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Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO

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

#131

Post by stormbrew »

ben336 wrote: post #111
davidgerard wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Just out of curiousity would you say that voting for Prop 8 would have been equally politically toxic? Since that would eliminate 52% of Californian voters from 2008. I recognize that a donation is different than a vote, but I want to understand the mindset here. Can you really say that a political opinion that was apparently held by over half of the states voters at the time can disqualify someone from leading a com…

You kind of answer your own question here. Putting money behind an issue amplifies both your voice and the cause's well above and beyond the one-person-one-vote voice everyone gets (or is supposed to get). Everyone does not have an equal ability to contribute to political causes, so those with more ability have more power than those who don't.

And of course there's the fact that in modern democracy your vote is considered a part of your private life. Everyone has the right to keep that basic contribution to civic life out of their personal and business lives. But not for going above and beyond.

So it's really not that he held this political opinion, it is that he used his money to support it, almost certainly in full knowledge that it would be public information that he did so. And now, no matter how many times he says he believes in diversity without really explaining why he supported that cause if so, every gay person he works with knows that he spent $1000 supporting the cause to prevent them from getting married to someone they love. It would be kind of ridiculous if this did not cause friction. It's very difficult to "live and let live" when it's your life people are mucking with.

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

#132

Post by [deleted] »

crassus wrote: post #54
KuraFire wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#133

Post by rogerbinns »

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 root cause is: "According to the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), there are 1,138 statutory provisions in which marital status is a factor in determining benefits, rights, and privileges."

You can be against gay marriage because you don't like and don't want others to do it. But at the government level that also means denying gay couples those 1,138 benefits, rights and privileges. It means making them less equal. People are upset about someone who believes that and donated money to continue it.

Another comment from me with link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7490855

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

#134

Post by stormbrew »

mynameishere wrote: post #119
llamataboot wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a relatively small donation to the KKK or a neo-Nazi party? The issue isn't the size of the donation but taking a public stance in support of bigotry.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/25/politics/supreme-court-preview... President Barack Obama once believed marriage only was for one man and one woman. Was Obama once a supporter of the KKK? Do you people seriously not realize that gay "marriage" has been concocted into a moral imperative only very recently by the media? And that just a few years ago, not only was opposing it not bigotry , but being in support of it was co…

Yeah, it's all the media's fault! There aren't real people affected by these things, obviously. Just cartoon characters in our daily dose of Media Party Propaganda.

Snark aside, this analogy will work when Brendan Eich changes his mind as Obama did. No one is saying he's forever doomed by his position in 2008, but if he still believes it people still have every right to disagree with him as vocally as they want.

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

#135

Post by dllthomas »

desireco42 wrote: post #70
desireco42 wrote: post #37

This is stupid, he might not be the most charismatic leaders but he is genuine leader for organization like Mozilla, and other causes what he supports in his free time, I personally don't care, as it is not relevant.

I want to clarify my comment further, I am not aware that he did anything else but provide donation and I am absulutely for freedom of opinion and speech. To me this is not relevant enough nor as important as Mozilla and it's role in open source.

I am also for freedom of speech, but part of that is freedom to meet speech with speech of my own (and for others to do the same with regard to my speech).

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

#136

Post by wpietri »

mynameishere wrote: post #119
llamataboot wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a relatively small donation to the KKK or a neo-Nazi party? The issue isn't the size of the donation but taking a public stance in support of bigotry.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/25/politics/supreme-court-preview... President Barack Obama once believed marriage only was for one man and one woman. Was Obama once a supporter of the KKK? Do you people seriously not realize that gay "marriage" has been concocted into a moral imperative only very recently by the media? And that just a few years ago, not only was opposing it not bigotry , but being in support of it was co…

Once everybody was in favor of slavery, too. That people now have it right doesn't mean that the previous position was less wrong.

I agree that this change has been unusually swift compared with, say, the shift on interracial marriage from "loony tunes" to unremarkable. But I think that's mainly because there isn't a ton of gay/straight segregation, not like racial segregation. Now that being in the closet isn't nearly as common, it's hard for people to take an abstract anti-gay position without facing the fact that it will hurt somebody's family member.

But the legitimate question for any Mozilla employee or partner is: will I face discrimination from Mozilla's new CEO? Sure, Eich has promised to behave at work, but he hasn't apologized, and hasn't done anything to demonstrate that his opinions have changed.

Personally, Eich's weird avoidance of the topic makes me question his fitness to lead a major non-profit. His handling of this in the media has been less than adroit. CEO is a public-facing role, and so far he doesn't seem to be very good at it.

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

#137

Post by wpietri »

vacri wrote: post #130
davidgerard wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't that.

I think it is just that. I live in Melbourne myself, and while I'm not involved in the gay scene, I'm also not that far removed from it. What you've got here is a bland statement saying "we're boycotting this product" without actually stating any changes made. Does the council even use Mozilla's stuff? If they do, what changes are they making? How effective have previous campaigns of theirs been? (Like I say, I'm adm…

Regarding the "what has he done lately" question, he basically dodged the question in 2012: https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/

As far as I've seen, he's said nothing else on this topic. This could lead any Mozilla employee to wonder: does he still believe gay people don't deserve the same civil rights straight people get?

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

#138

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

gocarsno wrote: post #118
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might not be "against homosexuality", but their reasons are usually still homophobic.

Key word: usually. If there is a reasonable way to reconcile opposition to gay marriage with acceptance of gays, then we ought to give the opponents the benefit of the doubt before ostracizing them. And I'm pretty sure there is such a way.

Essentially, there isn't. There are gays living and loving now, who are being discriminated against now. This effect that the affected are feeling now does not go away by giving anyone a benefit of the doubt. If we need time to sort out how exactly to handle this whole marriage business, it still is inacceptable to just keep discriminating until a consensus has been found. "I accept gays but I still do treat them differently than other people" doeesn't really compute.

It is generally instructive to try and apply the arguments to similar struggles of the past, that tends to make it much much clearer how wrong those arguments are. "If there is a reasonable way to reconcile opposition to mixed marriage with acceptance of black people, then we ought to give the opponents the benefit of the doubt before ostracizing them." How does that read?

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

#139

Post by tzs »

crassus wrote: post #54
KuraFire wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

How do you feel when a 3 year old boy raised by non-adoptive heterosexual parents acts transgendered, regardless of what his parents do to try to get him to be like what people like you think boys are supposed to be like?

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

#140

Post by bzbarsky »

yulaow wrote: post #30
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…

I don't know why but I saw almost in each famous information site ever using only Net Applications to evaluate the market share of browser. Does it have some sort of better precision rate over the others? It seems strange

Net applications is the only major browser market share source that tries to provide _user_ share, not visit share.

Consider three people: one uses browser X and visits Wikipedia twice a day. One uses browser Y and visits three times a day. One uses browser Z and visits once a day. If you count share amongst users, the three shares are equal. If you count share amongst visits to Wikipedia, you get 50% Y, 33% X, 17% Z.

This same problem comes up if you count visits over a variety of sites too. Some biases cancel out (e.g. the sort you'd get if you measured just Huffington Post vs just Fox News), but biases that have to do with some people just browsing _more_ than others in an absolute sense are not.

Of course both numbers, visits and users, are useful information. They just mean different things.

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