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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#931

Post by baud147258 »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #288
YorickPeterse wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly he didn't get fired for just not supporting gay marriage, he got fired for donating to some bill that was trying to prohibit gay marriage. That's quite the difference.

Understandable he had to go. Not many people would feel comfortable supporting a product where the profits go in to restricting their human rights.

That's an entirely disingenuous way of putting this situation. Mozilla's profits are NOT the salaries of its employees - the profits are AFTER payroll. It was Eich's personal money, not Mozilla's money, and there is absolutely zero implication that Mozilla itself had the same opinions as its CEO - nor should there be. If you draw that inference, it is because you're acting as part of Cancel Culture, which is totalitarian liberalism in action.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#932

Post by baud147258 »

big_chungus wrote: post #365
core-questions wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter - it's legal, protected political speech in donation form. There's nothing wrong with having differing opinions about things; you can disagree as much as you like and donate as much as you want to counter it.

You're right, it absolutely is. The corollary to this is that no one has to hire him/work with him; they're allowed to fire him for his legally-protected speech. I don't agree with how it was handled either, but we must protect their freedom to act as they choose as much as Mr. Eich's freedom to speak as he chooses.

Oh, sure, until it ends up in the situation where you have to prove your perfect ideological allegiance to the Party in order to have employment. It's already the case that you can't publicly post things without getting dox'd and fired for a lot of opinions that were 100% the norm not that long ago. You may call it progress, but the progression is towards totalitarian liberalism; your gay marriage is really not going to make that experience that much better once they find some place where you're not faithful enough. For example, what if you're a white gay male?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#933

Post by BrendanEich »

useragent86 wrote: post #899
BrendanEich wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been downvoted; I sympathize. While you stick to "speech", I think you miss two things, one about speech and the other from a different area of law: 1. Free speech is not just a U.S. 1st Amendment issue, and who cares what else goes wrong at subsidiary levels. From the Committee for the First Amendment (Humphrey Bogard had to disavow under HUAC pressure; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_First_Am…

Respectfully, with full benefit of hindsight, do you think it would have been better if you had stayed at Mozilla, forcing them to either fire you (which would have been illegal) or learn to deal with dissent? I ask not to criticize but to strategize. Thanks for standing up and fighting these good fights.

I cannot comment on anything about what happened, sorry.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#934

Post by BrendanEich »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #913
BrendanEich wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top few execs made above 800k but not 7 figures when I was there.

I guess I'm being a pedant about the way one might pursue the line of reasoning of comparing to other companies' pay, not its validity and overall applicability.

Mozilla constantly says it is not like “other companies”.

We were and are in the Bay Area, which is every year more expensive, but not 3x more.

It could be the 2.5m/year is justified, but not by market share up, new revenue lines, or both. What else? Competition? No, it is a custom fit job, chair of both boards and now even acting CEO. No competitive recruiting or chance for others to get the job, no real oversight.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#935

Post by jldugger »

BrendanEich wrote: post #903
BrendanEich wrote: post #895

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not accurate. Netscape was the browser company, with servers too (I worked with the McCool twins and Ari Luotonen in first month on board). I have no idea what "not lightweight" means but Netscape took over the market from Mosaic and pioneered SSL (now TLS) for secure e-commerce. This is all pretty well known and many still alive who saw it. Taher El Gamal among them. Why do people make up fables on HN?

From Twitter I was sad to be reminded of Netscape 4, a late and bloated mess that shipped first on Windows. Not Netscape 2 or 3, which were baseline here.

Even netscape navigator 2 supported[1]:

- ftp uploads - email - nntp

It also launched javascript, but I think we can agree that isn't bloat.

But you're right, I totally forgot about the time in which Navigator was sold, rather than given away[2]. Please forgive me, this was a time before the PC in my childhood home had TCP internet, so I was more reliant on libraries and school labs at the time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator_2#Features [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20141102052346/http://news.cnet....

