The apologists just keep repeating the same argument: that what Eich did was merely expressing a personal view, whilst those opposing his appointment as CEO were a mob on a witch hunt.
The reality is that Eich as a supporter of Prop 8 was part of a mob on a witch hunt, one with considerably greater consequences than a CEO resigning from his job. The job of one man doesn't even begin to compare to the civil rights of so many.
The continued portrayal of Eich as the victim instead of the aggressor bothers me a lot.
To paint Eich as a good guy and those who opposed him as some evil misinformed opportunistic lynch mob is a complete reversal of reality.
Prop 8 supporters are the lynch mob, and Eich was one of them. Calling for him to step down is a relatively mild response to that.
This being said, it really bothers me that OKC and others did not clean up after themselves. Battle won, they just fucked off. No encompassing announcement of "Hey, use Mozilla again, boycott over". They got what they want, Mozilla is once again pure in the diversity stakes, but they didn't bother to clear the bad air. They've basically left the bad taste of the virulent boycott hanging around despite getting exactly the change they wanted.
So yes, it was a witch hunt - they only cared about destroying Eich, not strengthening Mozilla, and were happy to damage their Mozillan allies (that they purported to be defending) in the process.
Besides, it's possible (and common) for both sides in an argument to be wrong.
Yeah I think your interpretation is fair. Taking a leadership stance takes on a higher level of responsibility to do the right thing and be just, and to appear to do that.
The job of one man doesn't even begin to compare to the civil rights of so many.
While this is true, I think comparing a political donation to a witch hunt and a lynch mob is a stretch.
It's not really clear to me how the rights of lesbian and gay people have been improved by Brendan's decision to resign. Whereas Mozilla has lost it's founder, new CEO and long-term CTO and, if recent activity on es-discuss is a reliable gauge, the ECMAScript committee has lost its benevolent dictator and the man who invented the language. Are you positive that the world is better without Brendan occupying those positions?
As explained many times in many forums, but obviously falling on deaf ears, drawing parallels with the KKK is absurd.
It's an unreasonable distortion of the debate, designed to emotionally repel all who disagrees with your views on defining marriage, and wrongly mixing up civil rights with human rights.
The KKK encroached on people's HUMAN rights, obviously. And while you insist that marriage is a matter of civil rights, it's easily arguable that marriage is not a civil right for gays or straight people.
The legal "benefits" allowed within established relationships on the other hand, can be argued as civil rights. This means you should be campaigning for equal rights for civil unions rather than trying to get everyone to re-define what they believe to be "marriage", which doesn't seem to be working. You like to think that everyone is on the same page as you, but many people holding back expressing their opinion on this matter simply don't want to be accused by people like you of gay-hatred, bigotry and all the other pathetic labels you have for those who don't agree with you about what "marriage" is, its limits and scope, and how much of it is inherently about male + female union.
Why is it the job of the gay folks to redefine civil unions to protect "traditional marriage"?
Had the folks who wanted to protect "traditional marriage" proposed removing marriage from the legal framework and replacing it with "civil union" do you have any idea the groundswell of support they would have had?
So, why didn't they? Why was there no campaign to remove "traditional marriage" from the legal framework? Why, instead, did a whole bunch of religious folks sponsor Prop 8 instead of a far superior and equal solution of removing the state altogether from "traditional marriage"?
Simple, Proposition 8 wasn't about marriage. It was about attacking "the gays". And people in the tech industry are smart enough to see it for what it was--a well-funded effort to inject religion-based bigotry into California law. And Eich is paying the price for that.
If I knew more about Prop 8 details, I'd comment on prop 8. I prefer the social and philosophical ideas around the wider debate, and the online activism overreaction, the tweeting Mozilla staff (who should just resign themselves IMHO).
If you're right that Prop 8 was about attacking gay people, then that sucks. This is where I'd like to hear from Eich on the matter. I've automatically assumed his innocence on the matter of gay-hatred, especially after reading his March 26 blog post.
Same-sex couples can still get married anyway, have a wedding without fear of the riot squad shutting the party down. Mickey Rooney married eight times. That's a lot of wedding parties. Definitely have the parties, the honeymoons. That stuff is the important stuff, then go after de-facto/unmarried/same-sex rights of couples.
Certificates for emergencies and so on, come on there's not actually that many rights. Some can be sorted out with co-habitation agreements and other arrangements.
