Three Mozilla Board Members Resign over Choice of New CEO
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
Even if the appointment were simply a majority of the board, that in and of itself raises bizarre questions. Why is a CEO appointed only on a 3-3 (or 4-2) vote? Usually you would want unanimity in important things like this.
This certainly opens up a lot of questions.
I'm going to be simultaneously cynical and optimistic here, but the story so far appears to be based on anonymous hearsay. Eich's appointment could perhaps be a smaller part of a big shakeup at Mozilla, board and all, that isn't predicated entirely on Eich.
Alternatively, and perhaps most realistically, the board members who voted for Eich may not have considered it a problem until they saw the backlash, both internally and externally. Both people and organizations alike can backtrack and develop new ideals based upon the reactions to their actions.
While we're doing hearsay though, I've heard no new CTO is on the cards which strikes me as odd.
Edit: I don't know how legit this is, but I just saw this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TruthTellerMoz1/status/44967336620801228...
Either way, the numbers don't quite add up. If there were only 5 board members, and only 2 of them wanted Eich, how did he get chosen? And even if Katherina was already on the board, that's still 3 vs 3.
Mozilla is an incredible force for good. Hope they get through this quickly and get back making the web better.
Archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20140322233528/http://www.mozill...
Edit: clarity.
(The whole "donate to prop 8" thing is a red herring; Mozilla needs someone who is excellent at the things Mozilla most needs (hire for strength) vs. the absence of any weaknesses (politically incorrect donations); it's possible Eich doesn't have the right strengths.)
Is Mozilla not capable of attracting really top-tier people for senior leadership due to lack of an equity upside, or culture, or something else? I realize the pool is pretty small, but there are people with either mobile or security leadership experience who would probably take the job.
On mobile, I think there's a relative handful of candidates, and they're either gainfully employed or burned out. I've been in the mobile world for a decade and the people I know are jumping into "miscellaneous devices with a cellular connection" at quite a rate. My contention is Mozilla are too conservative, and can't accept the smartphone war is lost already. There are related markets for which their system could work very well though, such as e-readers.
"Subpar"?
I've used FF on my Android phone for quite a while, and find it nicer than chrome...
[I still try chrome occasionally, "just in case", but always end up ditching it and sticking with FF.]
"Firefox is the world’s second-most-popular Web browser on personal computers, with 18% market share, according to Net Applications, a web-analytics consulting firm. That trails Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with 58% share, and just ahead of Google’s Chrome, with 17% share."
Here's what I found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers:
Chrome IE Firefox Safari
StatCounter 46.60% 24.64% 20.37% 5.06%
W3Counter 34.1% 20.3% 18.3% 17.8%
Wikimedia 42.69% 18.02% 15.28% 6.06%
And the interesting browser growth today, of course, is all mobile. (So those outgoing board members were right in several ways.)
Consider three people: one uses browser X and visits Wikipedia twice a day. One uses browser Y and visits three times a day. One uses browser Z and visits once a day. If you count share amongst users, the three shares are equal. If you count share amongst visits to Wikipedia, you get 50% Y, 33% X, 17% Z.
This same problem comes up if you count visits over a variety of sites too. Some biases cancel out (e.g. the sort you'd get if you measured just Huffington Post vs just Fox News), but biases that have to do with some people just browsing _more_ than others in an absolute sense are not.
Of course both numbers, visits and users, are useful information. They just mean different things.
This strikes me as curious, as I don't know of any popular websites who would agree with that statement, since their own traffic more closely matches that of the wikipedia numbers.
Can you explain why you'd make that claim?
Whether that makes them more accurate? I really don’t know. But I could very well imagine that for those tracking firms their sample is heavily US and Europe biased (where different browsers as in the rest of the world might dominate), so doing some weighing may increase their accuracy. Or not. I really don’t know.
Some light googling does reveal that this is a highly contentious topic with people from all sides screaming at each other about questions of methodology. Do with that info what you will.
On the flip side, Chrome usage dominates among visitors on my development-focused blog at 61.7% and IE trails Firefox (22.2%) at 9.5%.
On the other hand, Net Applications attempts to measure _users_. This is a very different number from visits; it turns out that Chrome users visit more web pages on average than IE users (in addition to a variety of other demographic differences between the two groups), with Firefox users somewhere in the middle. See my example at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7490952 for a simple rundown of how the numbers can be very different depending on what you're measuring, even if we assume perfect measurement.
And I say this as someone with my own large tech-focused site (over 2m visitors a month) which sees about a 40-34-17-3 split for Chrome-Firefox-IE-Opera.
There's been some progress, though, as at least we have fewer clueless people citing W3Schools' stats these days.