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#936

Post by bduerst »

manfredo wrote: post #897
bduerst wrote: post #887

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lawyer's marketing blog selling his services to sue for wrongful termination. The labor code § 1101 they cite is the same thing : it applies only to employers using threatening to terminate in order to coerce political activity, not actually terminating someone for political actions. This is an important distinction. It is illegal for an employer to threaten all employees with termination if they do not vote…

> it applies only to employers using threatening to terminate in order to coerce political activity, not actually terminating someone for political actions. So your idea is that it's not okay to threaten to fire an employee over political actions, but it is okay to actually fire someone over political actions? No worker protections protects against both. Read it closely: > No employer shall coerce or influence or att…

I didn't make the laws - this is what they are. GP is making the appeal to legality which is wrong in this case.

The law is to prevent employers from extorting all employees into taking political action under threat of termination. Terminating a single employee for their past political actions is different from extorting all employees into action.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#937

Post by malachismith »

dgudkov wrote: post #823

Mozilla lays off people, yet it still doesn't accept donations. I don't understand it - there are tons of people (including me) would gladly donate to Mozilla to keep it afloat. Yet, you can only donate to the Mozilla foundation, but not to Mozilla Corporation (that develops the browser).

Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit business

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#938

Post by malachismith »

shawndrost wrote: post #908
athms wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. This statement is a fabrication. She was trained and worked as a lawyer. She went to Berkeley, not to study computer science or electrical engineering, but to study law. She graduated and went to a San Francisco law firm that specialized in intellectual property and had many clients in Silicon Valley. She eventually left and w…

I didn't say anything about software. You are free to dispute what I said but I did not fabricate it; here is a quote from a source, which is the #2 search result for her name: "Mitchell has written the key documents that set out Mozilla's enduring mission and commitments – the Mozilla Public License in 1998, the Mozilla Manifesto in 2007 and the Mozilla Manifesto Addendum – also known as the Pledge for a Healthy Int…

You can understand why, here on Hacker News, we might have interpreted your statement that she "directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet" as claiming that she contributed code, rather than just drafting some legal docs and marketing pieces.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#939

Post by wesgarland »

toyg wrote: post #923
wesgarland wrote: post #922

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happens on mac, too. Some mornings I'm beachballing for my whole first coffee. Eventually I just wind up power cycling the mac if I can't open a shell prompt with which to `pkill -9 plugin-container`....

I'm on Mac too and I've never seen anything like this. The odd tab will crash (particularly after I started using containers extensively and more than one adblocker/anti-tracker), but that's it. > pkill -9 plugin-container Ahhh, ok - that's not FF, that's a crap plugin (likely Flash). It's the browser equivalent of blaming Windows when a crap taiwanese driver gets it stuck. You could try uninstalling all that crap.

Amazing how it happens neither with Chrome nor Safari. Any idea how they solved that problem?

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#940

Post by manfredo »

bduerst wrote: post #936
manfredo wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it applies only to employers using threatening to terminate in order to coerce political activity, not actually terminating someone for political actions. So your idea is that it's not okay to threaten to fire an employee over political actions, but it is okay to actually fire someone over political actions? No worker protections protects against both. Read it closely: > No employer shall coerce or influence or att…

I didn't make the laws - this is what they are. GP is making the appeal to legality which is wrong in this case. The law is to prevent employers from extorting all employees into taking political action under threat of termination. Terminating a single employee for their past political actions is different from extorting all employees into action.

> The law is to prevent employers from extorting all employees into taking political action under threat of termination.

Not incorrect, but an incomplete description of these worker protections. It is also prevents employers from threatening employees into refraining from taking political action, "No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity."

> Terminating a single employee for their past political actions is different from extorting all employees into action.

Terminating an employee for their political action makes it crystal clear to the remaining employees that they need to refrain from that political action if they want to keep their jobs - and that violates worker protections.

Again, you seem to be under the impression that these protections only exist to prevent employers from making their employees carry out a political action. That's not the case, they also prohibit influencing employees from refraining taking political action. Firing an employee from donating to a ballot initiative is a very explicit way to get employees to refrain from donating to said ballot initiative.

And yet again, I as well as other commenters have provided you with analysis from law groups that explain that Mozilla firing Eich over his political donations would have violated these worker protections.

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