did. "we're not going to accept this kind of bullying anymore." Exactly why Eich had to go. "It's time to start sticking up for ourselves." Said people bullied by people like Eich, and stuck up for themselves. Yes, I do think that LGBT rights are far more important than Mozilla.
- temphn 13y ago
  The answer is to stop arguing with words and start targeting Gawker's business model. Their advertiser list is in plain view. Go to their about page to see all the megacorps that have done sponsored ads with them. Now take the worst things Gawker has ever written and send it to the people who run the advertising accounts at those companies (you can get their names off LinkedIn or whatever). For example, send the #GawkingatRapeCulture hashtag to the Coke rep who chose to advertise on Gawker and ask them whther Coke is intentionally supporting rape culture by donating to Gawker. Make sure not do this purely as a solo op; once you have the data on their advertisers, pull together a website that makes it easy for anyone to chip in via one click. Those who run sites with advertising inventory can also donate ad slots at lower CPMs to the sponsors of Gawker in order to pull revenue away from Gawker. They profit from clickbait. So we need to hit these people in the wallet.
- badman_ting 13y ago
  Stop it, that was not an attack.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rebelidealist 13y ago
There is a stark contrast with how Drew Houston of Dropbox defended Condi Rice vs Mozilla's lack of effort in defending someone that instrumental part of what Mozilla is today. https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/04/our-commitment-to-your-rights-and-privacy/ https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/04/our-commitment-to-your-righ... His pointed response is short and stern. "We’re honored to have Dr. Rice join our board" Mozilla's was apologetic. "We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better." If Drew is the chairman of Mozilla, he would said. "In 16 years that Eich was in leadership position in Mozilla, he welcomed and worked with everyone with different personal beliefs, religious values, and sexual orientation. We are honored to have the creator of Javascript as our CEO". End of story.
- GuiA 13y ago
  You can't really compare Dropbox and Mozilla. They don't have the same structure, they don't have the same goals, they don't attract the same kind of leadership or employees, they don't have the same people pulling the strings, etc etc.
  - asaddhamani 13y ago
    So apparently being a war criminal is a lot better than donating $1000 to Prop 8? The world would be a better place if instead of Eich, Rice resigned.
    - GuiA 13y ago
      Re-read my comment. I'm not saying it's better at all; just that you can't compare the two (and saying "If Houston had been at Mozilla..." is nonsensical). The kind of people involved with Mozilla, and the kind of structure Mozilla aspires to be, makes it logical for them to dismiss their CEO in the way they did. The kind of people involved with Dropbox, and the kind of structure Dropbox aspires to be, makes it logical for them to defend their board of directors choice and not back down. (FWIW I have deep disgust for some of the actions taken by both Rice and Eich.)
exabrial 13y ago
Bullying goes both ways. Hilarious how some people are trying to justify this.
jvehent 13y ago
People who are going to comment on this blog post need to realize how disturbing this episode has been for Mozillians. We are talking about a small group of people, a couple thousands at best, that work with limited resources to keep the web open for everybody. When this tidal wave hit Mozillians, the base contributors and employees who spend most of their days in code and features, we lost focus of our work, and stepped into a world of politics that most of us dislike, and are uncomfortable to navigate. I believe Chris Beard is a true Mozillian, as is Brendan Eich. And I am glad that we can refocus on our mission, and move forward. I just wish people can put their differences aside, accept each other's beliefs, and share code!
- jvehent 13y ago
  And just to add to this :) http://people.mozilla.org/~smartell/cbeard/cbeard-illustration.png http://people.mozilla.org/~smartell/cbeard/cbeard-illustrati...
- bowlofpetunias 13y ago
  Please, please, stop calling this "politics" or suggesting this is about (in)tolerance by others. It's completely dismissive of the very real objections people had concerning the appointment of Eich, especially those of us who understand the importance of Mozilla for the open web and weren't just out for good old lynching.
  - Yoric 13y ago
    The problem is not people who were able to argue against Brendan Eich. I am sure that there was space for a sane debate on the topic. The problem was the bullies who were screaming along. (I'm not going to call this a lynching, because in my mind, that's basically a Godwin point).
    - wonderzombie 13y ago
      It's silly to call this bullying. Yes, people shouldn't send death threats-- nobody should receive them regardless, and I think this is a larger problem with the Internet in general. But a collective of people exercising their free speech to disagree with somebody's views and to vote with their feet isn't bullying. It's not bullying just because someone's feelings are hurt when a shit-ton of people find said person's views abhorrent.
jackbauer 13y ago
can't understand why this story is ranked at 1
Xdes 13y ago
Time to see Chris Beard's track record for contributions.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  Let's not. I think the folks who feel someone's political actions and views are a good reason to shun or punish them are wrong. I don't care what you're for or against: If you participate non-violently in a political debate and don't let your views interfere with your work, including how you treat your coworkers, I'm happy to work with you or for you. Or grab a beer with you and try to change your mind.
  - Mikeb85 13y ago
    Why not? They already burned Eich at the stake, why not apply the same scrutiny to everyone?
    - king_jester 13y ago
      If by burned at the stake you mean rightly called out questionable contributions that flies in the face of respecting LGBT Mozilla employees and then deciding not to say anything about it or make an apology, then yes he was burned at the stake.
- protomyth 13y ago
  I am hoping he has never made a donation or spoken about any issue. His whole life is going to go under a microscope looking for the "gotcha". Sadly, its just how this stuff works.
- bkor 13y ago
  I really dislike that Brendan Eich was appointed because the board appointed him while knowing his position on prop 8. Yet no statement while there was a huge backlash at the time that news came out. For me CTO vs CEO matters a lot. CTO vs reversing gay rights: don't like the person, wouldn't want to work directly or indirectly for that person appointing someone who you already know reversed gay rights and causes an uproar: wtf I'm not gay and also not part of any gay rights organization. In tech sites within Netherlands the views expressed are totally different than here on Hackers News. Meaning: most are amazed how he could have been considered a CEO.
hackuser 13y ago
Mozilla's mission is vital and they have been very successful overall. Much of the credit must belong to Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, and others who led the organization until now but I'm starting to be concerned about the leadership's future, a future that is important to everyone -- I'd much rather lose almost any software company than lose Mozilla. * Why do they appear to have difficulty finding a long-term CEO? Appointing the founder/CTO (edit: and after a long search and many short-term leaders) raises the possibility that either they couldn't find a willing external candidate or that there was conflict between the founders and the board. Which leads to ... * Why do they appear to have difficulty finding board members? Even 5 seemed too few for such an important non-profit; to have 3 resign with only 1 replacement ready seems alarming. * The PR of Eich's appointment, transition, and the political issue was poorly managed; Mozilla looked badly managed and the brand was damaged. The image of the organization is a responsibility for the CEO and, when hiring a new CEO, for the board. Even if the political issue never arose, losing a 3 of 5 board members when a new CEO is appointed looks bad no matter what public explanations are given. The appearance was that only 2 people supported the new CEO and one was his co-founder (again, appearances can be deceiving but managing them is essential). These signs look worrying to me, but you'll notice that I wrote a lot about appearances -- I don't know the inside of Mozilla (I've participated at a low level for many years and have a sense of the culture and a few personalities, but that's all) nor do I know how to run a major non-profit or major open source project. Maybe someone here knows more.
- bzbarsky 13y ago
  > * Why do they appear to have difficulty finding a long-term CEO? I can't speak for the board here, but lack of stock options and the like probably has something to do with it. I expect that it's also difficult to find a CEO that is willing to operate in the sort of environment described in http://blog.finette.com/on-mozilla http://blog.finette.com/on-mozilla (see the quote from John Lilly in there). This extends to broader culture fit issues: finding a CEO who would be a good culture fit for Mozilla's stance on openness and the like may not be simple.
  - hackuser 13y ago
nsxwolf 13y ago
Most importantly, Chris Beard has correct views on today's political hot button issues.
grej 13y ago
To me, one of the saddest things about this whole episode was the fact that Brendan Eich was a true technical leader. His contributions literally helped create and define the modern internet. I believe he was well positioned to help move Mozilla beyond simply being a browser company/nonprofit org, and advance the Mozilla mission of bringing openness and innovation to the web. Rust, ASM.js, and Firefox OS are some of the biggest projects at Mozilla and are critical areas that have to be executed well for Mozilla to gain traction in the mobile device world and beyond. I thought that Brendan Eich's background uniquely qualified him to guide Mozilla over the next few years in maturing these technologies into something that can help disrupt the trend of "walled-garden" web ecosystems. I was and still am really rooting for Mozilla to succeed in these efforts, because the web needs them to. Sadly Brendan Eich is now gone from Mozilla and along with him goes a wealth of knowledge, history, and experience that would undoubtedly have helped advance the cause of a free and open internet. All that said, I don't know as much about Chris Beard's history as I did Brendan's, and I don't know if he can provide the same level of technical leadership in these areas that Brendan Eich could have. I suppose we will find out. I remain hopeful, but not yet optimistic.
gojomo 13y ago
"Moving Forward" is my least favorite management euphemism.
- userbinator 13y ago
  Agreed, although I've heard "going forward" a lot more.
drawkbox 13y ago
