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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

#151

Post by bzbarsky »

wpietri wrote: post #136
mynameishere wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 near…

> will I face discrimination from Mozilla's new CEO?

That's a legitimate question, absolutely. The openly gay people who have been working with him over the last several years at Mozilla seem to be saying they haven't faced any discrimination from him in the process. And Mitchell, who has worked with him very closely since 1997 or so, was very surprised when she found out two years ago about the 2008 donation [1]. Which implies that he had kept any thoughts he had on the matter out of his closest professional interactions for those 15 or so years. Make of all that what you will.

[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/26/building-a-global... next to last paragraph.

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

#152

Post by bzbarsky »

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…

> Should we insist that browsers also be built with different languages

In a perfect world, yes. Then you might not get standards written entirely around ease of implementation in C++, leading to crazy behavior just because it happened to be the simple thing to do in that language.

> if not just that Chromium/Chrome are somehow bad for the web?

What's bad for the web is monoculture, because then people start building sites that rely on quirks of that monoculture that are not codified in a standard. And then if something better comes along it's a long uphill battle to get that something better adopted, because it has to duplicate those quirks.

For example, there is no way something like Servo would be able to happen if we had a Blink monoculture on the web, and I seriously doubt that Blink will be able to parallelize to the extent that Servo is planning to and that I think the web needs in the future.

For another example, once you have an engine monoculture, the developers of that engine become gatekeepers for what's possible on the web. We saw that once already with IE. While Google is not likely to shut down development of Chrome in the near future, they have their own priorities (e.g. getting video DRM implemented is a lot more important to them than anti-tracking countermeasures), so unless you think those priorities are perfect for the web you should be against them having a stranglehold over what ends up in the web platform. Just like you should be against any other entity having such a stranglehold. It was bad when Microsoft was there, it would be bad if Google were there, and it would also be bad if Mozilla were there.

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

#153

Post by xj9 »

rayiner wrote: post #124
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…

As a conservativeish person on HN, I have to say that pushing to deny a legal arrangement to gay couples is different than being skeptical about their impact on society. Rant: Also, I'm irritated that this is the "conservative" position. Our culture is doing away with the institution of marriage, and its to the detriment of our children and our families. In the face of that, conservatives should not be in the busines…

I'm probably the furthest thing from conservative (Anarchist), but I appreciate your view on families. I was raised in a very conservative christian home and I really believe in the importance of family; it doesn't really matter to me how a family is organised, but having one (in whatever form) is a good and beautiful thing.

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

#154

Post by wpietri »

bzbarsky wrote: post #149
wpietri wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 employ…

I think that with 600+ employees, there are going to be an awful lot of employees who are not going to be comfortable saying, "Hey, boss's boss's boss's boss: why did you put your money down with the anti-gay bigots?"

And I don't know about you, but if I were a) afraid to ask, or b) didn't get a satisfactory answer, I wouldn't be posting about it on Twitter. Because of that great-great-grandboss thing.

I have no idea what's going on in Eich's head, but I am saying that people working for him could be reasonably concerned.

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

#155

Post by blisterpeanuts »

arrrg wrote: post #146
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, the purpose of Prop 8 was to insert the following into the state constitution: "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California"

It doesn't ban gay marriage. It does explicitly assert that only traditional marriage is legally recognized.

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

#156

Post by desireco42 »

wpietri wrote: post #145
desireco42 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is a guy who created javascript singlehandedly that powers the web working to take away your freedom :)

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

#157

Post by bzbarsky »

wpietri wrote: post #154
bzbarsky wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 employ…

I think that with 600+ employees, there are going to be an awful lot of employees who are not going to be comfortable saying, "Hey, boss's boss's boss's boss: why did you put your money down with the anti-gay bigots?" And I don't know about you, but if I were a) afraid to ask, or b) didn't get a satisfactory answer, I wouldn't be posting about it on Twitter. Because of that great-great-grandboss thing. I have no idea…

True, but my point is that the people who have actually been working for him for many years now have no negative experiences along these lines to report that I've seen. And that if you're worried about how he'll treat people working for him, the best thing to do is to ask the people who have been working for him. It's not like he's a new hire into the organization or something; there are lots of people around who have been interacting with him for a long time.

I agree that if you had no other source of information than the existence of the donation, that would certainly raise the chances of there being problems in other aspects of interacting with the man, of course. That's obvious. I'm just saying that if there are non-proxy sources of information available, it's better to use those than to use proxy sources that rely on good but imperfect correlations. (The correlation in this case being "someone who strongly supported Proposition 8 is also a problem to work with if you're gay". Reasonably good correlation, I expect, but not perfect.)

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

#158

Post by courtf »

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…

Just to nitpick a bit, voter turnout was nowhere near 100% in 2008, so no, we can't say that 52% of Californians were toxic in 2008 (not counting LA obviously). The types of donations that went into the pro Prop 8 campaign helped fuel a marketing effort intended to stir up emotions among the anti-gay crowd. That was pretty toxic.

The idea of explicitly enshrining our collective dislike of gay people is also just pretty toxic all by itself, naturally, but that's a slightly different tack.

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

#159

Post by icebraining »

foolinaround wrote: post #110
jbeja wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>he doesn't believe in equality what you mean is "he does'nt believe in the definition of equality as you believe it to be". I believe that he should be penalized if he has demonstrated any hatred towards people in the workplace. I believe that a man is free to exercise his right to free speech in his private life, and this is what I deem it to be. There is a reasonable fear that the gay employees may find themselves…

Would you really extend this to any opinion one might have? Suppose a large percentage of women in your state thought men were unfit to vote. Supposed they were enough to legally remove men's right to vote. Now suppose a supporter of that position was hired as your boss. Would you really be OK with that?

Feel free to picture more repugnant positions. Would you really not draw the line anywhere? If you would, then you're not really any different than people around here, you just disagree where you draw the line. And frankly, I find it very hard to believe that someone wouldn't.

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

#160

Post by slantyyz »

KuraFire wrote: post #105
mjn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being a libertarian is a very different thing from donating $1000 to an anti-equal rights campaign. If you mean that people should be able to think whatever thoughts they want without me conducting paparazzi-style investigations to find out what they think, sure: I'm not advocating a campaign to find everyone who owns a copy of F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom and ostracize them (in fact, I own one!). But how about don…

Like I said in my original comment: there is a crucial difference between thinking harmful things, and acting on them. Actions matter. Thoughts that you keep to yourself? I don't care. Go nuts with that. (also I'm not a fan of the libertarianism in tech/SV, but that's a whole different discussion)

>> Actions matter. Thoughts that you keep to yourself? I don't care. Go nuts with that.

If only life were so simple.

Bigots who keep their thoughts to themselves (and there are plenty of them in C-level positions) often get away with discriminatory actions with weasely excuses like "they're not a fit for that position" and "they're not quite ready for that position".

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