So I see this type of argument come up a lot and I'm curious about the logic.
Why do you "respect his right" to donate to his cause (prop 8) you don't respect the other person's right to remove him as ceo?
Why do you "respect his right" to donate to his cause (prop 8) you don't respect the other person's right to remove him as ceo?
When you donate to MF, you do that in order to further MF mission. Political activism should not be that[1]. When Eich donated to his cause, he did to organization that had the cause in it's mission; he did not set additional condition (e.g.: fire these people, because I don't like some aspect of their look and they refuse to change).
[1] Now, interesting thing would be to know, how many people didn't donate to MF since they turned into political activist organization.
But since they believe in the foundation mission, despite the actions from the leadership, they looked for an compromise that Eich accepted (apologizing) and then refused to fulfill his end (the real big problem).
At this point there was no more compromise, either Eich is out or the donors are and Mozilla does not have the luxury of losing donors, most of their money may come from Google but for then every penny counts.
This was not political activism by Mozilla, it was choosing between a rock and a hard place, either losing a big chunk of money or loosing the CEO and making some irrelevant people unhappy, the best decision is very clear to me, CEO is easy to find a replacement, money not so much and 99% of the people complaining are not either.
This was political activism by the donors and they are totally within their right to do it with their money.
Even if Google and Microsoft were 99% of their income they can still do not have the luxury of losing that extra 1%, loosing the CEO is still a better option then loosing 1% of their income.
And unless you were donating anything closer then that 1% to MF then you and your opinion are irrelevant for their situation. You may belive they are political all you want, it will not change the fact that they could not afford to loose that donor.
As for the other browsers, they are a joke, Brave, Dolphin and Opera are all just chrome with a different skin, might as well be using chrome then. No thank you.
Any browser that use webkit is ultimately bound by google decision on what they want to do with their engine, just like when google make manifest v3 the only one available next june and break most, if not all, ad blockers. It will affect all those browsers eventually.
Now if any of those browsers want to keep manifest v2 to keep ad blockers working they will have to put the manpower to do it themselves and have to fight Google every step of the way because Google will surely start breaking things they need for the effort, the amount of work will only grow over time until they give up.
Now, it should be purely and absolutely neutral in any other area that is outside the mission.
But at the end of the day I would rather live in a society where we have the ability to cooperate with other people in the pursuit of a good cause, even if we disagree with them about some other cause. Like if you follow the attitude of those donors to its logical extreme where do we end up? We end up with no one cooperating on anything, many projects that could have improved society never happen, many opportunities for people with differing viewpoints to learn about each other's perspectives never occur, and so on.
I think if you take what those donors did to the logical extreme you end up with some form of societal collapse, and history teaches us that what happens after that is a strongman shows up and enforces a far worse type of social order.
I think those donors pulling out of Mozilla hurt the cause of free software, hurt Mozilla, and was one instance in a multi-year process of American political polarization that led to the election of a demagogue like Donald Trump, and is still going on. All because one guy in the C-suite had a bad position an issue that was totally unrelated to Mozilla. This is a very dangerous road for our society to tread.
I actually read a blog post at one point by the donors about their decision - short version is Prop 8 would have prevented them from marrying and one of them was here on a visa which they would have lost. So I really feel for them and understand why they would be angry at Eich. Still think they should have selected a different outlet for it.