What a sad thing for the Mozilla CEO that his own staff tweet against him just a day after his March 26 blog post promoting equality and stating he was open to advice from the LGBT community...
https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
The solution of having a "civil union" that takes care of that stuff and then "marriage" is up to the church is generally acceptable to the LGBT community. However, nobody from the other side is willing to do this either; they just want to bash the LGBT bunch.
> If you're right that Prop 8 was about attacking gay people, then that sucks.
It was. Sadly. And that's what pissed off a LOT of people. The Mormons swooped in and spent enormous amounts of money to get it passed. The Catholic church did too, but not as much as the Mormons.
> This is where I'd like to hear from Eich on the matter. I've automatically assumed his innocence on the matter of gay-hatred, especially after reading his March 26 blog post.
Don't. He believes this and is unapologetic. I suspect it's part of his religion.
I respect him for sticking to his position even though I find his position abhorrent. However, both he and Mozilla should have seen this coming and not put him in the CEO slot.
> Certificates for emergencies and so on, come on there's not actually that many rights. Some can be sorted out with co-habitation agreements and other arrangements.
It's NOT that easy. If it were, I suspect California would have done it already. "Marriage" winds its way through a lot of laws--power of attorney, medical emergency decisions, death benefits, child custody, divorce splits, alimony, adoption, the list goes on and on and on.
The stories of some bigoted doctor preventing a gay partner from visiting or making decisions while their loved one is dying are not uncommon. Can you imagine the lawsuit if that happened to a husband or wife of a traditional marriage? It would be so huge that it wouldn't even get to court.
> You like to think that everyone is on the same page as you, but many people holding back expressing their opinion on this matter simply don't want to be accused by people like you of gay-hatred, bigotry and all the other pathetic labels you have for those who don't agree with you about what "marriage" is, its limits and scope, and how much of it is inherently about male + female union.
Maybe because there's no real rational reason for them to hold onto the term for themselves, and they'd probably not be able to cogently explain why they're against sharing it, so they do what you just did and get all hypothetical and defensive about it instead.
State-sanctioned marriage has a meaning if it's purpose is to promote reproduction. Which is what marriage was for up to 50 years ago. It's an institution that has benefits to society, so it makes sense to promote and protect it.
Now if you think of marriage as "any love relationship sanctioned by the government", you of course should include same-sex couples. My objection is that then you have changed the meaning, and now there is no rational reason for not including "a love relationship between a man and his three wives", or "a love relationship between two siblings". Or "a love relationship between four men, two woman and a goat". Or just "a relationship between any number of humans that they choose to call marriage", love (or sex) should be no requirement. As long as all humans involved are adults, and they don't pretend me (via government) to subsidize any of their costs, there is no rational reason to hold onto the term just for couples, same-sex or not.
> This means you should be campaigning for equal rights for civil unions rather than trying to get everyone to re-define what they believe to be "marriage", which doesn't seem to be working.
It's not necessary to get everyone to re-define what they believe to be "marriage", just as it wasn't necessary to get all white people to accept black people as equals. All that's needed are enough people to tip the scales, and such support is inevitable:
You know that KKK were killing people right? and anti-interracial-marriage were not allowing people to live together. Do you think that can be compared to prop8 which only wanted to remove tax cuts and social status?
No, what Brendan helped pass was worse than anti-miscegenation laws. With the latter, you might not be able to marry your first preference, but there are plenty of fish in the sea. If you're gay, in post-Proposition 8 California, you could not marry anybody you were attracted to.
Where did I say that? I said that not being able to marry anybody at all you were attracted to is worse that not being able to live with one particular person that you might fall in love with.
Also, marriage has more legal implications than taxation.
I had been quite certain that Jay Sullivan would become
our permanent CEO, after a long and successful “interim
CEO” run
You're not the only one. Everybody keeps forgetting to point the finger at the real culprit: the Mozilla board.
There is certainly enough blame to go around elsewhere, like rabid reactions from all sides, the original unethical deed (contrary to the common simplifications it's not about his beliefs per se, it's about the act of enabling legislation that denies basic rights to a minority).
None of these casually-identified factors are really at fault for what happened. Let's shift criticism to where it belongs: the Mozilla board elected someone into the chief public messaging position who seems to be prone to behavior that is fundamentally at odds with Mozilla's core message. In doing so they provoked a very foreseeable public outcry and a series of highly emotional responses which ultimately ended up taking down an excellent technologist and by all accounts likeable fellow human.