This is a pretty massive change. Eich was technology/standards focused. Someone from the product/marketing side is ok as long as they get Mozilla is really a technology product company (business and marketing is easier when technology/products are the base focus and you don't lose developers targeting the platform). I am a little concerned that a switch was flipped at Mozilla when the former Chief Marketing Officer is now CEO over the CTO previously. Granted the new CEO has been around the company a while and oversaw Firefox is helpful, I just hope they keep the technology/standards as their base focus. I feel many of the things I love Mozilla for, asm.js most recently, may not be as focused as before. Also, I lost a ton of respect for Mozilla for throwing a founder under the bus.
- fabrice_d 13y ago
  The previous CEO (Gary Kovacs) was also a product guy, so no switch was flipped (the switch was to put a strong tech lead like Brendan as CEO). But Chris has also a technical background (he worked on porting linux to mips architectures) and he knows Mozilla in and out.
  - drawkbox 13y ago
    To developers, Eich was definitely a force internally and externally and CTO as CEO means something. Switching to that then back is a change. As a founder Eich had immense input on direction. Maybe there is a vacuum now on the technology side in terms of upper management. I guess time will tell how this has truly impacted Mozilla. I am glad to hear Chris Beard has some engineering along with product/marketing. Also Kovacs was there for a while (2010-recent) but was technology product focused, previous was John Lilly (2008-2010) who very much was technology focused, and then Baker who was a lawyer at the founding and you could argue technology and standards was the Mozilla main focus for a long time since inception. Hopefully it stays that way.
- pcwalton 13y ago
  > I feel many of the things I love Mozilla for, asm.js most recently, may not be as focused as before. Chris Beard is the most technical person who's now marketing-focused I know. A little-known fact: he wrote the first prototype of the Firefox themes feature (formerly known as Personas).
xname 13y ago
Imagine: when they were looking for the next CEO, the first question was: does he/she support gay-marriage?
Mikeb85 13y ago
Well, Firefox is first of all quite inferior to Chrome. Worse JS performance, worse stability, worse interface and worse Cloud sync and features. The only reason to possibly use it was openness and their motto. With them refusing to stand up for Brendan Eich and his right to his own personal opinions, which it's clear he never brought to work with him, I no longer think they have any moral high ground. I know I'm done with Firefox, and none of this is good PR, and they were losing tons of market share before...
ender7 13y ago
Can anyone proffer an opinion on Chris Beard as the new CEO? Is he a good choice, or should this remain an interim position? I don't know anything about him.
- nnethercote 13y ago
  He's been a part of Mozilla for a long time. He was CMO among many other roles. He's a smart guy and good at handling difficult situations. I think it's a solid choice. It does sound like it's definitely planned to be an interim choice, though. Fun story: my one personal interaction with Chris was a few years ago. I had learnt that the McAfee Site Advisor add-on was causing Firefox to leak the JavaScript contents of every single page you visited! This was bad. I was incensed, and I wrote a blog post entitled "McAfee is killing us" (https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/02/16/mcafee-is-killing-us/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/02/16/mcafee-is-ki...). Chris was CMO and got rather upset with me for my undiplomatic choice of wording. And understandably so; he didn't want a loud-mouthed engineer triggering some kind of Mozilla vs. McAfee story in the tech press. Fortunately nothing much came of it, publicity-wise. It's worth noting that I offered to take the post down, and he said not to, which is why you can still read it today. Best of all, we did find a way to prevent that leak -- one which many add-ons triggered variations of -- and it shipped in Firefox 15 (https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-plugs-the-add-on-leaks/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-p...).
pvnick 13y ago
Unfortunately, the reality is that one of the first questions they probably asked Chris when vetting him for interim CEO is "Are you or have you ever been an opponent of same-sex marriage?"
SethMurphy 13y ago
I tweeted in praise of Mozilla's support of the web a few days after he resigned and was asked in a response if Mozilla helped support my preferred bigotry. While I don't disagree with the criticism of Brendan Eich, it has gone a little far when my praise of Mozilla's support of the open web got me labeled a bigot (IMHO I am not). Making a correlation like this is wrong and can only hurt even a good cause.
- Yoric 13y ago
  Consider yourself lucky you were just called a bigot. Some of us (not me) received death threats.
finder83 13y ago
I'm still rather disappointed in Mozilla's handling of the issue. I've since gone back to using Chrome, and away from thunderbird as well. Free speech is important to me; more important even than using and supporting open source software, which is pretty important to me. Someone's personal life, and their professional life, should be able to be kept separate, and the fact that they dragged out his political support of Proposition 8 into his professional life is a clear violation of free speech. If the issue were so important, why did they choose him as CEO in the first place? Instead, they created an obvious and blatant attack against his character for his own beliefs which had absolutely nothing to do with his day to day work, particularly given that he was a great leader, technologist, and could have brought Mozilla to the next step technologically. Would I support a member of the KKK, or any other known "hate" group? It is their right of speech, and they are still free to have it, so long as it is not in a manner of defamation (such as slander, or libel), which looks much more like how Mozilla responded.
- wonderzombie 13y ago
  Whose free speech was violated? Free speech doesn't mean the freedom from consequences or criticism. It means the exact opposite! He's free to speak as he likes and donate as he likes, and everyone else is free to exercise their own rights to free speech. That's how it freaking works. There's no right to be a CEO, either. I wouldn't dispute a racist's right to speak as they like, but free speech doesn't mean turning a blind eye to bigotry and prejudice. Views are not somehow exempt from criticism just because they are sincerely held.
  - izacus 13y ago
    Erm no... if you have to be afraid for your job, your career prospects, your house or your family then your have NO free speech, no matter what some paper somewhere says. Economic pressure was used to great success in (socialistic) countries like mine to curtail free speech (even though there was a "free speech" law). And it looked exactly like this - if you had an unpopular opinion, you'd just be marked as "unfit for leadership position", "unfit for advancement", "we cannot have someone going to church as our CEO", your children would get scholarship denied, etc. You know... consequences. The definition of free speech is the ability to voice political opinion without fear. Haven't you learned anything from cold war?
moron4hire 13y ago
I stopped using Firefox because it's gotten really buggy in the last couple of months, not because Brendan Eich stupidly voiced his opinion in a debate he should have seen he was on the losing side of a long time ago.
- nnethercote 13y ago
  What are the bugs? One option is to try resetting Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 13y ago
I'm against what happened to Brendan Eich too -- for the reasons it happened. His personals opinions and political ideas, even if he was a card-carrying NRA member slash confederate flag bearering bigot, should be his own. But (and I'm only half kidding) I'm actually in favor of sacking him for his incompetence, for so many years, to bring bloody ES6 to a final standard and into our browsers. When HTML5 progressed so fast in so few years, and things like CSS Animations, Canvas, WebGL, etc also moved on, heck, even when IE picked up steam, the glacial pace of Javascript looks really unacepptable, and a throwback to the bad old days of W3C dragging its feet.
ruggeri 13y ago
I like how the board continues to take no responsibility for the situation they created. Right or wrong that Eich was fired, this was a foreseeable event; Eich's prior contribution was well-known. This whole thing really doesn't make me feel good about Mitchell Baker or Reid Hoffman.
dredmorbius 13y ago
It makes solid sense for a company to choose a leader, the person who sets the tone and communicates to the public, partners, and stakeholders for it, who reflects the values of the organization and its stakeholders. Mozilla stands, among other things, for freedom both online and off. Eich certainly has technical chops, and has contributed, technically, to both Mozilla and the Web. There's no doubt about that. His personal values, as reflected through his public political actions, were an extremely poor fit. In his prior role as CTO this wasn't as significant an issue (though it could likely have emerged eventually). As CEO there's simply no question that they were polarizing and distracting to the extreme. Especially in light of how he addressed the controversy once it emerged. Quite bluntly: he wasn't up for the job. I'm not saying this as a GLTBQ individual, or someone with an unblemished record myself on this (attitudes have changed tremendously over the several decades I've been aware that alternative sexual orientation is a thing) or other issues. It's a reflection of contemporary moral values -- and I absolutely believe that there's a large room for movement in such values. If you want to reflect on that for a while, I'd recommend James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed, which addresses beliefs. The first and last programmes in the series address this particularly episodes 1 and 10, which reflect specifically on how beliefs have changed over time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed If nothing else, this is a mark of just how far we've gone from beating up faggots for lols (not that this doesn't still happen) -- even under cover of law (Stonewall and similar events), if not without sanction or consequence for those so engaged. For those who are suggesting that Eich was singled out where others more deserving haven't been: Mozilla proved itself to be more susceptible and responsive to moral suasion and pressure. There are plenty of companies (and other organizations) exhibiting poor moral character: Dropbox's appointment of someone widely regarded as a war criminal to its board, ongoing boycotts against Chick-fil-A, growing actions against the Koch brothers and the industrial and political network they control, campaigns I recall against Nestle, Carl's Jr., grape growers, and other causes. The fact is that moral and market pressures can work, and in a world in which enterprises far too often disclaim all but the smallest shreds of moral responsibility, they're often one of the few effective tools available. So while I do feel a slight bit of sympathy toward Eich (he was caught up in changing times), I applaud the action and result.
adrianlmm 13y ago
#uninstallfirefox

