I'd expect the company to be pretty democratic. but every month you hear a story like that.
specially shocking: "What business a not-for-profit company, based primarily on doing open-source, web-based engineering has making physical, commercial products is questionable, but it failed long before that could be considered." ...and that was right after their failed mobile phone line failure!
Especially in hindsight.
That just isn't done elsewhere. You criticize internally and form a front to the outside. Meanwhile, Mozilla employees cry for their own CEO to be fired. That's just insane and wouldn't fly elsewhere.
Mozilla Corporation (of which I was CEO) was the subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation, not vice versa. So in no case were those few Mozilla Foundation employees who tweeted against me, the people who had me as "their own CEO".
Are you stupid, or dishonest? Pick one. Your posts are BS, and crucial logical contradictions are not "nuance".
It's first and foremost an open-source community, and some people are paid by Mozilla Corp. or Mozilla Foundation to dedicate their entire working time to that community. Allowing open dissent has always been one of the community values, so long as it's otherwise respectful.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/part...
At least as of a couple of years ago when I left, there were no internal guidelines above and beyond these.
Socially, of course, you could shoot yourself in the foot just like anywhere else, but we did enjoy a great deal of intellectual freedom and were expected to be vocal if we thought something should be different. I can't possibly view that as a bad thing.
The Eich situation was and still is touchy, and I won't go much deeper into that other than to echo Fabrice's comment that it was originally driven by a handful of Foundation employees that weren't part of his company (Mozilla Corporation is a different corporate entity than Mozilla Foundation) and to add that within Corp there was a diverse range of opinions, both privately and publicly expressed.
As for "wouldn't fly elsewhere," there's never been any particular ethical reason why an employee shouldn't publicly speak their mind short of spilling trade secrets. The reason has always been fear of being fired. Influence via fear has some pretty sharp downsides, and I'm happy to see the current trend of people submitting to it less.
How so? I think most people have gotten the memo that if you want to keep your job you will toe the line and only say things that couldn't possibly offend anyone. Not only did influence via fear win, it has become so entrenched that it isn't even visible anymore.
But hanging internal disagreements out for the competition? Stupid. There's no upsides.
there's never been any particular ethical reason why an employee shouldn't publicly speak their mind short of spilling trade secrets
It's not about ethics. The public perception of a company matters. Hanging internal disagreements out there does not help so you're just hurting yourself.
Here, I totally agree. Mozilla grew a dysfunctional pattern of participants (more likely to be employees than not in my experience, but Mozilla hired most of the active contributors) stabbing projects, individuals, and other sub-groups in the back, under cover of "being open". This was inevitable given the framing in the "open vs. transparent" document:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Working_open#Open_vs._Transparent
Even now, Mozilla punches itself in the face too often, with punchers (and sometimes punchees!) claiming it's all for the best.
Taking care to give colleagues a chance to interact over a nascent or less-than-clear technical controversy, before blogging or tweeting, is not being "closed". It is standard peer review with scalability via layers-of-the-onion socializing combined with the "hermeneutic spiral".
Shooting first, fast, and in public in a large community with competitors and press listening is "open" in a vacuous sense, but it has the downside risks you note.
Maybe it's optimistic confirmation bias, but it sure seems like people are less afraid to speak publicly online.
And the same happens in politics and economy: everybody also thinks that been a citizen makes then elected to say how the economy and the politics should be lead. But their efforts stops there, in talking. No hands on works, neither in politics, neither in the company they are complaining. Mostly because as they don't know the core business that much, they can't get the big picture and start thinking in a binary way.
This has upsides too, I'm fairly confident Mozilla wouldn't be able to comply with a secret court order.
https://brendaneich.com/2014/01/trust-but-verify/
Our plan then (while we were still at Mozilla), and my advice now, is to avoid blind trust. Use systems where you can both trust and verify that your data is not being secretly surveilled.