Everybody has flaws, sometimes they're even crippling flaws. If we mandate every high-profile CEO appointment should be reserved for completely flawless people the result will simply be that from now on only liars get appointed. However, at the same time, a board of directors must display a minimum of rational judgement and refrain from appointing people who unfortunately have flaws that prevent them from doing their job.
I feel sorry for what happened to Mr Eich. It's difficult to even imagine how absolutely disappointed and rejected he must feel. I sincerely believe he was looking forward to taking care of things that really mattered. Unfortunately, this was never in the cards. The board set him up for this experience when they should have protected him.
Sure, the board shouldn't have made him CEO in the first place, but Eich could have just admitted that what he did was wrong and fixed the whole disaster with just a single statement. The fact that he couldn't caused many progressive people to distance themselves from the organization. Since Mozilla draws most of its contributors from that population, that would cause more damage to Mozilla than anything Eich could overcome with his leadership.
I don't care what Mozilla's CEO thinks, I care what the public thinks he thinks. Public figures with openly homophobic views are much more dangerous than a random homophobic grandpa because they signal to the public that there is nothing wrong with it.
"Fake it til you make it" works because most prejudices are kept alive because of conformation bias and herd mentality.
He supported legislation that maintained the requirements for a legally-recognized marriage that have been around for as long as this country has legally recognized marriage. It's unfair to describe that as homophobic. We have no idea what his feelings are towards gay people, only that he believes "marriage", in a legal context, should require exactly one party of each sex.
There's been no evidence that this position affected his work at all over the last 15 years, or the ways he may have interacted with LGBT coworkers. There's also no evidence that he fears or hates gay people.
Relationships are a complicated topic, and a lot of very reasonable, intelligent people have a very diverse set of opinions on how they should operate. Can we please stop lynching someone because he happened to hold (at least at the time) the most popular opinion?
> I don't care what Mozilla's CEO thinks, I care what the public thinks he thinks
This is the kind of thinking that leads to "gay propaganda ban" in Russia. Government doesn't care whom you love, it only cares what "children" think about you.
Disliking some group of people is pretty much ok, as long as you manage to keep your behavior civilized.
That's why people are talking about tolerance and not obligatory love towards all other people.
What if Eich didn't think he did anything wrong? Would you be comfortable with him lying his way out of it? The objection to having him as CEO is that he doesn't support gay marriage; that doesn't change, and you've forced a man to lie to keep his job.
Thats the beauty of the lie. As others have pointed out, its not our responsibility (or right?) to know of Eich's personal opiniions in the first place.
Knowing it though and not being able to say (at least pretend) he changed his mind is disturbing for many people, because then it became part of a public image.
I love that sheppy didn't tiptoe around how infuriating this whole thing has been, regardless of whether you thought Brendan should step down or not, what with the sensationalist media and misinformed public. I haven't been able to figure out how to constructively express my anger, but this post comes closer to it than any I've seen yet.
> In April 2012, when Brendan was CTO at Mozilla someone (unknown to me, possibly known to others)
> For more than 16 years, Brendan fought for openness and freedom on the web, and led many of the people who built that open and free web. This week, in a senseless, vicious convulsion, the web turned on him.
these things worry me. especially the latter. it worries me, because regardless of your view on whether he was a bigot or not, brendan protected the open web. his views on that matter were clear, and had a track record. we could have had a powerful, a strong ally, with clear principles. if anything his track showed that he would not let personal opinions(which btw WE DO NOT KNOW AT ALL based on one data point) get in the way of performing that duty.
I think we lost an ally. A very important ally by the way. Someone care to explain why someone would read a whole list of donations just to throw dirt at him?
the quotes are from the linked article in the article:
I was rather sympathetic initially, but the campaigners lost me completely when they went after Firefox.
That is just the dumbest precedent they could have possibly set. Because the important question is: What will be the next technology to boycott when a high-profile figure screws up?
But can you imagine Linus doing an equivocal interview where he ducks the issue and uses "Indonesians want to use Mobile Firefox" as a justification? That was Eich's mistake which just inflamed the already brewing PR disaster.
There is a reasonable difference between "personally donating to a cause" and "donating to a candidate who votes for a cause". Not that it excuses Mr OKC from being an asshat but it is a different situation.
I don't like the whole affair, and in my opinion, while the discussion might've been appropriate, the turnout is disappointing. And it's been said in here; most actors in this affair didn't act very mature.
(TLDR; Co-Founder of OKC donated to far-right republican opposing gay rights and trying to make abortion illegal; among various other stuff).
