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Chris Beard Named CEO of Mozilla
- e15ctr0n 12y agoWhat were Chris Beard's qualifications to become CEO? Honestly curious.
- JimmaDaRustla 12y agoNot sure, but I wonder if someone will find something to disqualify him...
- jmccree 12y agoInteresting idea. A well funded competitor could astroturf a "DDOS" outrage attack and prevent a company/org from ever choosing/having a functional CEO.
- dragonwriter 12y agoA functional CEO would remain so even in the face of an astroturfed outrage attack. Negative PR, including targeting persons rather than the company directly, isn't exactly a new feature of the business environment.
- JimmaDaRustla 12y agoI think HN might have an opinion conformity issue... "You can have any opinion you want, as long as it's ours."
- JimmaDaRustla 12y agoOh come on guys, not my internet points! I need those to prove my superiority when voicing our unanimous opinions.
- mbrubeck 12y agoHe used to be a Linux kernel hacker. In 1998, he entered the business world by founding a consulting company around his kernel porting work. His company was acquired and he continued leading related work at the new owner (Linuxcare). From there he went on to various entrepreneurial and senior management jobs at technology companies including HP and Sun. Chris left Sun to join Mozilla almost ten years ago (October 2004), just before the release of Firefox 1.0, making him one of the first dozen or so employees. He stayed at Mozilla for nine years in a variety of roles. As CIO he founded and led Mozilla Labs, and later was the CMO until leaving last year to work in venture capital and then start another company. He returned to Mozilla as interim CEO after Brendan Eich stepped down several months ago. [Disclosure: I've been a Mozilla employee for the past 4.5 years.]
- rjohnk 12y agoNo word on if he supports the GLBT community hook, line and sinker. That's the litmus. EDIT: Wow. So if he does support the GLBT community, we don't need to know about it? My post that offensive to people? It's an important question to ask. Edit 2: I just love tolerance ;) Edit 3: I'm removing the /sarcasm tag because people are really confused by it for some reason.
- bellerocky 12y agoYour sarcasm doesn't help your argument, and this post is about Chris Beard and Mozilla, not anything else.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- rjohnk 12y agoummm....no. It was in my original post to try to minimize pushback from those that take offense to anything that they disagree with or may find at any time offensive.
- jasonlotito 12y agoNo, it wasn't. Not that there is anyway to prove that. I saw the original post. Maybe you added it right after, but no, the original did not have it.
- obvious_throw 12y agoExcept that, as has been demonstrated, the position itself carries particular requirements for the candidate's personal political opinions.
- untog 12y agoSemantics are exactly what makes this difficult. You might say "requirements for the candidate's personal political opinions", others might say "requirements for the candidate to not hold offensive, discriminatory political opinions".
- jeremyt 12y agoWhatever. I'm sure we can find something completely unrelated in his background to disqualify him. Just give the Internet a little bit of time.
- daviis01 12y agoHe doesn't have any facial hair while his name suggests the opposite. That's doublespeak if I've ever heard it.
- nawitus 12y agoHas Chris Beard made any public political donations? EDIT: Why the downvotes?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jasonlotito 12y ago> EDIT: Why the downvotes? You should remove that. Otherwise, you should receive down votes. Edit: For clarity's sake, you should remove the complaint about downvotes.
- TallGuyShort 12y agoI disagree. A political donation was the sole reason the previous CEO left that position. I think it's quite crucial for the future of Mozilla, not to mention an interesting insight into how this decision may have been reached internally, to see the public political record of the successor. I don't believe this question intended any snark or negativity whatsoever - it's a valid question, IMO.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> A political donation was the sole reason the previous CEO left that position. No, I don't think that's a justifiable claim. A political donation was the trigger for a public controversy, which was a key event leading to the previous CEO leaving the position. The evidence does not, however, provide anything like clear support that the political donation itself was the sole reason that the CEO left the position.
- xienze 12y ago> The evidence does not, however, provide anything like clear support that the political donation itself was the sole reason that the CEO left the position. Do you agree that if he'd never made the donation he'd still be there?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- tosseraccount 12y agoPresumably he's not donated to campaigns which are not approved by the elite.
