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.
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.