Overall I would argue that the statement in the article, while accurate, can be misleading. It should probably include mobile usage numbers (though the sentence you quoted makes clear that they don’t – and on mobile phones Firefox isn’t much of a player anyway) and maybe note that market share measurement of browsers can be unreliable.
Still, while I know it's not good to say "data" and "gut feel" in the same sentence, I just have a very hard time believing that IE usage is trending upward while Chrome is trending down. It just doesn't add up.
Total suppositions with no data. Not an argument, just thinking aloud.
Sidebar: I find IE 11 pretty usable these days -- give it a try if you're open minded. You might be surprised =)
He invented Javascript in 1995, co-founded Mozilla, and helped start Firefox. It seems to me he's very well qualified from a historical as well as technical perspective.
Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced, considering that his technical contributions helped pave the way for mobile web apps.
The article suggests that the unhappiness about Eich's appointment stems from his support in 2008 for California's Proposition 8, which was an anti-gay marriage law that passed but ultimately was overturned by the Supreme Court.
I don't wish to incite a flame war over this or start a debate over gay/same sex marriage; I merely question why his views on this particular issue make the man unfit for the job. Would it be better if he had contributed money to fight Prop 8? I find this kind of litmus test highly disturbing.
> Questions about his mobile expertise seem misplaced,
> considering that his technical contributions helped
> pave the way for mobile web apps.
>The first HTML touch api came from apple...
Mozilla is an organization that prides itself on openness and equality, on being inclusive as an organization and a culture. This is reflected in its products, in many different ways—all of them good, generally speaking.
The CEO is the figurehead of a company or organization; they have to represent the company, establish its culture, define its vision, and so forth and so forth.
Having a CEO who has a history of donating to an anti-equality campaign, an act that very strongly suggests having an unequal view of certain groups of people (LGBTQ folks in this case), does not mesh with an organization that prides itself on equality (among other things). They are pretty mutually exclusive.
It was already a conflict with Eich as CTO, but at least in that position he had no say over the company culture or its policies when it comes to people, just technology. As CEO, all that changed.
Additionally, by making a donation to (what is essentially) a campaign of hatred (and FUD), he took it WAY beyond a personal belief or view. Expressing your views in public or making a donation that way is an act, not merely "holding an opinion", and actions matter. His action in the form of the donation harmed the lives of thousands of people, with no justifiable cause for it.
Now, there's tons of people who hold such bigoted views and even express them in the form of acts through public statements or donations, but most of the time we don't award those people with the CEO position of a major corporation.
(to clarify how this is not a litmus test: while it sure can be applied that way, plenty of organizations have bigots as CEOs — see e.g. Chick-fil-A — but what’s mainly happening here is that it is simply a matter of bad judgement and people objecting to the appointment because he's unfit to lead an org like Mozilla)
To emphasise this point - the importance of the choice in relating to the outside world - this is just in:
http://gaynewsnetwork.com.au/news/victoria/vac-gmhc-to-boyco...
The Victorian AIDS Council and Gay Men's Health Centre, one of the most important gay charities in the state of Victoria in Australia, is boycotting Mozilla and removing Firefox from their machines.
More than that, they issued a PRESS RELEASE to this effect.
So the Firefox brand is becoming toxic well outside the world of disgruntled techies.
I don't disagree per se, but do you apply this generally, disqualifying people with any expressed anti-egalitarian politics from leading a pro-egalitarian organization such as Mozilla? Would you apply a "no Randians" or "no libertarians" litmus test as much as a "no Christian fundamentalists" or "no social conservatives" test? In my opinion, the economic and social equality angles are of fairly equal relevance to Mozilla's stated goals.
If economic and social equality angles are of fairly equal relevance, then Eich shouldn't be CEO, because him being CEO puts the economic angle as significantly more important than the social equality one.
If you mean that people should be able to think whatever thoughts they want without me conducting paparazzi-style investigations to find out what they think, sure: I'm not advocating a campaign to find everyone who owns a copy of F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom and ostracize them (in fact, I own one!). But how about donating $1000 to Rand Paul's campaign? I would consider that equally odious, and yet it is (unfortunately) not that uncommon in the tech community, even among fairly high-profile people with board positions. In my opinion, the right of people with congenital heart diseases to receive medical treatment is of a similar level of importance as the right of gay people to have their marriages recognized by the state—if anything, actually somewhat more urgent in its importance—but a certain sort of "yuppie liberalism", which I think exists more or less only in Silicon Valley, takes the opposite view.
Actions matter. Thoughts that you keep to yourself? I don't care. Go nuts with that.
(also I'm not a fan of the libertarianism in tech/SV, but that's a whole different discussion)
If only life were so simple.
Bigots who keep their thoughts to themselves (and there are plenty of them in C-level positions) often get away with discriminatory actions with weasely excuses like "they're not a fit for that position" and "they're not quite ready for that position".
Why?