- tosseraccount 12y agoWhy the down votes?
- untog 12y agoSimplistic reasoning like "the elite" (what elite?) isn't usually encouraged here.
- homulilly 12y agoWe really do not need a page of snarky asshole comments about the gay agenda.
- Zarkonnen 12y agoExactly. Can we have a discussion about Chris Beard and Mozilla rather than a repeat of an argument about Brendan Eich?
- BrandonMarc 12y agoApparently not, and it seems that question was settled long ago. I'd say every "side" of this story definitely agrees that Brendan, and the reasons he was removed from the position, are VERY relevant to who can and will hold the position of CEO at Mozilla. So, while it's a bit sad, I don't think there can be discussion of Mozilla's CEO for some time into the future without the related discussion of Brendan Eich.
- rjohnk 12y agoSo when one agrees with something, everyone else should just move along, like nothing happened?
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- hamax 12y agoWow, the comments... Some people seem to be really mad about some other people voicing their opinion.
- jasonlotito 12y agoIt has nothing to do with voicing opinion. It's the manner in which it's being done. They are making short, snide commentary, trying to be clever. They add nothing to the conversation, and indeed, are not trying to have one. They are merely trying to "make a point" or cause a stir. They have an agenda, and a civil discussion is not what they are looking for. They know exactly what they are doing. On top of that, if they go bad and edit their posts, complaining about down votes, which should then earn them down votes regardless. There are civil ways to hold a discussion. Many of these comments are not an example of that.
- avalaunch 12y agoAsking why you're being down voted is not the same as complaining about being down voted. If you legitimately don't know why I think you should ask. It's an opportunity to learn what is and isn't considered proper etiquette.
- jasonlotito 12y ago> Asking why you're being down voted is not the same as complaining about being down voted. You're right. Never suggested otherwise. However, if the comment and the question are equally short, and your other commentary makes it clear you are just fishing for trouble, you'll get no sympathy.
- avalaunch 12y agoTrue, you didn't suggest otherwise. I just didn't see anyone in the thread complaining about being down voted. I saw a few people asking why they'd been down voted though. It's possible I missed the comments where they were complaining. As for someone fishing for trouble, I think it's fairly easy to be relatively sure that's the case (vs genuinely ignorant), but impossible to be certain, and I tend to prefer giving the benefit of the doubt.
- TallGuyShort 12y agoSo it's hard to tell if the existing comments are trying to be snarky or if they just failed to explain their non-snarky intent, but they're getting voted down into an abyss and I would sincerely like to know what his political background is. So far my searches only yield people who are probably not the same Chris Beard. I do not mean this question to voice any particular opinion or as a commentary on the last CEO, but given the reason a new CEO was needed in the first place, I think it would be very interesting to see the political background of the person they chose as a replacement. Are they publicly pro-gay? Or have they been relatively neutral?
- mbrubeck 12y agoChris Beard has already been (interim) CEO of Mozilla for three and a half months now: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/14/mozilla-moving-forward/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/14/mozilla-moving-forw... I would assume, though I could be proved wrong, that any of his political/social/religious/other positions that he or anyone else wanted to make public would be well known by now. (Remember that Brendan Eich's Proposition 8 donation was well known two years before he was promoted to CEO.) My personal views, not necessarily shared by other Mozillians: Brendan's support of Prop. 8 was part of both public record and common knowledge, including his public response to the 2012 controversy around it. With this knowledge, the MoCo board promoted him to CEO. Both this decision and his decision to step down were controversial because of his public political activity. Now, if a new CEO candidate had taken actions similar to Brendan's, that would reasonably affect their views and the board's (and Mozilla's staff, community, users, partners, etc.) about whether it would best serve the project for the board to name them CEO. Obviously, eyes on Mozilla in this regard. But it does not necessarily follow - as much as some people want it to - that every belief held by the new candidate must be suddenly made public and deemed relevant to their job. I there's a version of the fundamental attribution error at work here [1]. People have decided that politicization of the CEO role is something intrinsic to Mozilla in particular, rather than something that would happen with any organization that put itself in a similar situation. (And conversely, not happen when the situation is not similar.) It truth, the same situation could repeat itself. But if it does, it's just as likely - probably more likely - to involve a different company and a different individual. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_Attribution_Error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_Attribution_Error
- bgun 12y agoWow, this comment thread went full Reddit in record time.