175 points by tweakz 13y ago

also read: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2014/04/12/earth-to-mozilla-come-back-to-us/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2014/04/12/earth-to-mozilla... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7584900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7584900 was on HN homepage earlier in the day.

natural219 13y ago

I'm still mad about the Brendan Eich thing. Like, mad. I'm totally fine with anybody pursuing whatever kind of political agenda they want, but at the moment you start to derail real progress, the moment you attack one of the best organizations who has literally been busting its ass for the last decade to change the world for no profit... Well, you declared war. I think this whole debacle should be a rallying cry that we're not going to accept this kind of bullying anymore. The worst part is, the progressive platform has some really important things to say about the way we live. We're not an equal society yet. We still have more changes we need to make to secure the freedom and happiness of everybody, especially groups that have been historically marginalized. All the more reason to shut down the bullies who have domineered the narrative, produced nothing but useless bickering, and have sought nothing but divisiveness at every turn in the everlasting quest for more pageviews. I'm looking at you, Gawker. Don't tolerate this any more. Brendan Eich was just one casualty. It's time to start sticking up for ourselves.

pgrote 13y ago
"It's time to start sticking up for ourselves" Can you clarify what group does "ourselves" reference?
- k__ 13y ago
  Probably people with other opinions than the masses.
  - kourt 13y ago
    Proposition 8 was an opinion of the masses: it received 7,001,084 (52.24%) of the votes.
    - MrZongle2 13y ago
      It amazes me that you've been downvoted for posting a fact. Proposition 8 was passed by a majority: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_%282008%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_%28200... However one feels about the result, only a fascist would want to shove that bit of history down the memory hole.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        MrZongle2 13y ago
        Why it happened doesn't matter in this context. Suppressing the record of what did happen is Soviet-style revisionism. But to address your point, according to at least one SF-based news organization, Proposition 8 spending had no effect on the vote: http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Prop-8-spending-found-to-have-swayed-no-voters-3184734.php http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Prop-8-spending-found... Edit: apparently decrying revisionism and citing a reference in response to a now-deleted post is downvote worthy. Thanks, free thinkers of HN!
        wwweston 13y ago
        > Prop8 was passed based on propaganda and a lot of out-of- state funding... Under normal circumstances prop8 would never have passed in California of all places. "The campaigns for and against Proposition 8 raised $39.0 million ($11.3 million or 29.1% from outside California) and $44.1 million ($13.2 million or 30.0% from outside California), respectively"[1] If money distorted normal circumstances, presumably it did so to a greater degree on the "against" side of Prop 8. If you take Prop 22 as the earlier norm ("61% in favor to 39% against"[2]), that makes some sense. I think it's a lot more likely, though, that the advertising probably only affected a minority of participants (if any) and Eich's support put him in company with the then majority of the state. That doesn't mean it was the right thing. It does, however, have something to say about whether his support puts him beyond the pale for a leadership role. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008)#Campaign_funding_and_spending http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008)... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_22_(2000) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_22_(2000...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
bkor 13y ago
"the moment you attack one of the best organizations" Nobody attacked Mozilla. You're totally off base.
- i80and 13y ago
  Some people fell just one step shy of demanding that others boycott Firefox. I'd call that an attack on Mozilla.
  - weaksauce 13y ago
    there actually were websites that called for a boycott of firefox.
  - bowlofpetunias 13y ago
    Some people would call attacking the decision of the Mozilla leadership supporting Mozilla. I would not have given a f* about Eich if I didn't care about Mozilla.
- M2Ys4U 13y ago
  Plenty of people did attack Mozilla, though, and it was quite disheartening to watch.
  - bkor 13y ago
    No, they strongly disliked Brendan Eich to be a CEO of Mozilla. Their dislike is with the CEO, not the company. But because of the strong dislike, they cannot support the company. Boycotting a company because of not wanting the CEO is not an attack on the company. It is expressing that you really don't like / disagree / hate / whatever the company. I strongly dislike Brendan Eich was made a CEO. I don't want to support Mozilla in any way and I would've been very critical about Mozilla. Knowing that he supported prop 8 and then knowingly making him a CEO is not the company / organization I supported (fyi: I've triaged 600+ bugs, used to be a Bugzilla developer, have git.mozilla.org commit access, etc).
- carlio 13y ago
danso 13y ago
Sorry, but "sticking up" for what exactly? Eich's defenders seem to treat him like a child...like, he doesn't know how to phrase a statement like, "I'm against civil unions, not gays, which is why I donated to Prop 8". This isn't about Eich being punished for a "mistake" back in 2008, his detractors are unhappy that Eich does not believe that Prop 8 was a mistake, back in 2008 and today, six years later. I'm not going to get into a debate about whether Prop 8 was right or wrong. But don't treat this like it's a witch hunt for long past grievances. Until he says otherwise, Eich is a supporter of Prop 8. That doesn't make him evil, that doesn't make him incapable of holding leadership. But for people for whom Prop 8 is a big deal, I think it's understandable why they would continue to press the issue with Eich and his leadership.
- saraid216 13y ago
  Effectively, people are saying that we should defend Eich for the same reason we should defend weev: less that they are people and more that they are pawns.
- smsm42 13y ago
  Prop 8 was not about civil unions. If you want to discuss it, at least get your facts right. Benefits equality, etc. that is commonly understood under civil union umbrella existed in California long before prop 8, and prop 8 was not going to change that. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo... For people for whom prop 8 is a big deal it would be a good thing to at least know what it was about.
  - bunderbunder 13y ago
    Well, it depends on what you mean by "commonly understood under civil union umbrella". A lot of people mistakenly believe that civil unions are just a separate-but-equal version of marriage. That version of civil unions is a fairy tale. Speaking as one member of a couple that finally gave up on making a civil union work and went ahead with an actual marriage a few years back, I can say that there's a night-and-day difference between the two. The institutional benefits that were available to us as a legally recognized civil union could be counted on one hand, and most of them were still not quite the same as what married people get. People who only have a civil union aren't allowed to share health savings accounts the way married people can, for example. The number of finacial and convenience perks we acquired the day after our marriage license got filed with the county clerk, on the other hand, are practically innumerable. We feel like shits for exercising the privilege we enjoy as a heterosexual couple. But we're getting pragmatic in our old age, so here we are.
patrickg_zill 13y ago
I think your point is (paraphrasing), we canned a very productive engineer and manager over his un-PC views expressed in his personal life, but which no one at his organization was affected by; and in return, since none of the people criticizing him or pushing for his departure has the ability to truly replace his talent, we have the prospect of the unproductive people criticizing the people who actually get things done. How accurate am I in understanding your view?
- rjzzleep 13y ago
  i think the real bitter irony here is that brendan eich not only helped build, but also protected the platform that helped oust him. when i say the platform, I don't mean the web, I mean the open web, where you can freely express yourself as aggressively as you want(which is a good thing). not to step on anyones toes, but we effectively ousted a very productive engineer from a company he helped found to replace him with a marketing guy(no offense really, i know he's been with mozilla forever, and loyalty deserves to be rewarded). i really hope i won't have this moment in 10 years thinking back, man where did mozilla ideals move so much away from mine, and i know everyone is going to jump on this part of cynic good ol me, especially all the mozillians here, but i still very well remember the time i spent in irc ~20 years ago, where the people thinking about mass surveillance were a select few stamped as insane anti social paranoid geeks.
