Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

blogs.wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 194 posts

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#51

Post by davidgerard »

KuraFire wrote: post #40
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #32

This article links to an earlier WSJ piece that gives more information about Eich's background ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/24/mozilla-picks-insider... ). He invented Javascript in 1995, co-founded Mozilla, and helped start Firefox. It seems to me he's very well qualified from a historical as well as technical perspective. Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced, considering that his technical co…

It's not really a litmus test. Mozilla is an organization that prides itself on openness and equality, on being inclusive as an organization and a culture. This is reflected in its products, in many different ways—all of them good, generally speaking. The CEO is the figurehead of a company or organization; they have to represent the company, establish its culture, define its vision, and so forth and so forth. Having…

>The CEO is the figurehead of a company or organization; they have to represent the company, establish its culture, define its vision, and so forth and so forth.

To emphasise this point - the importance of the choice in relating to the outside world - this is just in:

http://gaynewsnetwork.com.au/news/victoria/vac-gmhc-to-boyco...

The Victorian AIDS Council and Gay Men's Health Centre, one of the most important gay charities in the state of Victoria in Australia, is boycotting Mozilla and removing Firefox from their machines.

More than that, they issued a PRESS RELEASE to this effect.

So the Firefox brand is becoming toxic well outside the world of disgruntled techies.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#52

Post by KuraFire »

sp332 wrote: post #42
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #32

This article links to an earlier WSJ piece that gives more information about Eich's background ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/24/mozilla-picks-insider... ). He invented Javascript in 1995, co-founded Mozilla, and helped start Firefox. It seems to me he's very well qualified from a historical as well as technical perspective. Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced, considering that his technical co…

The article could have been clearer, but this is the important bit: The three board members who resigned sought a CEO from outside Mozilla with experience in the mobile industry who could help expand the organization’s Firefox OS mobile-operating system and balance the skills of co-founders Eich and Baker . So it's not about the Prop 8 thing at all.

…that the article and board members in question are willing to reveal.

It's still entirely possible (and more likely if you ask me) that the Prop 8 angle and subsequent objections raised by many Mozillans and Firefox developers have changed their minds about this, but these are big-time board member CEOs we're taking so of course they're not going to say the political position on Prop 8 of the newly appointed CEO is what's making them resign. That's still a bad career move in today's world, but saying "we wanted someone from outside the organization with experience in XYZ" is not.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#53

Post by mjn »

KuraFire wrote: post #40
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #32

This article links to an earlier WSJ piece that gives more information about Eich's background ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/24/mozilla-picks-insider... ). He invented Javascript in 1995, co-founded Mozilla, and helped start Firefox. It seems to me he's very well qualified from a historical as well as technical perspective. Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced, considering that his technical co…

It's not really a litmus test. Mozilla is an organization that prides itself on openness and equality, on being inclusive as an organization and a culture. This is reflected in its products, in many different ways—all of them good, generally speaking. The CEO is the figurehead of a company or organization; they have to represent the company, establish its culture, define its vision, and so forth and so forth. Having…

> They are pretty mutually exclusive.

I don't disagree per se, but do you apply this generally, disqualifying people with any expressed anti-egalitarian politics from leading a pro-egalitarian organization such as Mozilla? Would you apply a "no Randians" or "no libertarians" litmus test as much as a "no Christian fundamentalists" or "no social conservatives" test? In my opinion, the economic and social equality angles are of fairly equal relevance to Mozilla's stated goals.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#54

Post by crassus »

KuraFire wrote: post #40
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #32

This article links to an earlier WSJ piece that gives more information about Eich's background ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/24/mozilla-picks-insider... ). He invented Javascript in 1995, co-founded Mozilla, and helped start Firefox. It seems to me he's very well qualified from a historical as well as technical perspective. Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced, considering that his technical co…

It's not really a litmus test. Mozilla is an organization that prides itself on openness and equality, on being inclusive as an organization and a culture. This is reflected in its products, in many different ways—all of them good, generally speaking. The CEO is the figurehead of a company or organization; they have to represent the company, establish its culture, define its vision, and so forth and so forth. Having…

As a conservative-ish person in tech, I'm glad I made the decision to hide my politics beginning a few years ago. You people are vicious. I'd love to have an open debate or conversation, but that doesn't seem to be your game.

Our culture is in middle of making unprecedented changes to a core social institution that goes back into prehistory. It's going to be a messy process and some people are going to disagree. That's reasonable and shouldn't be grounds for disbarment from polite society. Let's dial back the vitriol

Lastly, equality isn't an unmitigated good. We treat different people differently depending on the circumstances, and for good reason. For example, you probably don't believe that children should be able to marry, or more than two people. "Equality" isn't a magic word that wins all arguments.