Are we talking about degrees here? About the skin in the game? -- If so, I agree.
If it is about free speech, I disagree.
For example, what if he had given $10? Same amount of vitriol, or a little less?
Our culture is in middle of making unprecedented changes to a core social institution that goes back into prehistory. It's going to be a messy process and some people are going to disagree. That's reasonable and shouldn't be grounds for disbarment from polite society. Let's dial back the vitriol
Lastly, equality isn't an unmitigated good. We treat different people differently depending on the circumstances, and for good reason. For example, you probably don't believe that children should be able to marry, or more than two people. "Equality" isn't a magic word that wins all arguments.
Personally, I raise an eyebrow when a six year old boy raised by adoptive lesbians decides he is transexual, and I feel like society may be failing that boy. But we are so drunk on the doctrine of equality that there is no stepping on the brake...
Who bought them again? oh yeah, facebook. Three days ago, it was a web-wide disaster. Now, they hired some famous tech guy (unknown to me, casual gamer here) and people can't be riled anymore.
I accept your challenge to an open debate about how the government should endorse relations between consenting adults.
My view as of a couple years ago, which has changed somewhat, is freely available online under my legal name, Jordan Birnholtz. I hope this provides you an adequate starting point. I will even include it here so you do not have to search: http://www.michigandaily.com/content/viewpoint-divorce-marri...
How would you like to structure it and over what media?
> Our culture is in middle of making unprecedented
> changes to a core social institution that goes back
> into prehistory.
We're not the ones treating other people as lesser human beings who should be treated as second-class citizens in our society.
> Lastly, equality isn't an unmitigated good.
"Equality" in the sense of civil rights and social liberties doesn't mean "give every person exactly the same set of everything under any and all circumstances imaginable" — that's a very programmer (dare I say, robot-like) way of looking at the term. Equality, in this context, is about ensuring that certain groups are not discriminated against in systems, in cultures, and in society at large. Ensuring equal rights often does, in fact, demand unequal laws to counteract an unequal status quo, etc. I'll spare you the crash course of legislation 101.
> For example, you probably don't believe that children should be able to marry, or more than two people.
Yes I do, but I also believe that marriage should not be a government institution in the first place, because too many people think of it as having a religious aspect (for understandable and legitimate reasons), but as such it does not belong in government. Separation of Church and State and all that. So I'm in favor of civil unions for all legal adults, and that includes poly unions. Children can then marry all they want, but they are not legal adults yet, so doing so has no impact whatsoever on their legal status in any way.
> Personally, I raise an eyebrow when a six year old boy raised by adoptive lesbians decides he is transexual, and I feel like society may be failing that boy.
I feel you're failing society by having that viewpoint. Who the fuck are you to judge like that, seriously?! Society is doing great if a young girl who was assigned male sex organs feels comfortable and safe enough to state this wish to her parents — and here you go thinking it would be better if she would feel trapped and unhappy in her body the entire rest of her life?! That's not just judgmental, but severely lacking in empathy.
This is a near perfect instance of xkcd's girls suck at math[1]. Shitty parents are tragically common, and we are failing children who are victims. But when a heterosexual couple destroys a child's life, we don't start talking about taking kids away from heterosexuals.
Also, I don't think polyamorous marriage is a good argument point against gay marriage. In time, as a society we'll see those opposed to the former as bigoted as well.
Anything that violates live and let live between consenting adults is on thin ice.
We should call the campaign for gay marriage exactly what it is, a single-issue campaign for gay marriage, and not a campaign for marriage equality.
It is clearly wrong to talk about civil rights and human rights when the campaign clearly excludes minority groups who don't fit into the two person heterosexual/homosexual category.
Did you trade some goats for your wife? If not, then gee, I guess we've already made unprecedented changes to a core social institution.
And the whole argument about tradition, although undoubtedly interesting to some, is irrelevant as far as civil marriage goes. In the recent decision on gay marriage in Michigan, the judge made it clear that "that's how we've always done it" isn't sufficient justification for a law. The state has to have some rational purpose. And multiple courts, including the one that overturned Prop 8, have concluded that the straights-only marriage laws have no rational purpose.
Edit responding to your new last paragragh: Regarding the parents of the child identifying as transsexual, why specify that they're adoptive lesbians? You're already stacking the deck. Lesbians can have natural children, and straight people can (and do) encourage transexualism in their child. And I don't mean 'can' in terms of finding an outlier and pointing to it as representative.
I am the natural child of a lesbian (born in wedlock to a man), I have helped adult transexuals come out at their own pace, and only two months ago I was arguing against a friend who was glorifying a straight couple in the news who were encouraging transexualism in their six-year-old daughter. I am straight myself, as was my friend I was arguing against, just like the parents we were arguing about.