- king_jester 13y ago
  > but which no one at his organization was affected by; Uh what? There are most certainly LGBTQ folks who work for Mozilla in some capacity or another and they most certainly are affected by nationally focused political efforts to deny them access to a basic institution.
  - Crito 13y ago
    Particularly any LGBTQ Mozilla employees that lived in the state of California between 2008 and 2013, which I assume is many of them.
  - patrickg_zill 13y ago
crystaln 13y ago
I read this twice, and I still have no idea what you are trying to say, which side of any issue you are on, or what makes you any different from over-reacting haters on either side.
- ffbellfhtlflf 13y ago
  How can you not understand it? He's saying the progressive left has started to go too far in the mechanisms they use to bring about admittedly needed change. You don't go about winning the hearts and minds of people you disagree with by harassing them and getting them fired from their jobs. This only sets movements back. "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it"
- bane 13y ago
  He must be talking about Eich, since he was clearly supporting the group of bullies who were so flagrant and pernicious that they'd even pass a law to prevent grown consenting adults from having meaningful relationships with each other.
- kourt 13y ago
  "which side of any issue you are on" Maybe he's on everybody's side. What freedom is more important than the freedom to be true to one's self? What good is free speech[1] when the private, individual exercise thereof results in the professional equivalent of capital punishment? [1] Whether campaign contributions are always identical to speech in all contexts is immaterial here: in this case, they're close enough.
  - crystaln 13y ago
    Sure, he could be on everyone's side and trying to clarify the issue. If so, he's doing a rather poor job. However, it seemed rather obvious that he had an intention to take some sort of stance on an issue, something he also failed at.
- homulilly 13y ago
  Pretending to be on one side while implicitly supporting the other. Fairly common line of thinking amongst self-proclaimed moderates who try to hide, or wont acknowledge their own reactionary politics.
jhonovich 13y ago
"produced nothing but useless bickering" Brendan Eich produced _nothing_ but useless bickering?
kaonashi 13y ago
I find absolutely nothing wrong with the way he was treated. To say that somehow he was the victim of bullying, when he was the one who was taking action to deny other people their rights, is so morally backwards I have a hard time conceding that you're arguing in good faith.
- radmuzom 13y ago
  It's strange that this is getting downvoted. Nobody went and physically abused Eich to remove him as CEO. It's strange that those who are supporting Eich for his right to his own views are against our right to express outrage.
  - bzbarsky 13y ago
    The right to express outrage is not an absolute. See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/2014/04/speech_and_consequences.html http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/2014/04/speech_an... for what I consider some obvious limitations on it. You're saying there were no instances of item #1 on my list, and I believe you are correct. However, there certainly were instances of item #2.
  - zheshishei 13y ago
    > Nobody went and physically abused Eich to remove him as CEO. I hope you're not saying that bullying only occurs when physical abuse happens, because if you are, you're pretty much denying that cyber-bullying happens. Whether or not the response to Eich counts as cyberbullying, I'm making no comment on that.
nostromo 13y ago
And where do you draw the line? Are you going to defend people that oppose Women's Suffrage too? What about slavery supporters? These were just political opinions once too. But today you'll find that they get you fired as CEO. And for good reason: blacks and women (and gays) are your customers and employees and business partners.
- batmansbelt 13y ago
  And friends, family, and neighbours.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  I'm genuinely curious where you would draw your line. Would you support firing Mozilla's CEO if it's revealed he voted for Mitt Romney? What if he gave his campaign $1000?
  - davidw 13y ago
    Maybe we can all agree that it's a fuzzy, gray line, and move on to talking about things that can actually move our businesses forward, or are cool hacks, interesting phenomenon or otherwise generate more light than heat.
    - twoodfin 13y ago
      A fuzzy, gray line that cost a smart hacker a job he was otherwise incredibly well-suited for? If it's really that indistinct, it's scary: I might want to work for a company some day that cares about where that line is, and I'd like to stay on the right side of it.
      - davidw 13y ago
        "Working for" and "being the leader and representative of" are two different things. Eich's views were known to Mozilla for a while before this blew up. If you want an honest answer, I think if you want to play the political game, you need to keep your cards close to your chest. You may not like that answer, and you folks can furiously click on the downvote arrow all you like, but I think that's the reality of it: for an extreme example, look at how closely every single aspect of US presidential candidates' lives are picked over, both present and past. I'll add to that: not everyone should do that - I'm glad that some people have stuck their necks out in the past. We all owe some of them a debt of gratitude. But, by and large, they're probably not the same people aiming at the top job in a large corporation.
macrael 13y ago
I actually really liked Marco Arment's take on this. http://www.marco.org/2014/04/04/political-views http://www.marco.org/2014/04/04/political-views As time marches forward our society's tolerance for certain viewpoints has changed. This is a good thing.
- zobzu 13y ago
  Or.. this is a bad thing. It goes totally both ways. What if tolerance for your viewpoint is lower? You're not longer allowed to have an opinion not shared by the majority? Not sure how that's a good thing at all. Imagine you are 100 years ago and your viewpoint is "gay marriage should be allowed"? in fact, back then, some people would probably be killed for thinking that. The vast majority of the collective conscientiousness certainly thought this was wrong. And look where we are today.
rmrfrmrf 13y ago
I would take a step back and reflect on why you're so upset. The reaction you've posted is almost awkwardly inappropriate given the circumstances.
arrrg 13y ago
“I don’t think having a CEO who represents the company that donated to prevent gay marriage is cool. I will stop using the product of the company. I ask you to do the same.” That was the most common reaction. I think that’s completely harmless and unproblematic. That’s how responsible adults should act. So I’m not really sure what you are angry about.
benatkin 13y ago
Cool story. A more marketing-oriented person being CEO is a better choice for a community-oriented organization, and should have been made by the board in the first place. This [1] puts it succinctly. "The mistake made was not made by Brendan Eich" and "The people who messed up here are the board of the Mozilla Corporation." This is Mozilla's board doing what they should have done all along, except that Brendan Eich can't be CTO anymore. 1: http://seldo.com/weblog/2014/04/04/on_brendan_eich_equality_and_freedom http://seldo.com/weblog/2014/04/04/on_brendan_eich_equality_...
homulilly 13y ago
Brendan Eich was working pretty hard to derail real progress too, ironically. It's pretty understandable for people to be upset about the appointment of someone unqualified to CEO of an organization they strongly care about and someone who actively works against equal rights is incredibly unqualified to lead an organization like Mozilla, no matter their technical or business expertise.
- hackuser 13y ago
  > Brendan Eich was working pretty hard to derail real progress I don't support what he did, but did he do anything beyond make the donation?
ebbv 13y ago
Oh please. Bullying my ass. People found his views repugnant and reacted accordingly. Maybe you don't think supporting Prop 8 is repugnant, but lots of us do. This isn't a question of him supporting second amendment rights, or thinking the ACA is over-reaching. This is him actively supporting the squashing of the civil rights of a minority group because he doesn't approve of their relationship. Not only the donating to Prop 8, but even now in 2014 standing by those views. It is certainly his right to hold those views, but they are repellant enough that I no longer felt OK using Mozilla products. Other people shared my view. Enough people that Mozilla felt compelled to react. This is not bullying. This is freedom of speech all around and a free market, and a result of that. You and Andrew Sullivan pretending Eich is a victim of bullying are being ridiculous. If he had been a member of NAMBLA would anyone say it was bullying? No. Prop 8 support may not be as bad as NAMBLA, but it's pretty awful in my view all the same.
lotsofmangos 13y ago
