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Comment by kovac | Hacker News Reader

Can't speak for others but I stopped using Firefox for the following reasons, pretty much in the order of priority.

1. When I learnt about the corporate structure at Mozilla. I simply don't drust any large corporation with matters related to privacy.

2. What happened with Brendan Eich. That just wasn't cool. What someone does in his personal time is non of my business. Virtue signalling of any sort, to me, is a hallmark of the wrong crowd in power. As far as I could see, Eich refused to bend the knee which is an admirable quality considering the fact that internet privacy is an uphill battle against giants.

3. Lack of innovation and getting in bed with Google. If Firefox needed money, all they had to do was just ask. How can they, when they have to pay a CEO millions of dollars.

Now I'm primarily using Vivaldi. Sometimes Brave. I'd support a small, talented and a focused team anyday.

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He donated money to a political cause directly against some of his employees, got called out on it and refused to compromise. I'm sure those are admirable characteristics in some situations, as the CEO of an organisation like Mozilla they're suicidal. He doesn't seem to get that even to this day, based on some tweets linked to in this chat and in the article.

"Don't be an asshole" is a pretty good philosophy if you're going to be a ceo of an org like mozilla, and donating to an organisation which seeks to deprive a subset of your employees of their rights then refusing to compromise on it sounds pretty assholic to me. I know in the US it's all unlimited free speech, "but I have conservative views" etc etc, but that has real consequences in the same way that going up to a homosexual person in the street and telling them that you don't think they should be allowed to get married would have consequences - maybe they punch you, maybe they shrink off and feel terrible.

The question is whether there was any prejudice or he mistreated his employees based on their sexuality. If did he absolutely should have been fired and fired sooner. If he didn't, he seems to have kept his personal beliefs out of his professional life which is also an admirable quality. In that case, he was judged and forced to resign purely based on what he did in his own time with his own money. If we, for a moment, set aside the right/wrong of his action of donating money for a political course, then this entire saga was based on politics that is completely unrelated to Firefox. That's too much politics for a browser vendor and it kind of sets the tone as to how things at Mozilla are going to be.

Yeah, it might be too much politics, and yeah, it sets the tone...but he was the CEO! This culture at least partially came from him as well - give me an example of a CEO with no impact on company culture.

The point is not that he mistreated them, or that making a political donation was wrong, the point is he made a personal decision which is unstandably engraging to his employees affected by that decision. They called him out and he failed to come up with any reasonable remedy.

If you had to choose between a great open source browser run by a troubled organisation and a crappy browser run by a great organisation what would you choose? What is best for the users?

Foss folks and hackers would probably choose the latter, where as we've seen with all the FANNGS the world would choose the first.

That's not a choice we can make, the only choice here is the one Brendan Eich made when confronted with the consequences of his actions.

Thank you for shedding the light on this part. I didn't know it before! (even though it doesn't look like news)

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