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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

#141

Post by DenisM »

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…

The logic of your post can just as well be used to justify support of slavery (except the last paragraph).

That's some suspect logic right there.

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

#142

Post by stephenhuey »

Encosia wrote: post #48
dewitt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Net Applications numbers are far more accurate than the 3 in the table above." This strikes me as curious, as I don't know of any popular websites who would agree with that statement, since their own traffic more closely matches that of the wikipedia numbers. Can you explain why you'd make that claim?

Well, just one data point, but I have a consumer-facing site that sees a few hundred thousand visitors a month with only 6.1% of those coming from Firefox in the last month. On the flip side, Chrome usage dominates among visitors on my development-focused blog at 61.7% and IE trails Firefox (22.2%) at 9.5%.

And our consumer-facing site has 46% IE users due to the healthcare world hanging onto that browser. Chrome has 23% and Safari and Firefox are neck and neck in the teens.

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

#143

Post by bzbarsky »

dewitt wrote: post #35
JohnTHaller wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Net Applications numbers are far more accurate than the 3 in the table above.

"Net Applications numbers are far more accurate than the 3 in the table above." This strikes me as curious, as I don't know of any popular websites who would agree with that statement, since their own traffic more closely matches that of the wikipedia numbers. Can you explain why you'd make that claim?

The sites are measuring visits. That's what StatCounter measures too.

On the other hand, Net Applications attempts to measure _users_. This is a very different number from visits; it turns out that Chrome users visit more web pages on average than IE users (in addition to a variety of other demographic differences between the two groups), with Firefox users somewhere in the middle. See my example at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7490952 for a simple rundown of how the numbers can be very different depending on what you're measuring, even if we assume perfect measurement.

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

#144

Post by wpietri »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #88
crassus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Our culture is in middle of making unprecedented changes to a core social institution that goes back into prehistory. Did you trade some goats for your wife? If not, then gee, I guess we've already made unprecedented changes to a core social institution.

Yeah. A friend who has a PhD in a relevant topic did a great presentation on the phrase "biblical marriage". I forget all the permutations, but aside from the traditional man+wife, there was man+slave, man+wife+slave, man+dead brother's wife, and a few others. Basically, the people talking about biblical marriage were immensely selective in their interpretation of the bible, finding in it the exact prejudices they brought to it.

And the whole argument about tradition, although undoubtedly interesting to some, is irrelevant as far as civil marriage goes. In the recent decision on gay marriage in Michigan, the judge made it clear that "that's how we've always done it" isn't sufficient justification for a law. The state has to have some rational purpose. And multiple courts, including the one that overturned Prop 8, have concluded that the straights-only marriage laws have no rational purpose.

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

#145

Post by wpietri »

desireco42 wrote: post #112
jbeja wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"there is life beyond that", yeah and i would love to live it with the same rights as you. Cheers

and this is excellent example of tolerance you desire :)

That is horseshit. When somebody works to take away your civil rights, a desire for tolerance does not require you to politely say, "Oh, gosh, you go on ahead and oppress us then." An open mind isn't an empty mind.

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

#146

Post by arrrg »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #73
andrewflnr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people, including AFAICT a large chunk if not a majority if the tech community, consider same-sex marriage to be a human rights issue. To them, yes, it would be better if he had fought Prop 8, assuming they didn't just take it for granted.

Suppose he didn't oppose same-sex marriage per se, but opposed the way it was being implemented in California. Would he still be anti "human rights"? These issues are complex and people's beliefs and opinions can't always be distilled down to some simple, binary good/bad bit. I'm opposed to mandatory integration of public schools and mandatory racial-based quota systems. Does that make me a racist? Some would say so,…

Then I guess we are lucky to know exactly what Prop 8 stood for and we also know he donated a substantial amount of money to it.

Prop 8 was about specifically banning gay marriage. A blanket ban. It wasn’t about changing the implementation or any such nonsense. Your argument makes no sense in light of that.

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

#147

Post by wpietri »

grannyg00se wrote: post #95
jbeja wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the state that he doesn't believe in equality is enough for me.

The marriage issue is complicated by many factors, one of which is religion. It doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't believe in equality.

If you work to strip civil rights from a group of people, you pretty much have to not believe in their equality in any meaningful sense.

Sure, he might "believe in" their equality in the same way that most people "believe in" getting enough niacin. That is: they might state that belief, but they will never act for it and will often act against it.

And I'd add that if Eich believes in their equality and now regrets working against it, he could just say so. That he has energetically dodged the issue when it is of obvious concern to the people he can now fire says something on its own.

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

#148

Post by magicalist »

pekk wrote: post #122
magicalist wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it such a horrible idea to fork and contribute to blink? Just thinking out loud A fairly bad one, yes. There would be virtually no benefit to doing this, and a serious detriment to web browser diversity (which would likely be a detriment to the health of the web as a developing ecosystem). > It would be such a shame not to see it around 5 years from now They still have plenty of revenue, and the amount still kee…

What is unhealthy about shared components? Should we insist that browsers also be built with different languages or compilers or it is unhealthy? We are not talking about a proprietary component here. There may be reasons to prefer Firefox not to use blink, but "detriment to the health of the web" is a really vague and pointless argument. What do you really mean by that, if not just that Chromium/Chrome are somehow b…

> There may be reasons to prefer Firefox not to use blink, but "detriment to the health of the web" is a really vague and pointless argument. What do you really mean by that, if not just that Chromium/Chrome are somehow bad for the web?

Er, huh? I don't think my phrasing was that confusing: I said that the loss of diversity in implementations would likely lead to a loss to the future development of the web. Multiple implementations of a spec ensure that the spec matches reality and often make for better specs, as feedback from implementations over very different foundations bring out fundamental architectural and performance issues that may not have been obvious otherwise (e.g. you write a feature so that it's efficient on platform X, it means that in 5 years someone implementing a new browser will have to write it very much like X to get decent performance).

This is actually enshrined in the W3C technical report development process: for a specification to become a Proposed Recommendation, "the Working Group should be able to demonstrate two interoperable implementations of each feature"[1].

There were lots of arguments about this when Opera stopped developing Presto to move to Webkit. I think Chromium/Chrome have been, on the whole, great for the web.

[1] http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/tr#cfr

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

#149

Post by bzbarsky »

wpietri wrote: post #137
vacri wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You mean any Mozilla employee who's never actually talked to Brendan, right? The people who have interacted with him have this to say:

https://twitter.com/Jason_Duell/status/449276922359320576

http://subfictional.com/2014/03/24/on-brendan-eich-as-ceo-of...

(And I saw a few more along those lines on twitter, but trying to search twitter on this topic right now is a bit difficult.)

Oddly enough, the only Mozilla employees I've seen calling for Brendan to step down are employees of the Foundation, not of the Corporation, and as far as I can tell don't deal with him on a regular basis, if at all.

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

#150

Post by Zigurd »

grannyg00se wrote: post #93
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow, I doubt a CEO who is against same-sex marriage will be terribly friendly to LGBT employees.

A lot of people are against same sex marriage for various reasons but aren't necessarily against homosexuality or LGBT. More specifically, Brendan has publicly indicated that he intends to actively pursue equality throughout the organization[1]. So people seem to be calling him a liar with no evidence. And they're also bullying him solely based on his beliefs, rather than his actions. [1] https://brendaneich.com/2014…

That's a bit too analogous to "not being against" black people but being against interracial marriage.
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