I think it was good that Eich stepped down as he was a bad choice for CEO as it is a leadership role in which politics matters. Your militancy on this however is poisonous, there is a need for people building things here, not preparing for one of these abstract wars on concepts that folk seem to so love. Mozilla is a software collaboration and it needs to ship, the last thing they need is social warriors stirring the pot. If you want to help, fix bugs. Nobody won anything here, at best we all maybe learned something.
Tloewald 13y ago
> I'm totally fine with anybody pursuing whatever kind of political agenda they want, but at the moment you start to derail real progress, the moment you attack one of the best organizations who has literally been busting its ass for the last decade to change the world for no profit 1) So you're contradicting yourself in one sentence. I wish to pursue an equal rights agenda, and in so doing protest, loudly, when people who publicly act against equal rights are promoted to prominent positions. Now, I didn't expect Brendan Eich to be fired (he wasn't) or step down (which he did) but maybe to actually explain himself (he didn't). If his feelings are so strongly held, and he values free speech so much, then by all means let him make his case. 2) Mozilla is a non-profit, but plenty of the people working for it make perfectly decent salaries. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Mozilla-Salaries-E19129.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Mozilla-Salaries-E19129.htm > All the more reason to shut down the bullies who have domineered the narrative, produced nothing but useless bickering, and have sought nothing but divisiveness at every turn in the everlasting quest for more pageviews. I'm looking at you, Gawker. 3) Seems to me like it's the pot calling the kettle black.
king_jester 13y ago
I feel like there's a bingo card that has all of your half-assed excuses on it. > I'm totally fine with anybody pursuing whatever kind of political agenda they want, but at the moment you start to derail real progress, the moment you attack one of the best organizations who has literally been busting its ass for the last decade to change the world for no profit... I'm fine with pursuing your politics until I feel your politics are inconvenient. > Well, you declared war. I think this whole debacle should be a rallying cry that we're not going to accept this kind of bullying anymore. Not tolerating bullies that seek to curtail your existence through law does not make you a bully. > The worst part is, the progressive platform has some really important things to say about the way we live. We're not an equal society yet. We still have more changes we need to make to secure the freedom and happiness of everybody, especially groups that have been historically marginalized. How exactly are you going to do that by letting the CEO of Mozilla be a supporter of Prop 8? How exactly are you helping anyone by outright enshrining in law a discrimination against gay folks? > All the more reason to shut down the bullies who have domineered the narrative, produced nothing but useless bickering, and have sought nothing but divisiveness at every turn in the everlasting quest for more pageviews. I'm looking at you, Gawker. Of course, all those people who are affected by this are just being decisive and mean, leave Brendan Eich alone! > Don't tolerate this any more. Brendan Eich was just one casualty. It's time to start sticking up for ourselves. Sticking up for ourselves is what people were doing by voicing their complaints with Eich and his support for Prop 8. Nobody was launching a campaign to strip him of his rights in law.
- jdp23 13y ago
  > I feel like there's a bingo card that has all of your half-assed excuses on it. You mean something along these lines? https://twitter.com/eassumption/status/451921312609361922 https://twitter.com/eassumption/status/451921312609361922
qwerta 13y ago
I think most people hate him subconsciously for inventing JavaScript abomination. The current back splash is just an camouflage for that :-)
generalk 13y ago
I don't understand a thing you're saying. but at the moment you start to derail real progress, the moment you attack one of the best organizations who has literally been busting its ass for the last decade to change the world for no profit...Well, you declared war. I'm not familiar with anyone that attacked Mozilla. The heaviest I saw were boycotts. That doesn't sound like "war" to me, that sounds like the right tack to take. Calling it "war" is overly-dramatic. Don't tolerate this any more. Brendan Eich was just one casualty. It's time to start sticking up for ourselves. Let's start looking at reality. Brendon Eich had MANY opportunities to assure both his detractors and Mozilla's LGBTQ employees that he was dedicated to ensuring that Mozilla would remain inclusive regardless of sexual orientation. He pursued none of them. Look, I can't speak to Eich's effectiveness as CEO, but it seems like handling a PR situation is part-and-parcel of being a CEO. Eich chose to resign. We're not an equal society yet. We still have more changes we need to make to secure the freedom and happiness of everybody, especially groups that have been historically marginalized. Steps that include speaking out against and boycotting entities that put bigots in charge. (Bigot may be a strong word here, I don't know Eich personally, but he did donate to get Prop 8 passed, which certainly sounds like bigoted behavior.) What else would you have the aggrieved parties do? All the more reason to shut down the bullies that [...] produced nothing but useless bickering The irony burns.
msbarnett 13y ago
To crib a very old phrase: I cannot rightly apprehend the confusion of ideas that would lead one to believe that it was ok for Brandon Eich to exercise his Freedom of Speech to support an attempt to relegate many mozillans and other Californians to second-class citizenship, but that it was not ok for others to exercise their Freedom of Speech to express their feelings about Eich and his suitableness as a public-facing representative of Mozilla.
- invalidOrTaken 13y ago
  >...to express their feelings about Eich and his suitableness as a public-facing representative of Mozilla. But who made him "unsuitable?" Was Eich trumpeting his donations? This whole thing has a "Answer me when I talk to you, boy! ----> Don't talk back to me, boy!" feel to it.
  - msbarnett 13y ago
    > But who made him "unsuitable?" Was Eich trumpeting his donations? Eich fundamentally believes that many mozillans are second-class human beings, worthy of less rights and respect than others. That makes him enormously unsuitable to lead Mozilla.
- sergiosgc 13y ago
  Do a mental exercise. Imagine a very vocal group of anti-gay activists causing a tech company to get cold feet about promoting an LGBT supporter to CEO. That's the dual scenario. Does your opinion still hold? This is the Pandora box that was opened here.
  - msbarnett 13y ago
    It's not much of a Pandora's box. They're certainly well-within their rights to try to do so. And civil rights activists would call for counter-boycotts, etc. That's how society shakes this stuff out. That's, fundamentally, how free speech and freedom of association and voting with your money works. And more to the point, this is the exact world we already live in. Conservative groups pressured World Vision into reversing their stance of accepting gay marriage just a couple of weeks ago. The Mozilla-Eich brouhaha didn't open any strange new Pandora's box, this kind of thing has been a fundamental part of the American civil landscape for well over a century!
pjbrunet 13y ago
"we're not going to accept this kind of bullying anymore." What are you proposing? Can you force OKCupid to treat all browsers the same?
mbrutsch 13y ago
The way I understand it, you're free to say what you please, and free to get called out for it. Having the internet harass your business is a distraction, regardless of how "right" it may be, and it's understandable that concessions mus be made to keep the business running smoothly, lest you endanger the livelihoods of everyone who works there.
LaGrange 13y ago
"I'm totally fine with anybody pursuing whatever kind of political agenda they want, but at the moment you start to derail real progress," Exactly why Eich had to go. "Well, you declared war." Yes, the right wingers did. "we're not going to accept this kind of bullying anymore." Exactly why Eich had to go. "It's time to start sticking up for ourselves." Said people bullied by people like Eich, and stuck up for themselves. Yes, I do think that LGBT rights are far more important than Mozilla.
temphn 13y ago
The answer is to stop arguing with words and start targeting Gawker's business model. Their advertiser list is in plain view. Go to their about page to see all the megacorps that have done sponsored ads with them. Now take the worst things Gawker has ever written and send it to the people who run the advertising accounts at those companies (you can get their names off LinkedIn or whatever). For example, send the #GawkingatRapeCulture hashtag to the Coke rep who chose to advertise on Gawker and ask them whther Coke is intentionally supporting rape culture by donating to Gawker. Make sure not do this purely as a solo op; once you have the data on their advertisers, pull together a website that makes it easy for anyone to chip in via one click. Those who run sites with advertising inventory can also donate ad slots at lower CPMs to the sponsors of Gawker in order to pull revenue away from Gawker. They profit from clickbait. So we need to hit these people in the wallet.
badman_ting 13y ago
Stop it, that was not an attack.

