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Because they are not necessarily making things better, they are making things worse (and "good intentions" are no excuse here).
In my view, discriminating against someone professionally (and publicly dragging their convictions through the mud) because of privately held political/religious opinions is not acceptable behavior, full stop.
I would have some understanding if Eich had been nasty with coworkers, or if his convictions had affected his work. But there were no accusations of this.
Lets just flip the thing a bit to make my point clearer:
If Eich had been discovered to be (secretly) a stout, godless atheist (sponsoring anti-religious campaigns)-- do you think the same kind of smear campaign/discrimination/career-killing would have been adequate?
Why don't we consider trying to pass laws that hurt your coworkers to qualify as "being nasty with coworkers"?
Because "advocating for laws that potentially negatively affect coworkers" and "actually being nasty with coworkers" is a difference in proportion of at least 100000 (maybe slightly less if your advocacy effects a lot of votes).
By cancel-campaigning against Eich you basically
1) Discriminate against someone for a political view they held (5 years ago!)
2) Suffocate honest discussion/debate about any affected topic
3) Directly promote creation of cultural echo chambers
You also make the workplace an observably more hostile place for anyone that leans more on Eichs side on the topic.
On the other hand, what does the whole thing actually achieve? I don't even see accusations of anyone actually being affected, in the workplace, by Eichs views (and that would be the bare minimum to demonstrate actual harm).
You don't think it creates a hostile place for workers when their CEO is trying to deny them basic right?
No. My argument is that "being in favor of prop 8" is a defendable PoV.
Firing someone for political/religious views much less so.
> You don't think it creates a hostile place for workers when their CEO is trying to deny them basic right?
1) No. Calling state sanctioned marriage a "basic right" is IMO a stretch in the first place, but lets put that aside: Say Eich had voted for a proposition that was actually in favor of taking basic rights, like raising voting age to 21. Would that have been a reason to cancel his career five years later? Don't think so; does not affect work at all. Its your CEO, not your drinking buddy, and even in drinking buddies someone with conflicting or opposite political views can make for more interesting discussion; I see no appeal in spending life in an echo chamber.
2) It was not a cancel campaign championed by people actually affected, but "white knighting" instead (people very publicly advocating for issues that don't affect them, frequently without even any feedback or involvement from the actual victims). Might be wrong here and dont know everything about everyone involved, but thats what it looks like to me (judging mainly from John Lilly).
3) Running a cancel campaign like this is not gonna make everyone feel safe. People are just gonna try very hard to never be in the "outgroup" instead, with all the detestable social maneuvring that brings. No thanks. Would rather face honest bigotry than fake smiles, a bunch of lies and raw contempt behind the back.
Why is it OK for Eich to try to prevent certain people from getting married, but it's not OK for Eich's employees to try to prevent him from having a certain job? Please explain using small words so I can understand the difference.
One common theme I’ve noticed among all the people arguing with me here is that you’re all steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the part where he was the CEO. You’re here comparing him to one random person. I have other replies trying to paint me as inconsistent because I’m not trying to get my bigoted coworkers fired or doing something about random bigots in the community. There’s a big difference when a person is in a leadership role. I’m pretty sure you’re all smart enough to understand that, so I can only assume that you’re avoiding that understanding because it would fatally undermine your argument.
If someone steadfastly refuses to stop bringing hate to work, or if they do something physically violent or verbally abusive, you have to fire them, but if they deviate only a little bit, they deserve to face pressure and criticism before getting kicked out - or maybe even a chance to defend themselves, or come to terms with the other side.
How many people lose their jobs every day in this country because they were slightly less than 100% obsequious to a customer or to their boss? And we just shrug. But one CEO gets fired because he doesn’t have the confidence of his workers and you lose your minds. Why are people so sympathetic to rich people who suffer a small setback? It’s bizarre.
That’s shameful enough – and completely discredits his purported religious beliefs – but it’s especially bad for an officer of a public company because it creates a hostile working environment. If you’re gay, working for a homophobe means that you have to view any decisions he makes through the lens of whether he thinks your life should be illegal. Even if you only care about the business, anyone with a stake still needs to worry about liability from creating a strong argument for a lawsuit arguing that a negative personnel decision wasn’t based on the stated rationale.
Just like it would be silly for someone to blame you for being on this website founded by someone who has some questionable views, if you go looking. Or, for using this very much American website, an America that's becoming increasingly hostile. Is your participation here an implicit agreement with the current administration?
Perhaps not before, but now that you've read this comment one could argue your continued participation makes you complicit.
You show me someone's views and associations and I can make them a devil.
IMHO the issue is the collapse of any broadly-shared moral and ethical framework. I don't know how you resolve that, except perhaps by trying to peacefully partition society.
Of course, for this particular example this is actually a good thing. It would be even better if there was broad agreement that homosexuality wasn't immoral, but having a substantial number of people on that side is better than having almost none.
I think the other comment misattributes the problem. The problem isn't the loss of the old broadly shared morality, the problem is that we haven't yet managed to coalesce around a new and better one.