So it drives me nuts when folks make an argument like you have: oh, it's not enough to decry the action on its own merits, I also have to demonise the people around the action in a way that reinforces inaccurate negative stereotypes. "The people who are fucking our kids up are these 'really weird' couples". Bullshit.
I wouldn't let children drink alcohol. Should we ban gays from pubs? Children can't vote. Should we etc etc etc.
The history of human’s relations is much more complicated, and it changed a lot even in the historic time. There is nothing new under the sun.
Monogamy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogamy
Poligyny: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygyny
Polyandry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyandry
...
Homosexuality in Greece: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Greece
Homosexuality in Rome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome
...
There are much more articles, but I don’t want to link to the whole Wikipedia.
Rant: Also, I'm irritated that this is the "conservative" position. Our culture is doing away with the institution of marriage, and its to the detriment of our children and our families. In the face of that, conservatives should not be in the business of discouraging people who want to build families.
We respond to systematic oppression with angry words, and we're the vicious ones?
Look, I'm sorry you feel hard done by. The folks down in Birmingham felt hard done by, too, when they were told they had to put up with black people dirtying up their lunch counters. These next few decades are going to stress you out just as much as the last few did them. I truly, honestly hope that you'll eventually be able to find another way of looking at things.
How do you feel when a 3 year old boy raised by non-adoptive heterosexual parents acts transgendered, regardless of what his parents do to try to get him to be like what people like you think boys are supposed to be like?
That's some suspect logic right there.
Only if you assume either that his position is so wrong that it could not be held by a reasonable person, or that he shouldn't speak or act on his position in any public way. I consider both of those assumptions to be highly suspect.
> ... and people objecting to the appointment because he's unfit to lead an org like Mozilla
That is exactly using this as a litmus test.
I think it's pretty safe to say that thinking some of your employees are lesser human beings because they happen to not conform to your outdated view of sexuality, romance, and gender identity, is a pretty demonstrably unreasonable position.
The three board members who resigned sought a CEO from outside Mozilla with experience in the mobile industry who could help expand the organization’s Firefox OS mobile-operating system and balance the skills of co-founders Eich and Baker.
So it's not about the Prop 8 thing at all.
It's still entirely possible (and more likely if you ask me) that the Prop 8 angle and subsequent objections raised by many Mozillans and Firefox developers have changed their minds about this, but these are big-time board member CEOs we're taking so of course they're not going to say the political position on Prop 8 of the newly appointed CEO is what's making them resign. That's still a bad career move in today's world, but saying "we wanted someone from outside the organization with experience in XYZ" is not.
I'm opposed to mandatory integration of public schools and mandatory racial-based quota systems. Does that make me a racist? Some would say so, others would say not. I would vigorously argue not; I totally oppose racial discrimination and I believe that a blind meritocracy in the long run brings about real, permanent integration. So should I be locked out of a non-profit tech organization because of my views?
From what I've observed over the last couple of decades, the tech community hosts plenty of diverse political opinions, but generally with a serious streak of anti-authoritarianism. Do we want to now define the tech community as being on one side of any particular political or social issue? Is that a fair or healthy approach?
Prop 8 was about specifically banning gay marriage. A blanket ban. It wasn’t about changing the implementation or any such nonsense. Your argument makes no sense in light of that.
It doesn't ban gay marriage. It does explicitly assert that only traditional marriage is legally recognized.
For what it's worth, part of how the free market avoids devolving into pure selfishness is that people take personal stands on moral issues, regardless of economic concerns. That, also, is an important way that change happens. It just happens that you and I don't agree with that particular stand (not that it necessarily had anything to do with the resignations in question).
You can be against gay marriage because you don't like and don't want others to do it. But at the government level that also means denying gay couples those 1,138 benefits, rights and privileges. It means making them less equal. People are upset about someone who believes that and donated money to continue it.
Another comment from me with link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7490855
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10729717/Brian-Sewe...
You can be an atheist and still appreciate this argument as I do. As for the resignations, fine! Let them do what they want to do. Is it a big deal?
The correct fix in the US would be decoupling all those rights, benefits and privileges from marriage (only). However the chances of that happening at the moment are very low. So today the issue is all about marriage.
Edit - Found his response: https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
President Barack Obama once believed marriage only was for one man and one woman.
Was Obama once a supporter of the KKK? Do you people seriously not realize that gay "marriage" has been concocted into a moral imperative only very recently by the media? And that just a few years ago, not only was opposing it not bigotry, but being in support of it was completely loony tunes?
Snark aside, this analogy will work when Brendan Eich changes his mind as Obama did. No one is saying he's forever doomed by his position in 2008, but if he still believes it people still have every right to disagree with him as vocally as they want.