Personally, I raise an eyebrow when a six year old boy raised by adoptive lesbians decides he is transexual, and I feel like society may be failing that boy. But we are so drunk on the doctrine of equality that there is no stepping on the brake...

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#55

Post by throwawaay »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #28
jholly wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft isn't a fair comparison. They have other, multi-billion dollar cash cows to rely on. I don't think they're unfounded. Nearly every developer I know uses chrome, and chrome dev tools. This wasn't always the case. Market share can be a lagging indicator, i think it's a little short sighted to suggest they're okay. They're not! Forking isn't a sin. Diversity often a result of forking. Take a look at this graph…

Firefox has equal share with Chrome and most of the techies I know still use Firefox. Not having every private test URL of stuff you're working on sent to Google is reason enough. I do have several dev friends that use Chrome. They're usually mobile devs unconcerned with privacy (they have everything in Google).

Put up or shut up:

Please provide evidence that Chrome sends private URLs to Google.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#56

Post by davidgerard »

untog wrote: post #9

The choice of Eich as a CEO also made me wonder - they took a year to find a CEO, and ended up with their own CTO. Is it fair to assume that they searched long and hard but couldn't find anyone? If so, that's a real shame. I want Mozilla to succeed.

To be fair, Eich lives and breathes Mozilla and the mission, and is basically the perfect choice for CEO ... except for his political actions being so toxic to the brand that other nonprofits issue a press release to say they're boycotting Firefox over it: http://gaynewsnetwork.com.au/news/victoria/vac-gmhc-to-boyco...

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#57

Post by copergi »

dewitt wrote: post #23

Off-topic, but that's a weird statement from the WSJ: "Firefox is the world’s second-most-popular Web browser on personal computers, with 18% market share, according to Net Applications, a web-analytics consulting firm. That trails Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with 58% share, and just ahead of Google’s Chrome, with 17% share." Here's what I found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers : Chrome…

Net Applications are famous specifically for their incredibly wrong stats.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#58

Post by yulaow »

sinak wrote: post #47

Hmm, something's amiss. Archive.org's record of Mozilla's website says that Mozilla Corp only ever had 5 board members. The WSJ seems to imply they had 6. Assuming Moz's own website is accurate, Katharina Borchert only joined around the time Eich was appointed. Either way, the numbers don't quite add up. If there were only 5 board members, and only 2 of them wanted Eich, how did he get chosen? And even if Katherina w…

Could be that (note: this is only a supposition) maybe some who voted for this CEO had not evaluated well the outcome and now part of the board, and maybe in this part there are also some who voted for him, asked him to step back? Maybe he said no and now, in the position to get a bad reputation or to pay for the bad choice, the same board members prefer to step back themselves to avoid to be in the crossfire?

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#59

Post by blisterpeanuts »

sp332 wrote: post #42
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #32

This article links to an earlier WSJ piece that gives more information about Eich's background ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/24/mozilla-picks-insider... ). He invented Javascript in 1995, co-founded Mozilla, and helped start Firefox. It seems to me he's very well qualified from a historical as well as technical perspective. Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced, considering that his technical co…

The article could have been clearer, but this is the important bit: The three board members who resigned sought a CEO from outside Mozilla with experience in the mobile industry who could help expand the organization’s Firefox OS mobile-operating system and balance the skills of co-founders Eich and Baker . So it's not about the Prop 8 thing at all.

There are some people within Mozilla who are demanding he recant his Pro 8 support. Google "eich" and you'll get one or two such bloggers, within the first 5 hits or so.

Re: Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

#60

Post by AnimalMuppet »

KuraFire wrote: post #40
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #32

This article links to an earlier WSJ piece that gives more information about Eich's background ( http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/03/24/mozilla-picks-insider... ). He invented Javascript in 1995, co-founded Mozilla, and helped start Firefox. It seems to me he's very well qualified from a historical as well as technical perspective. Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced, considering that his technical co…

It's not really a litmus test. Mozilla is an organization that prides itself on openness and equality, on being inclusive as an organization and a culture. This is reflected in its products, in many different ways—all of them good, generally speaking. The CEO is the figurehead of a company or organization; they have to represent the company, establish its culture, define its vision, and so forth and so forth. Having…

> but what’s mainly happening here is that it is simply a matter of bad judgement ...

Only if you assume either that his position is so wrong that it could not be held by a reasonable person, or that he shouldn't speak or act on his position in any public way. I consider both of those assumptions to be highly suspect.

> ... and people objecting to the appointment because he's unfit to lead an org like Mozilla

That is exactly using this as a litmus test.

Post reply on HN