Assuming that such a harsh action (displaying a message to users with a particular browser and urging them to change) must've been OK'ed at quite a high level, it's not far-fetched to say that somebody is/was quite the hypocrite here.
That is not at all the same. Saying that Yagan supports oppressing gays because he donated to Cannon is like saying most of us support the PATRIOT Act because we voted for Obama. Eich donated to a campaign whose sole purpose was to take existing rights away from gays in California.
It might not be 100% the same, but it's also not completely different. You don't get to pick; if Yagan honestly was against gay discrimination, he shouldn't have supported Cannon. Especially since by 2004, the year of his donation, it was already evident that Cannon was against gay rights.
But this is not what I'm trying to say at all. Merely that: If OKC wanted to speak out against Eich, they should've done sone in a mature and careful way - it's what a decent person (be it legal or nature) needs to do anyway, and even more so since rarely one is without fault.
Because he and the PR folks at Mozilla screwed this up so badly.
This reaction was bloody obvious. The PR machine should have been smoothing this transition and been ready for the backlash. They already had a big kerfuffle about his Prop 8 donation years ago.
Not only should Eich be leaving, but anyone in charge of PR at Mozilla should be fired, as well.
This actually bubbled up into my brain as well, but I just put it off as my political paranoia being overly active.
Given that nobody really anticipated Eich being put into the CEO clot, I wonder if some big battle happened in the background. So, the board said "Fine, here's your shot. Enjoy." and dropped him into the soup to let him sink.
No, People who believe that some groups deserve less rights than others, and take action on those beliefs should not lead companies. Certainly, they should not lead tech companies who have a focus on being open and accepting.
I guarantee you everybody believes some groups deserve less rights than others. For example you just said certain people don't have the right to be CEOs.
This new CEO search will be very difficult as all candidates will have to go through a very detailed screening processing (well a good search should require that anyway). In particular, anyone who lives in CA and has voted someone who is not in favor of gay will be tossed out right away.
Any company that jumps into a heated controversy like this is not acting heroic. Their actions are merely to strengthen the heat. It may appear that OkCupid is really just after that PR stun given how the CEO may have been against LGBT community by voting someone who is against LGBT. One might defend OkCupid's CEO by saying "well maybe he was voting him for some of the candidate's agenda, not the entire agenda. After all, no congressman has perfect agenda that everyone likes. You either choose someone you totally disagree with or someone you partially disagree with, or someone you think is actually helping and caring about people."
When we reflect, doesn't that make this whole crisis really stupid and ugly given how we elect people into office based on partial agreement? How Eich is helpful, friendly to his colleagues at Mozilla and outside of Mozilla and yet he is still not the right choice to lead Mozilla.
After all, Mozilla's mission IS ABOUT allowing every community to be able to express itself to the whole Internet. How do we do that? By building a browser which people can trust by verifying the source code. By building websites and tools which allow people to share opinions freely. By teaching people how to make use of technology to share opinions.
Choosing Eich might have been a really bad choice now that we reflect on history. CEO search will continue and will require triple efforts. Great lesson for all future CEO search. Yet, Mozilla has to take a lot of losses which is unfortunate.
I don't like OkCupid. What they did was truly amazingly reckless to me. You can disagree with me all you want. But it is. If you are going to boycott Mozilla over this LGBT issue, where was your boycott when we found out about NSA? Where were you OkCupid when we heard about Russian's ban on gay when the Winter Olympics was happening? There is so many worth causes for a service owner to display a boycott message to its users. Dying children and poor labor in the world. But most don't do that. Why? Neutrality for a neutral service is the right thing to do. Now all the sudden ganging up on Mozilla is fishy to me, OkCupid.
"Russian's ban on gay" doesn't exist. Sochi, for example, has many gay clubs. The Russians passed "you can't promote homosexuality to juveniles" which is very different.
It's not even close to "banning gays". It's a restriction, sure, and it's a stupid dumb one that many countries have or have tried in the past but Russia isn't "banning gays" at all.
The reality is that Eich as a supporter of Prop 8 was part of a mob on a witch hunt, one with considerably greater consequences than a CEO resigning from his job. The job of one man doesn't even begin to compare to the civil rights of so many.
The continued portrayal of Eich as the victim instead of the aggressor bothers me a lot.
To paint Eich as a good guy and those who opposed him as some evil misinformed opportunistic lynch mob is a complete reversal of reality.
Prop 8 supporters are the lynch mob, and Eich was one of them. Calling for him to step down is a relatively mild response to that.