deleted 13y ago

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rebelidealist 13y ago

There is a stark contrast with how Drew Houston of Dropbox defended Condi Rice vs Mozilla's lack of effort in defending someone that instrumental part of what Mozilla is today. https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/04/our-commitment-to-your-rights-and-privacy/ https://blog.dropbox.com/2014/04/our-commitment-to-your-righ... His pointed response is short and stern. "We’re honored to have Dr. Rice join our board" Mozilla's was apologetic. "We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better." If Drew is the chairman of Mozilla, he would said. "In 16 years that Eich was in leadership position in Mozilla, he welcomed and worked with everyone with different personal beliefs, religious values, and sexual orientation. We are honored to have the creator of Javascript as our CEO". End of story.

GuiA 13y ago
You can't really compare Dropbox and Mozilla. They don't have the same structure, they don't have the same goals, they don't attract the same kind of leadership or employees, they don't have the same people pulling the strings, etc etc.
- asaddhamani 13y ago
  So apparently being a war criminal is a lot better than donating $1000 to Prop 8? The world would be a better place if instead of Eich, Rice resigned.
  - GuiA 13y ago
    Re-read my comment. I'm not saying it's better at all; just that you can't compare the two (and saying "If Houston had been at Mozilla..." is nonsensical). The kind of people involved with Mozilla, and the kind of structure Mozilla aspires to be, makes it logical for them to dismiss their CEO in the way they did. The kind of people involved with Dropbox, and the kind of structure Dropbox aspires to be, makes it logical for them to defend their board of directors choice and not back down. (FWIW I have deep disgust for some of the actions taken by both Rice and Eich.)

exabrial 13y ago

Bullying goes both ways. Hilarious how some people are trying to justify this.

jvehent 13y ago

People who are going to comment on this blog post need to realize how disturbing this episode has been for Mozillians. We are talking about a small group of people, a couple thousands at best, that work with limited resources to keep the web open for everybody. When this tidal wave hit Mozillians, the base contributors and employees who spend most of their days in code and features, we lost focus of our work, and stepped into a world of politics that most of us dislike, and are uncomfortable to navigate. I believe Chris Beard is a true Mozillian, as is Brendan Eich. And I am glad that we can refocus on our mission, and move forward. I just wish people can put their differences aside, accept each other's beliefs, and share code!

