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Comment by lawl | Hacker News Reader

I totally see how this could upset people. But I'm not sure how his management qualities are tied to his political opinions.

It's the same with politicans, what the fuck has an affair to do with their political views?

I 100% support gay marriage. I also understand they're upset. But I don't know if this is the right reaction.

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It has to do with our money (via Google ad revenue) going to a corporation headed by someone who cared enough about harming us to spend $1,000 to do so. All I can says is that when I see this from people we otherwise respect, I feel like I'm physically reliving a kick to the ribs from high school.

I'd consider it more if Prop 8 hadn't been overturned. But as it stands, he hasn't used his personal platform to speak on the subject or use Mozilla's resources to do so. If that changes, I'll reevaluate.

Usually I'd say you might be right. But I really have this sweet spot for mozilla. They're an NPO and Firefox 1.0 basically fixed the web.

I don't know, it's hard.

I clearly disagree with his political opinion. But then again, is using chrome any better? Thats Google after all, which I hate to love and love to hate. (And at the end of the day, Google is still just an Ad company!)

I don't know it just sucks. Maybe we can try to seek a dialogue with him?

I mean if he works for Mozilla he can't be that dumb.

His last public comment on this issue was in 2012, where he basically didn't actually comment.

And quite honestly, as a gay man, I would rather use Chrome and have Google profit over my personal data, VS touching Firefox now. The Mozilla Board clearly knew about this issue (it was quite a big deal when the news first broke), and this should have something they considered. If Eich changed his views, then he should have clarified before them formally announcing this. Mozilla making this choice yells to me that they don't give a crap about me and others like me. Even if logically that doesn't make sense, there's this visceral emotional disgust and pain.

I agree it's tough, but who you choose to lead you says a lot about who you want to be. I don't personally want to support a company that wants a dude with the morals of Eich pointing the way.

(I don't care for Larry Page much, either, but there's less active attacking of other folks' rights up in the Googleplex. Google's actions with regard to ads and my data don't really bug me, so that isn't a factor to me.)

"what the fuck has an affair to do with their political views?"

Uh, integrity? If a politician won't keep probably the most solemn vow they've ever made, to the person they were most committed to in their life, in front of all the other people they care about most, why the fuck do you think they'll keep some fucking campaign promise to you and a bunch of other faceless citizens they've never met to make your lives better, instead of taking a backhander from some lobbyist to fuck you all over instead?

And if they're not going to keep their campaign promises (yeah, yeah, no need to point out the incredible naïvety of that particular "if") then why should you let them stay in a position of power that they can use to better themselves at your expense? Boot them out, get the next one in, and keep doing it until they learn the lesson that we fucking demand better.

I don't know what kind of world you want to live in, but one where we've already given up and don't even try to maintain a pretense of holding our politicians to account for their honesty isn't the one I'm going for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_marriage

Just saying... Making public you're in an open relationship will kill your career as a politican just as fast, wanna bet?

Oh, you're almost certainly correct. Absolutely, there's the right thing to do which involves telling the truth but could cause difficulties, and then there's the easy "political" lie you can tell to try to stay popular and keep your career humming along and your salary rolling in.

But no-one said doing the right thing was easy. And you've still totally failed to convince me that I want the second type of person claiming to represent me in government.

That's a terrible example. It would only be a career killer among people with a propensity toward intolerance. And there are plenty of places, some of which are represented by politicians with unconventional relationships, that don't care.

"If a politician won't keep probably the most solemn vow they've ever made, to the person they were most committed to in their life"

Not to stray from the point of the article, but the politician analogy is very appropriate. My wife is a former lobbyist, and I've met and grown to know many prominent politicians from a behind-the-scenes perspective.

The number of arranged marriages, to the point that it's mostly a business relationship, is really common, especially at the national level. Most of the time, the politician's "spouse" is really just their operations manager.

Well this is a bit high and mighty. I think you're ethical standard is a bit naive. As well, marriage being the most "solemn vow," that's sort of a personal thing and subject to many different norms.

Try applying it to yourself.

It may be more emotional than logical, but I personally would find it very difficult to work for someone who would deny me the right to marriage because I'm an atheist.

There is a huge difference between a politician having an affair with someone and a person actively trying to oppress you.

Bad analogy, you don't work for the people you elect, they work for you (in theory).

If the person who had direct control over my career held discriminatory personal beliefs, I'd probably have a problem with it too.

Personally, politicians' affairs only really bother me if they ran on a "family values" platform. Then it's just straight up hypocrisy, especially if they are caught in a gay affair because "family values" is a euphemism for anti-gay.

I think an affair is a little different than trying to affect political change. What if he was a white supremacist? No big deal because if a white supremacists writes qsorts, it's still O(nlogn)? That may seem a bit extreme but it's essentially like this. A CEO is in some a ways political animal and is certainly a representative of an organization. I think political causes are different from affairs. However, he hasn't done anything against the law here but I don't think it is unreasonable for people to want to boycott.

I see a big difference between having an affair, and spending money to whatever the equivalent is (a proposition to end hetero marriages?).

The $1000 was a hateful spend.

I've got no problem with someone campaigning to end hetero marriages. State marriages make no sense to me. The State shouldn't be granting special rights and privileges to people unless there is a good reason, either one of social benefit or of trying to make up for unfair disadvantages that those individuals suffer.

I'm not sure what social benefit marriage is supposed to confer. If it's to do with raising of children, then clearly only those who have a child should be able to get married. If it's to do with committed relationships being good for society, then anyone in any kind of committed relationship (and not necessarily a sexual one) should be able to get married.

If you can't point to any specific benefit that marriage is supposed to bring to society, then it just looks like the state is trying to control peoples sexuality which is weird, and there's no need for it at all.

If you can point to a specific benefit, then that benefit should be the benchmark for who can and who cannot get married.

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