I agree that this change has been unusually swift compared with, say, the shift on interracial marriage from "loony tunes" to unremarkable. But I think that's mainly because there isn't a ton of gay/straight segregation, not like racial segregation. Now that being in the closet isn't nearly as common, it's hard for people to take an abstract anti-gay position without facing the fact that it will hurt somebody's family member.
But the legitimate question for any Mozilla employee or partner is: will I face discrimination from Mozilla's new CEO? Sure, Eich has promised to behave at work, but he hasn't apologized, and hasn't done anything to demonstrate that his opinions have changed.
Personally, Eich's weird avoidance of the topic makes me question his fitness to lead a major non-profit. His handling of this in the media has been less than adroit. CEO is a public-facing role, and so far he doesn't seem to be very good at it.
That's a legitimate question, absolutely. The openly gay people who have been working with him over the last several years at Mozilla seem to be saying they haven't faced any discrimination from him in the process. And Mitchell, who has worked with him very closely since 1997 or so, was very surprised when she found out two years ago about the 2008 donation [1]. Which implies that he had kept any thoughts he had on the matter out of his closest professional interactions for those 15 or so years. Make of all that what you will.
[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/26/building-a-global... next to last paragraph.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_and_responsibilities_of...
How effective have previous campaigns of theirs been? (Like I say, I'm admittedly not involved in the scene, but I haven't actually heard the name of the aids council for literally years). How much political reach do they have to make people actually change the web browser they're using? Few people use thunderbird or firefox OS or Mozilla's other subsidiary products.
And what is the basis of their claim? A single sizeable donation from six years ago. What more recent evidence do we have that he's still acting this way? People can and do change over the course of years.
This announcement is merely jumping on a political bandwagon, and the suggested boycott has no teeth in it. It's a robotic response, and smacks of the usual way these things are written: responding to the hot gossip with no further investigation. Fine, boycott away if they want to, I'm just saying that press releases like this - giving little insight, having no real teeth, no course of action, and which can be written in 10 minutes - don't require much to trigger them. It doesn't even mention that Mozilla's primary product is Firefox and you can start off by using something else!
As far as I've seen, he's said nothing else on this topic. This could lead any Mozilla employee to wonder: does he still believe gay people don't deserve the same civil rights straight people get?
https://twitter.com/Jason_Duell/status/449276922359320576
http://subfictional.com/2014/03/24/on-brendan-eich-as-ceo-of...
(And I saw a few more along those lines on twitter, but trying to search twitter on this topic right now is a bit difficult.)
Oddly enough, the only Mozilla employees I've seen calling for Brendan to step down are employees of the Foundation, not of the Corporation, and as far as I can tell don't deal with him on a regular basis, if at all.
And I don't know about you, but if I were a) afraid to ask, or b) didn't get a satisfactory answer, I wouldn't be posting about it on Twitter. Because of that great-great-grandboss thing.
I have no idea what's going on in Eich's head, but I am saying that people working for him could be reasonably concerned.
I agree that if you had no other source of information than the existence of the donation, that would certainly raise the chances of there being problems in other aspects of interacting with the man, of course. That's obvious. I'm just saying that if there are non-proxy sources of information available, it's better to use those than to use proxy sources that rely on good but imperfect correlations. (The correlation in this case being "someone who strongly supported Proposition 8 is also a problem to work with if you're gay". Reasonably good correlation, I expect, but not perfect.)
It seems to me that you didn't fully read the second link that bzbarsky provided, in which the author says that while she's not happy with the past donation, she doesn't see that it has changed how Mozilla treats its staff, and that in past years it has been improving (years in which Eich was a CxO, if not CEO): To be clear, I’m personally disappointed about Brendan’s donation. However, aside from how it affected me emotionally, I have nothing to indicate that it’s materially hurt my work within the Mozilla community or as a Mozilla employee. Mozilla offers the best benefits I have ever had and goes out of its way to offer benefits to its employees in same-sex marriages or domestic partnerships on par with those in heterosexual marriages. Last year we finally got trans-inclusive healthcare. We didn’t have an explicit code of conduct when I started, but adopted the guidelines for participation within my first year. Progress might be slow, but it’s being made. And I don’t see Brendan standing in the way of that.
To throw away commentary like that with a handwave saying "well, any dissenting employees would be silenced by fear" does not do Eich justice, and it also does not do that author justice, because you're effectively saying she doesn't count because she's not in fear. A well-written, considered article, one that is neither gushing nor abusive, presenting a complex, nuanced picture... and it's worthless because 'someone might be too scared to speak up'.
It's apparent that you won't be happy unless there's a vocal dissentor to support your point of view. You've essentially pre-convicted the guy against evidence provided by people that currently work with him, and are groping around for ammunition.
Personally, I'd be happy if Eich said, "Boy, I was a jerk to support Prop 8. I've always believed in equality, but I supported Prop 8 for [mistaken reasons]. I now understand that helping to strip some of my employees of their civil rights was harmful action, and apologize unreservedly."