Are you referring to the private one time donation of a thousand dollars as activism?
The bill also won the popular election. So it wasn’t a fringe view.
Meanwhile work chats in big tech in 2014 were open season for literal political organizing and activism.
People around the world have very different views on social issues - tech workers just know they aren’t supposed to voice them publicly in the US, or that the law can be more open than their personal views. And this isn’t just 2012, check in on blind.
Tolerance is a good policy on this topic, but compromise doesn’t work if you are then going to sniff out private mental states of your coworkers.
And yeah, you're not supposed to voice them. That's not some sort of gotcha, that's common sense. If you think some of your coworkers are lesser, then you'd better keep that shit under your hat, or leave. You cannot expect to make those views public and then stick around like everything's still fine.
Once again, Brendan Eich did not publicly advocate - journalists searched through small donations.
> If you think some of your coworkers are lesser,
Im sure all of my coworkers hold religious, ethnic, cultural, and gender biases of many kinds. Because they are people. I hope we can minimize these and treat each other with care and respect, and I would not tolerate mistreatment.
Does helping to pass laws to formalize certain people as legally less-than qualify as "mistreatment"? If not, why not?
1) if you knew a coworker supported this bill you would want them fired,
(I’ve said all I can here.)
2) the harm was when he gave $1000 which is when a bias because mistreatment
I don’t know what to say to that one.
Eich's donation was well-known. The lists are public. Lots of Mozilla folks were aware and unimpressed, but they tolerated it because Eich (CTO) was a respected member of the corp with a long history of technical excellence. As well as no workplace hostility etc.
Then Eich was to be promoted to CEO, which is a nontechnical job that involves being the public face of the corporation and speaking on behalf of all employees.
A substantial portion of Mozilla employees felt that this new expanded role would not be appropriate for Eich or anyone who had expressed hostility to a marginalized group, that Eich did not represent the values of Mozilla, and that they did not want to promote him or to be led by him.
So they created an internal stir which gathered a lot of internal support, bled into public forums, and led Eich to back out of the CEO role. He probably could have gone back to CTO, but he decided to resign from the organization instead.
What happened after I left is not in any way on me. I'm not a slave, serf, indentured servant, or lifelong mandatory employee-subject of Mozilla, and I thank God every day for this.
The boneheaded move was elevating you in the first place. Not that you didn't deserve it or were not capable! Just that it was doomed to create extreme conflict with a large portion of the Mozilla community, which has always had a much broader mission than "simple" excellence.
There's a good argument that this breadth often manifests as a lack of focus, and that anything other than excellence should be secondary at best. But that's not how Mozilla was built or staffed or marketed.
And here we are.
I wish it was otherwise -- and of course I agree that it is absolutely not on you -- but I do sometimes wonder what Mozilla would be like today if not for that Prop 8 donation.
The breadth or lack of focus you describe is a bug, not a feature.
But Mozilla became something else, and staffed itself accordingly, and marketed itself accordingly. The culture evolved to be broad and inclusive.
Some people would argue (as I think you have) that broad inclusivity is, at best, a distraction from technical excellence.
Others would say that inclusivity / diversity is a strength, and Mozilla is an experiment in demonstrating that.
I don't think we can draw any conclusions on that argument from the Mozilla example either way, honestly.
And of course I don't know how you viewed the Org when you left -- did it need a recalibration toward excellence with the accepted risk of alienating 30% of the staff and volunteers? Or did it just need better leadership to get more focused results out of the existing team?
I don't know, and I'm sure you won't want to say! But clearly what has happened in the last ten years has been unproductive.
I'm sure you'd have done a better job at Mozilla than the MOFO BOD has. And I suspect you'd have been able to do a much better job with Mozilla's trust fund disbursement resources, while avoiding the (frankly, obvious) mistakes made at Brave.
No disrespect intended. Seeking revenue is hard, and "obvious" from the outside doesn't map precisely to "not even worth a try" on the inside. I also wonder if the outside view was wrong, and that if you had pushed through the initial negativity, whether people would have acclimated to the novel revenue models, and you could pour more resources into the technology. People put up with worse in other browsers.
Anyway -- I appreciate your conversation here and all of your years at Mozilla. I hope something sustainable and good can come from Brave. I remain a Firefox user, pending further developments. :)
The "NGO" die was cast in 2003 when we spun out of AOL as a 501c3. I didn't get a say in that decision. It went poorly after the big Google default search revenue share turned on and the IRS reneged on their promise that we could take the $$$ tax-free as "sponsorship income".
This led to a battle where we ended up paying some back taxes, but contrary to the San Jose IRS agent's position, we did not have to go "be like Opera" and drop the 501c3. We rather used the typical (hospitals, universities, sports teams do it) non-profit parent of taxable for-profit subsidiary structure, with a trademark license fee kicked up to the parent.
The IRS rules governing nonprofits still required the Mozilla Foundation to beg big to go big: the parent had to go find big grants from Soros, Ford, Knight, MacArthur, and give smaller grants to many. This put it in the lefties-only-no-righty-Irish-need-apply revolving-door personnel sector of NGOs and nonprofits (too many glowies there for me, too). Which meant I had a hostile MoFo over my head the minute I got CEO appointment from the MoCo board.