- tptacek 12y agoYes, it did. In the short term, making sure junk threads like this fall off the front page of the site (or to the bottoms of their threads) quickly is an important goal. That protects the site itself, by preventing it from collapsing in on itself due to pointless hostility. This is the problem the HN mods have been working on for the past year or so. In the long term, figuring out how we can host relevant discussions about volatile partisan subjects is important, and I imagine something that will become a focus for moderation. Not having completely solved the first problem, it's probably a bit wishful to hope that we can address the second one. HN doesn't have to be all things to all topics. If we lose some stories in the service of repairing comity, I think that's a fine tradeoff in the short term.
- zorpner 12y agoI would disagree that those are two different problems -- "preventing [the site] from collapsing in on itself" and figuring out how to host relevant discussions are tied together more deeply than that. As an example, if heated discussions/topics are systemically removed from view, it makes HN more of an echo chamber, and it will attract more people who will make having volatile discussions more difficult in the future. If you can get past the title, this is actually a very excellent article on moderation requirements for a successful online community: http://dashes.com/anil/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-assholes-its-your-fault.html http://dashes.com/anil/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-assh...
- tptacek 12y agoThe systematic removal of volatile topics does make HN more of an echo chamber. I agree. And that's not a good thing. But there are worse things than being an echo chamber, and preventing those worse outcomes takes priority. The irony about the link you provided is that HN does literally all the things Dash says sites should do. Of course, the problem HN faces is much bigger than the problem Dash is contemplating.
- wuxiekeji 12y agoIn other news, Chris Mustache named CEO of Google Chrome
- qwerta 12y agoWhatever. I just hope Mozilla will not run out of money as Gnome Foundation did. Firefox is harder to replace than Gnome.
- dblohm7 12y agoBeing a regular Firefox user helps that cause :-)
- webwright 12y agoFor those who are asking about his politics and getting downvoted, here's why. His politics almost certainly don't matter, UNLESS they are way outside those of the majority of his "constituents". For example, if he pro-religious-freedom, that's fine. If he's for a flat-tax, that's okay to most folks. If he's pro-choice, there are a few who'd get grumpy. If he's a climate-change denier, a lot of folks would question his thinking and/or ethics. If he was an enthusiastic neo-nazi, we'd start marching on Mozilla. For Mozilla's constituents (users, developers, employees), being anti-LGBT was well outside the realm of acceptable political beliefs. In short, let's leave politics out of this kind of stuff UNLESS the candidate is demonstrably in one of the outer circles of "unacceptable viewpoints".
- ScottBurson 12y agoThis is too weak. His politics don't matter, period, unless he brings them into the office himself.
- webwright 12y agoNo. Bringing views into the office can be a subtle thing. Would you work for an unapologetic racist if he promised to not let race impact his management? If you think prejudice is something that a person can turn off when they walk into the office, you need to study it more.
- mcantelon 12y agoCultural consensus was reached long ago about most matters involving race, but cultural consensus about gay marriage is more recent (Obama, for example, opposed gay marriage not so long ago). So this comparison is a bit apples-to-oranges. But, following this comparison, what if this hypothetical racist had an established work history of not letting his/her racial opinions impact management? Eich founded Mozilla and likely had a great deal of influence on the its culture. Yet he did nothing I've heard of to impede Mozilla's organizations from embracing diversity in all forms.
- ryanthejuggler 12y agoRead this backwards at the first go. "CEO of Mozilla named Chris Beard."
- yuhong 12y agoIt would be interesting to sue OkCupid for coercing Mozilla to violate anti-discrimination laws. Which brings up the fact that I don't really like them. I am thinking of ditching them, but allowing the EEOC or similar to order particular sets of companies to stop discrimination for a period of time if necessary.
- lodes 12y agoA political donation of $1,000 that someone (presumably more than one someone, but who knows) in Mozilla did not like, and the CEO is ousted. http://lodes.net http://lodes.net
- thrillgore 12y agoWatching how the comments here have sunk gives me little hope for Hacker News.