But instead, he's dodged the question with some vigor. Which makes it reasonable to think he still thinks some of his employees don't deserve the same rights as he does. Whether or not that actually leads to bigoted actions within Mozilla as it has outside of it, reasonable people could fear that it would.
Can you really say that a political opinion that was apparently held by over half of the states voters at the time can disqualify someone from leading a company? Especially since there appears to not be a single other piece of evidence against his character? (seems it would have popped up by now)
And of course there's the fact that in modern democracy your vote is considered a part of your private life. Everyone has the right to keep that basic contribution to civic life out of their personal and business lives. But not for going above and beyond.
So it's really not that he held this political opinion, it is that he used his money to support it, almost certainly in full knowledge that it would be public information that he did so. And now, no matter how many times he says he believes in diversity without really explaining why he supported that cause if so, every gay person he works with knows that he spent $1000 supporting the cause to prevent them from getting married to someone they love. It would be kind of ridiculous if this did not cause friction. It's very difficult to "live and let live" when it's your life people are mucking with.
As for the rest, are you saying the difference is because its public? So hypothetically, supporting prop8 privately would be different and more acceptable than supporting it publicly? Or its not acceptable but he just wouldn't be getting lynched for it?
The idea of explicitly enshrining our collective dislike of gay people is also just pretty toxic all by itself, naturally, but that's a slightly different tack.
This would also explain why Mozilla seemed so unprepared for the criticism on Prop8: they'd just fought a huge battle over whether the CEO should be from inside or outside Mozilla, and that was probably all they focused on if it was so big that half the board resigned.
People need to speak up and stop this insanity about ousting Eich. This include the LGBT community and their supporters. Yesterday their were fighting for inclusiveness and accepting people with different values. They need to walk the talk themselves, even if it means to tolerate people whose value they disagree with.
Sure, he might "believe in" their equality in the same way that most people "believe in" getting enough niacin. That is: they might state that belief, but they will never act for it and will often act against it.
And I'd add that if Eich believes in their equality and now regrets working against it, he could just say so. That he has energetically dodged the issue when it is of obvious concern to the people he can now fire says something on its own.
what you mean is "he does'nt believe in the definition of equality as you believe it to be".
I believe that he should be penalized if he has demonstrated any hatred towards people in the workplace. I believe that a man is free to exercise his right to free speech in his private life, and this is what I deem it to be.
There is a reasonable fear that the gay employees may find themselves cornered under his leadership, and this was addressed in his letter and in the steps Mozilla took to assuage those fears.
Anything after this is a witch hunt, and folks taking up the pitchforks are the ones who have been affected the most. Its sad, but happens all the time.
Feel free to picture more repugnant positions. Would you really not draw the line anywhere? If you would, then you're not really any different than people around here, you just disagree where you draw the line. And frankly, I find it very hard to believe that someone wouldn't.
More specifically, Brendan has publicly indicated that he intends to actively pursue equality throughout the organization[1].
So people seem to be calling him a liar with no evidence. And they're also bullying him solely based on his beliefs, rather than his actions.
[1]https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
It is generally instructive to try and apply the arguments to similar struggles of the past, that tends to make it much much clearer how wrong those arguments are. "If there is a reasonable way to reconcile opposition to mixed marriage with acceptance of black people, then we ought to give the opponents the benefit of the doubt before ostracizing them." How does that read?
It's not discrimination to have a custom specific to celebrating the relationship between a man and a woman, which is what marriage has been in our culture until now. Indeed, even in past cultures in which homosexuality was considered completely normal and wasn't discriminated against at all, such as ancient Rome, marriage was considered a heterosexual custom and gays didn't want to take part in it any more than Christians feel excluded from Bar Mitzvah, for lack of a better comparison.
And if that seems too distant an example, then how about the 1980s? Some of the earliest gay marriage advocates (was it Andrew Sullivan? I'm not sure) were met with criticism in the gay community itself, because some of its members didn't like the idea and considered it contrary to their identity. It is all a matter mindset and I feel like it's a legitimate cultural dilemma - not an issue of equality.
I can empathize with people who are attached to the traditional definition of marriage and its symbolism. I don't think you have to carry any ill-feelings towards gays in order to want preserve it and I think it's the case for a significant proportion of gay marriage opponents.
This point of view seems quite obvious to me and it's unfortunate that almost no gay marriage supporters recognize it, as it causes unnecessary polarization of the debate. It is a disservice to both the LGBT community, who feel more threatened than they should, and to some of the defenders of traditional marriage, who are undeservedly labelled bigots, ostracized, and even - as in the instance of Brendan Eich - disenfranchised for their cultural/religious beliefs.