I think looking back that the nonprofit spinout from AOL was a mistake. It didn't focus on either technical excellence or pure do-gooding. It was an uneasy mix of both, neither fish nor fowl.
Of course I can't comment on anything about my exit, for reasons that only the most loopy HN h8ers still can't figure out.
If I may impose further: Can you opine on (or link to something intelligent which you agree with) the health of the browser engine ecosystem?
Obviously you've chosen Chromium/Blink, which I assume was for practical reasons in a fledgling startup. I.e. the relative simplicity of embedding vs Gecko, the at-the-time performance superiority, confidence in upstream maintenance, etc.
I was surprised initially, because obviously you knew Gecko better than anyone. You also know the arguments against a browser engine monoculture.
I'm coming around to the idea that (Blink has won, and) that's not so bad. Because there are so many browsers embedding Blink now (and V8, but no one complains about that!) ... some of which have serious development teams behind them. I remain concerned about a single steward of web standards, but I think that Blink is really good and I hope that there are enough other browsers that rely on it, so if Google were to push Blink in a direction that didn't match the broader goals of the web, that the individual browser teams could fork and maintain it cooperatively.
Is this a pipe dream? Am I bargaining with the reaper?
I've been a Firefox user since before Firefox was Firefox, and Mozilla and Netscape before that. I think I'm abandoning my opinion on the importance of browser engine diversity. Gecko-Quantum has some advantages still, but they're becoming less important -- and more relevantly, they might not matter if Firefox grows increasingly obscure.
(FWIW, every time I try Brave, I bounce off because of the way sidebar/vertical tabs are handled. I need layout density and memory-efficiency. It's been a while though, so I will try again.)
"If there's no solution, there's no problem." - James Burnham, IIRC (sounds cruel but it's a brutally pragmatic, no-moralizing, epigram about where to focus strategic attention)
https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/future-internet-architecture-cl...
New architectures will come. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39534595
> the harm was when he gave $1000 which is when a bias because mistreatment
Sorry, I'm having a lot of trouble understanding what the second half of this is supposed to mean. The harm is taking a position opposed to basic rights of people who work for you and who use your product, and backing that up with cash.
I really doubt all of you saying that this isn't a big deal would be so blase about it if the CEO of your company donated a thousand bucks to a cause that considers you to be sub-human. But you're probably not the target of this sort of thing so you don't care.
Please explain when Brendan Eich said anything about anyone being subhuman.
> The harm is taking a position opposed to basic rights of people who work for you
Did you read my comments? The bill won the election. People you work with supported it.
> you're probably not the target of this sort of thing so you don't care.
Don’t make personal accusations, you know nothing about me.
Prop 8 says gay people don’t deserve the same rights as straight people.
> Did you read my comments? The bill won the election. People you work with supported it.
Ok... and?
What are you going to do about all these bigoted people in your community who view other people as subhuman?
> gay people don’t deserve the same rights as straight people.
People who are not US citizens do not have a right to vote or even a right to residency. Does that mean they are sub human? I am not welcome at a women’s shelter. Is it because I’m subhuman? I cannot claim many tax benefits that are available to others with different choices and identities, etc.
Did Brendan Eich indicate he does not support the gay community? Yes. Can you be mad about that? Sure. Did he say anyone was subhuman? No.
Not much. What’s your point?
Uh, yes? If activism does not include political donations, then nothing is activism.
The theory has a certain chaotic pizzazz but I'm not sure I could convince anyone.
The key is tolerance. Eich's views while distasteful and probably wrong could be tolerated.
At the time, no one thought that getting rid of the homophobe would mean there wouldn't be a browser at all. We (the world) got rid of the homophobe, because homophobes are rightfully quite bad, and we didn't think that would stop there from also being a browser.
or like they say "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"
Remember, canceling is a tool. People who want to conceal their real goals use this tool to slander and eliminate their enemies, and that's why we need to end it. But these people don't actually care about whatever values cancel culture purports to uphold - they are just savvy sociopaths. Ultimately these sociopaths all try to do the same thing, which is promote some kind of deception, fraud or graft.
I think Eich was one of the last guys at Mozilla who was dedicated to building a compelling rival to Chrome and preserving a free and open web. And I think these things have not been the mission of Mozilla for a long time. I think that Mozilla is an arm of Google, to know that, all you need to do is follow the money.
Mozilla has been marching to the beat of Google's drum for many years, and when it made sense for Google to claim it wasn't a monopoly, they ordered Mozilla to behave a certain way. Now that President Trump has sued Google, President Biden has won the case, and it's back on Trump to determine the sentencing as Pichai kisses the ring, there is too much power arrayed against Google and they have stopped trying to maintain the lie that they are innocent.
So now Google is deploying new orders to their bootlickers. We will see a variety of changes at Mozilla now that the mask is off.
We should not forget that the prime evil here is the convicted criminal enterprise that is Google.