jvehent 13y ago
And just to add to this :) http://people.mozilla.org/~smartell/cbeard/cbeard-illustration.png http://people.mozilla.org/~smartell/cbeard/cbeard-illustrati...
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Please, please, stop calling this "politics" or suggesting this is about (in)tolerance by others. It's completely dismissive of the very real objections people had concerning the appointment of Eich, especially those of us who understand the importance of Mozilla for the open web and weren't just out for good old lynching.
- Yoric 13y ago
  The problem is not people who were able to argue against Brendan Eich. I am sure that there was space for a sane debate on the topic. The problem was the bullies who were screaming along. (I'm not going to call this a lynching, because in my mind, that's basically a Godwin point).
  - wonderzombie 13y ago
    It's silly to call this bullying. Yes, people shouldn't send death threats-- nobody should receive them regardless, and I think this is a larger problem with the Internet in general. But a collective of people exercising their free speech to disagree with somebody's views and to vote with their feet isn't bullying. It's not bullying just because someone's feelings are hurt when a shit-ton of people find said person's views abhorrent.

jackbauer 13y ago

can't understand why this story is ranked at 1

Xdes 13y ago

Time to see Chris Beard's track record for contributions.

twoodfin 13y ago
Let's not. I think the folks who feel someone's political actions and views are a good reason to shun or punish them are wrong. I don't care what you're for or against: If you participate non-violently in a political debate and don't let your views interfere with your work, including how you treat your coworkers, I'm happy to work with you or for you. Or grab a beer with you and try to change your mind.
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  Why not? They already burned Eich at the stake, why not apply the same scrutiny to everyone?
  - king_jester 13y ago
    If by burned at the stake you mean rightly called out questionable contributions that flies in the face of respecting LGBT Mozilla employees and then deciding not to say anything about it or make an apology, then yes he was burned at the stake.
protomyth 13y ago
I am hoping he has never made a donation or spoken about any issue. His whole life is going to go under a microscope looking for the "gotcha". Sadly, its just how this stuff works.
bkor 13y ago
I really dislike that Brendan Eich was appointed because the board appointed him while knowing his position on prop 8. Yet no statement while there was a huge backlash at the time that news came out. For me CTO vs CEO matters a lot. CTO vs reversing gay rights: don't like the person, wouldn't want to work directly or indirectly for that person appointing someone who you already know reversed gay rights and causes an uproar: wtf I'm not gay and also not part of any gay rights organization. In tech sites within Netherlands the views expressed are totally different than here on Hackers News. Meaning: most are amazed how he could have been considered a CEO.

hackuser 13y ago

Mozilla's mission is vital and they have been very successful overall. Much of the credit must belong to Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich, and others who led the organization until now but I'm starting to be concerned about the leadership's future, a future that is important to everyone -- I'd much rather lose almost any software company than lose Mozilla. * Why do they appear to have difficulty finding a long-term CEO? Appointing the founder/CTO (edit: and after a long search and many short-term leaders) raises the possibility that either they couldn't find a willing external candidate or that there was conflict between the founders and the board. Which leads to ... * Why do they appear to have difficulty finding board members? Even 5 seemed too few for such an important non-profit; to have 3 resign with only 1 replacement ready seems alarming. * The PR of Eich's appointment, transition, and the political issue was poorly managed; Mozilla looked badly managed and the brand was damaged. The image of the organization is a responsibility for the CEO and, when hiring a new CEO, for the board. Even if the political issue never arose, losing a 3 of 5 board members when a new CEO is appointed looks bad no matter what public explanations are given. The appearance was that only 2 people supported the new CEO and one was his co-founder (again, appearances can be deceiving but managing them is essential). These signs look worrying to me, but you'll notice that I wrote a lot about appearances -- I don't know the inside of Mozilla (I've participated at a low level for many years and have a sense of the culture and a few personalities, but that's all) nor do I know how to run a major non-profit or major open source project. Maybe someone here knows more.

bzbarsky 13y ago
> * Why do they appear to have difficulty finding a long-term CEO? I can't speak for the board here, but lack of stock options and the like probably has something to do with it. I expect that it's also difficult to find a CEO that is willing to operate in the sort of environment described in http://blog.finette.com/on-mozilla http://blog.finette.com/on-mozilla (see the quote from John Lilly in there). This extends to broader culture fit issues: finding a CEO who would be a good culture fit for Mozilla's stance on openness and the like may not be simple.
- hackuser 13y ago

nsxwolf 13y ago

Most importantly, Chris Beard has correct views on today's political hot button issues.

grej 13y ago

To me, one of the saddest things about this whole episode was the fact that Brendan Eich was a true technical leader. His contributions literally helped create and define the modern internet. I believe he was well positioned to help move Mozilla beyond simply being a browser company/nonprofit org, and advance the Mozilla mission of bringing openness and innovation to the web. Rust, ASM.js, and Firefox OS are some of the biggest projects at Mozilla and are critical areas that have to be executed well for Mozilla to gain traction in the mobile device world and beyond. I thought that Brendan Eich's background uniquely qualified him to guide Mozilla over the next few years in maturing these technologies into something that can help disrupt the trend of "walled-garden" web ecosystems. I was and still am really rooting for Mozilla to succeed in these efforts, because the web needs them to. Sadly Brendan Eich is now gone from Mozilla and along with him goes a wealth of knowledge, history, and experience that would undoubtedly have helped advance the cause of a free and open internet. All that said, I don't know as much about Chris Beard's history as I did Brendan's, and I don't know if he can provide the same level of technical leadership in these areas that Brendan Eich could have. I suppose we will find out. I remain hopeful, but not yet optimistic.

gojomo 13y ago

"Moving Forward" is my least favorite management euphemism.

userbinator 13y ago
Agreed, although I've heard "going forward" a lot more.

drawkbox 13y ago

This is a pretty massive change. Eich was technology/standards focused. Someone from the product/marketing side is ok as long as they get Mozilla is really a technology product company (business and marketing is easier when technology/products are the base focus and you don't lose developers targeting the platform). I am a little concerned that a switch was flipped at Mozilla when the former Chief Marketing Officer is now CEO over the CTO previously. Granted the new CEO has been around the company a while and oversaw Firefox is helpful, I just hope they keep the technology/standards as their base focus. I feel many of the things I love Mozilla for, asm.js most recently, may not be as focused as before. Also, I lost a ton of respect for Mozilla for throwing a founder under the bus.

fabrice_d 13y ago
The previous CEO (Gary Kovacs) was also a product guy, so no switch was flipped (the switch was to put a strong tech lead like Brendan as CEO). But Chris has also a technical background (he worked on porting linux to mips architectures) and he knows Mozilla in and out.
- drawkbox 13y ago
  To developers, Eich was definitely a force internally and externally and CTO as CEO means something. Switching to that then back is a change. As a founder Eich had immense input on direction. Maybe there is a vacuum now on the technology side in terms of upper management. I guess time will tell how this has truly impacted Mozilla. I am glad to hear Chris Beard has some engineering along with product/marketing. Also Kovacs was there for a while (2010-recent) but was technology product focused, previous was John Lilly (2008-2010) who very much was technology focused, and then Baker who was a lawyer at the founding and you could argue technology and standards was the Mozilla main focus for a long time since inception. Hopefully it stays that way.
pcwalton 13y ago
> I feel many of the things I love Mozilla for, asm.js most recently, may not be as focused as before. Chris Beard is the most technical person who's now marketing-focused I know. A little-known fact: he wrote the first prototype of the Firefox themes feature (formerly known as Personas).

xname 13y ago

Imagine: when they were looking for the next CEO, the first question was: does he/she support gay-marriage?