Also, I think it is confusing to say "cultural customs and rituals are not rights and don't have to be inclusive." That is largely correct from a legal perspective, but still makes for a bad society to live in. You probably legally can found a club for white people only, but it's unlikely that that would be a nice club to be in. And also, just because something has a long tradition, that does not make it non-discriminatory.
Whether some gay people don't want to marry obviously is completely irrelevant to the discussion, as this is not about forcing gay people to marry. This is about the freedom for those who want to, not about forcing those who don't want to. And even if some gay people feel that it's not appropriate for other gay people to marry, it's not the job of the state to enforce that on those other gay people who actually do want to marry.
And I do agree that you don't have to carry any ill-feelings towards blacks in order to want to preserve the traditional definition of who has to sit where on the bus. But that completely ignores that there are people with feelings on the other side as well - people who are excluded, people for whom sitting on "black only" seats is not just a quaint tradition. Those strong feelings about traditional roles do exist and totally are real, be it about the role of slaves, of black people, of women, ..., but that does not mean that living them does not hurt other people. We as a society can (and have to) force people to confront that they are actually causing harm with their clinging to traditional ideas, often for totally irrational reasons. That does not mean that we cannot empathize with those people who sincerely believe that they are losing something when giving up such strong-held beliefs and ideas, but we also can not accept that they hurt other people.
And, really, I would want to encourage you to re-read what you write, replacing everything in it that is about gays with black people and mixed marriages and other things that we have figured out a while back, try to read it as a sincere argument. You are used to the idea that marriage is a custom specific to heterosexuals. But you have to consider that people at some point were equally used to racial segregation. There were people using the exact same arguments back then, feeling equally right about how traditionally marriage was for "people of the same race". And yet I would hope that the suggestion of a "interracial union" for those mixed couples who want to get more or less the same benefits that "one-race couples" enjoyed traditionally (so that the traditionalists can keep their tradition of what they perceive to be a real marriage) would seems utterly absurd and inappropriate to you. Then try to extrapolate from that perspective on the past to how you would view this current discussion as a person in the equally (not that) distant future. And then reconsider who is undeservedly labelled a bigot or ostracized.
I think your comparisons between race and gender are superficial. There fundamental differences between the two concepts.
We still have separate toilets for men and women, and nobody suggests it's offensive. I haven't seen fashion designers catch any flack for preparing separate collections for different genders. It is normal to sometimes seek the company of your own gender, e.g. to have "a ladies night out" - but deliberately inviting only white friends would raise eyebrows, to say the least. Nobody's weirded out by a bachelor party, either. There are many gender-related or even gender-exclusive traditions, places, institutions, and businesses.
In other words, we aim for a post-racial society, in which race is considered outdated and irrelevant to personal and social relations. The gender dynamic is different. In some respects gender is, in fact, separate but equal.
Some places indeed do have unisex toilets nowadays, and while I think few if any people consider separate toilets explicitly offensive, at least so far, they do actually pose a problem for some people, which is why I think it is not unreasonable to consider switching to unisex toilets everywhere. The problem with the current scheme of toilet separation is that there are both people who do not identify as either explicitly male or female, and in particular people who identify as a different gender than their biological one, for those people the scheme doesn't really work (and actually sometimes leads to real-world conflicts when they are perceived by others to be overstepping boundaries when they go to the "wrong" toilet). And if you think about it, the separation doesn't really make all that much sense. After all, you don't have separate toilets at home either, do you? And it's not like you couldn't have any privacy in public toilets nowadays, which a gender separation might be a crude approximation for.
Also, you have to distinguish between enforced categorisations and self-identification. A "ladies night out" probably is not really strictly about genitals, but rather a heuristic description of what kind of activities are planned, so if you happen to be a biologically male transgender, who identifies as female, and who is interested in taking part in that activity, behaving in that social role, you hopefully would not be excluded due to your biology. In particular, there is a difference between (biological) sex and social roles traditionally associated with certain biological sexes, commonly called the gender. This whole fight is not about getting rid of those roles, but rather about the freedom for each individual to choose their role independently of their biology (and also the freedom to reject both roles). Just as you can like or dislike swimming, you can like or dislike behaving according to what is traditionally considered "male" or "female" behaviour, and you should be able to choose to behave according to any of those roles as you like to, and not be forced by society to fill one of the roles because of your biology, just as you can freely choose to pursue swimming, or to not pursue swimming. That does not mean that we should ban swimming or "behaving female" or "behaving male".
Also, all of this obviously is not to be confused with a distinction that is based directly on biologically determined differences. If you do only have one kind of genitals, then services for the other kind of genitals probably aren't for you, just as pedicure is not for people who don't have legs. But that's not exactly something that needs regulation or social pressure to enforce.