Mikeb85 13y ago

Well, Firefox is first of all quite inferior to Chrome. Worse JS performance, worse stability, worse interface and worse Cloud sync and features. The only reason to possibly use it was openness and their motto. With them refusing to stand up for Brendan Eich and his right to his own personal opinions, which it's clear he never brought to work with him, I no longer think they have any moral high ground. I know I'm done with Firefox, and none of this is good PR, and they were losing tons of market share before...

ender7 13y ago

Can anyone proffer an opinion on Chris Beard as the new CEO? Is he a good choice, or should this remain an interim position? I don't know anything about him.

nnethercote 13y ago
He's been a part of Mozilla for a long time. He was CMO among many other roles. He's a smart guy and good at handling difficult situations. I think it's a solid choice. It does sound like it's definitely planned to be an interim choice, though. Fun story: my one personal interaction with Chris was a few years ago. I had learnt that the McAfee Site Advisor add-on was causing Firefox to leak the JavaScript contents of every single page you visited! This was bad. I was incensed, and I wrote a blog post entitled "McAfee is killing us" (https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/02/16/mcafee-is-killing-us/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/02/16/mcafee-is-ki...). Chris was CMO and got rather upset with me for my undiplomatic choice of wording. And understandably so; he didn't want a loud-mouthed engineer triggering some kind of Mozilla vs. McAfee story in the tech press. Fortunately nothing much came of it, publicity-wise. It's worth noting that I offered to take the post down, and he said not to, which is why you can still read it today. Best of all, we did find a way to prevent that leak -- one which many add-ons triggered variations of -- and it shipped in Firefox 15 (https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-plugs-the-add-on-leaks/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-p...).

pvnick 13y ago

Unfortunately, the reality is that one of the first questions they probably asked Chris when vetting him for interim CEO is "Are you or have you ever been an opponent of same-sex marriage?"

SethMurphy 13y ago

I tweeted in praise of Mozilla's support of the web a few days after he resigned and was asked in a response if Mozilla helped support my preferred bigotry. While I don't disagree with the criticism of Brendan Eich, it has gone a little far when my praise of Mozilla's support of the open web got me labeled a bigot (IMHO I am not). Making a correlation like this is wrong and can only hurt even a good cause.

Yoric 13y ago
Consider yourself lucky you were just called a bigot. Some of us (not me) received death threats.

finder83 13y ago

I'm still rather disappointed in Mozilla's handling of the issue. I've since gone back to using Chrome, and away from thunderbird as well. Free speech is important to me; more important even than using and supporting open source software, which is pretty important to me. Someone's personal life, and their professional life, should be able to be kept separate, and the fact that they dragged out his political support of Proposition 8 into his professional life is a clear violation of free speech. If the issue were so important, why did they choose him as CEO in the first place? Instead, they created an obvious and blatant attack against his character for his own beliefs which had absolutely nothing to do with his day to day work, particularly given that he was a great leader, technologist, and could have brought Mozilla to the next step technologically. Would I support a member of the KKK, or any other known "hate" group? It is their right of speech, and they are still free to have it, so long as it is not in a manner of defamation (such as slander, or libel), which looks much more like how Mozilla responded.

wonderzombie 13y ago
Whose free speech was violated? Free speech doesn't mean the freedom from consequences or criticism. It means the exact opposite! He's free to speak as he likes and donate as he likes, and everyone else is free to exercise their own rights to free speech. That's how it freaking works. There's no right to be a CEO, either. I wouldn't dispute a racist's right to speak as they like, but free speech doesn't mean turning a blind eye to bigotry and prejudice. Views are not somehow exempt from criticism just because they are sincerely held.
- izacus 13y ago
  Erm no... if you have to be afraid for your job, your career prospects, your house or your family then your have NO free speech, no matter what some paper somewhere says. Economic pressure was used to great success in (socialistic) countries like mine to curtail free speech (even though there was a "free speech" law). And it looked exactly like this - if you had an unpopular opinion, you'd just be marked as "unfit for leadership position", "unfit for advancement", "we cannot have someone going to church as our CEO", your children would get scholarship denied, etc. You know... consequences. The definition of free speech is the ability to voice political opinion without fear. Haven't you learned anything from cold war?

moron4hire 13y ago

I stopped using Firefox because it's gotten really buggy in the last couple of months, not because Brendan Eich stupidly voiced his opinion in a debate he should have seen he was on the losing side of a long time ago.

nnethercote 13y ago
What are the bugs? One option is to try resetting Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...

deleted 13y ago

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coldtea 13y ago

I'm against what happened to Brendan Eich too -- for the reasons it happened. His personals opinions and political ideas, even if he was a card-carrying NRA member slash confederate flag bearering bigot, should be his own. But (and I'm only half kidding) I'm actually in favor of sacking him for his incompetence, for so many years, to bring bloody ES6 to a final standard and into our browsers. When HTML5 progressed so fast in so few years, and things like CSS Animations, Canvas, WebGL, etc also moved on, heck, even when IE picked up steam, the glacial pace of Javascript looks really unacepptable, and a throwback to the bad old days of W3C dragging its feet.

ruggeri 13y ago

I like how the board continues to take no responsibility for the situation they created. Right or wrong that Eich was fired, this was a foreseeable event; Eich's prior contribution was well-known. This whole thing really doesn't make me feel good about Mitchell Baker or Reid Hoffman.

dredmorbius 13y ago

It makes solid sense for a company to choose a leader, the person who sets the tone and communicates to the public, partners, and stakeholders for it, who reflects the values of the organization and its stakeholders. Mozilla stands, among other things, for freedom both online and off. Eich certainly has technical chops, and has contributed, technically, to both Mozilla and the Web. There's no doubt about that. His personal values, as reflected through his public political actions, were an extremely poor fit. In his prior role as CTO this wasn't as significant an issue (though it could likely have emerged eventually). As CEO there's simply no question that they were polarizing and distracting to the extreme. Especially in light of how he addressed the controversy once it emerged. Quite bluntly: he wasn't up for the job. I'm not saying this as a GLTBQ individual, or someone with an unblemished record myself on this (attitudes have changed tremendously over the several decades I've been aware that alternative sexual orientation is a thing) or other issues. It's a reflection of contemporary moral values -- and I absolutely believe that there's a large room for movement in such values. If you want to reflect on that for a while, I'd recommend James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed, which addresses beliefs. The first and last programmes in the series address this particularly episodes 1 and 10, which reflect specifically on how beliefs have changed over time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed If nothing else, this is a mark of just how far we've gone from beating up faggots for lols (not that this doesn't still happen) -- even under cover of law (Stonewall and similar events), if not without sanction or consequence for those so engaged. For those who are suggesting that Eich was singled out where others more deserving haven't been: Mozilla proved itself to be more susceptible and responsive to moral suasion and pressure. There are plenty of companies (and other organizations) exhibiting poor moral character: Dropbox's appointment of someone widely regarded as a war criminal to its board, ongoing boycotts against Chick-fil-A, growing actions against the Koch brothers and the industrial and political network they control, campaigns I recall against Nestle, Carl's Jr., grape growers, and other causes. The fact is that moral and market pressures can work, and in a world in which enterprises far too often disclaim all but the smallest shreds of moral responsibility, they're often one of the few effective tools available. So while I do feel a slight bit of sympathy toward Eich (he was caught up in changing times), I applaud the action and result.

adrianlmm 13y ago

#uninstallfirefox