And if you look at it from that perspective, it might actually be more analogous to race than you think: Yes, inviting only white friends would be considered weird. But inviting people "for a day of doing what was traditionally what white people did" (and by that I don't mean anything "anti-black" or anything, just typical cultural differences)? You probably would not phrase it that way, but conceptually I don't think anyone would find anything wrong with that, and I guess part of why you would not phrase it that way is simply that it's the "majority/privileged/normal" thing anyhow, so it's unusual to name it explicitly, but looking at it from the other side, consider, for example, "black music": It would be perfectly fine to have a "black music festival", but inviting only black musicians or only admitting black audience would be racist, and there also is no stigma anymore for white people to be interested in "black music", listening to it and even participating in it. It's a culture that was traditionally associated with "race", and we dropped the exclusion, but we still kept the culture, and even name it according to where it came from.
As such, I would say: No, gender is different and equal, but separation as it is commonly understood should not have any place there. Just as different kinds of sports are not "separate but equal". You should be free to engage in any sports activity that you like, and you should be free to engage in any gender role that you like, and just as you usually won't find many swimmers swimming in the football stadium, you won't find many people into male roles at places where people meet "to be female", but it's noone's business to enforce some separation.
I love Firefox. I'm just worried for it. With the world going mobile, I wonder if there's space for Firefox. It would be such a shame not to see it around 5 years from now.
I wonder if it makes sense for a small organization to spend so much time and money on a custom rendering engine. Is it such a horrible idea to fork and contribute to blink? Just thinking out loud. Mostly out of despair.
A fairly bad one, yes. There would be virtually no benefit to doing this, and a serious detriment to web browser diversity (which would likely be a detriment to the health of the web as a developing ecosystem).
> It would be such a shame not to see it around 5 years from now
They still have plenty of revenue, and the amount still keeps going up every time they renegotiate their search engine contracts. They'd be more in danger of irrelevance, but while they had a slight dip in browser marketshare (depending on who you ask), it seems relatively steady state now (just like their major competitors). Meanwhile no one is wringing their hands over Microsoft's irrelevance in the browser market even though Windows Phone remains a tiny contender.
Your worries seem a little unfounded.
I don't think they're unfounded. Nearly every developer I know uses chrome, and chrome dev tools. This wasn't always the case. Market share can be a lagging indicator, i think it's a little short sighted to suggest they're okay. They're not!
Forking isn't a sin. Diversity often a result of forking. Take a look at this graphic[1]. There's a good chance the browser you're currently using is a result of a fork.
Mozilla has to really examine what they stand for. The open web doesn't depend on implementation internals. Just specs, tests, and sensible governing body, and a set of willing participants that don't have unreasonable misaligned interests. They can still promote an open. Perhaps even do a better job of it with the extra resources.
[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_...
Sorry, I think there's absolutely no way to spin the idea that abandoning Gecko for Blink would increase diversity. It's self-evidently false.
Forks lead to more rendering engine diversity than straight-up reskins, I suppose, but much less diversity than actual from-scratch engines. (Incidentally, since Blink is explicitly not designed to be embeddable, "adopting Blink" essentially means becoming a Chrome skin.)
> Firefox has equal share with Chrome and most of the
>techies
>I know still use Firefox.
> Not having every private test URL of stuff
>you're working on sent to Google is reason enough.
Please provide evidence that Chrome sends private URLs to Google.
There may be reasons to prefer Firefox not to use blink, but "detriment to the health of the web" is a really vague and pointless argument. What do you really mean by that, if not just that Chromium/Chrome are somehow bad for the web?
Er, huh? I don't think my phrasing was that confusing: I said that the loss of diversity in implementations would likely lead to a loss to the future development of the web. Multiple implementations of a spec ensure that the spec matches reality and often make for better specs, as feedback from implementations over very different foundations bring out fundamental architectural and performance issues that may not have been obvious otherwise (e.g. you write a feature so that it's efficient on platform X, it means that in 5 years someone implementing a new browser will have to write it very much like X to get decent performance).
This is actually enshrined in the W3C technical report development process: for a specification to become a Proposed Recommendation, "the Working Group should be able to demonstrate two interoperable implementations of each feature"[1].
There were lots of arguments about this when Opera stopped developing Presto to move to Webkit. I think Chromium/Chrome have been, on the whole, great for the web.
In a perfect world, yes. Then you might not get standards written entirely around ease of implementation in C++, leading to crazy behavior just because it happened to be the simple thing to do in that language.
> if not just that Chromium/Chrome are somehow bad for the web?
What's bad for the web is monoculture, because then people start building sites that rely on quirks of that monoculture that are not codified in a standard. And then if something better comes along it's a long uphill battle to get that something better adopted, because it has to duplicate those quirks.
For example, there is no way something like Servo would be able to happen if we had a Blink monoculture on the web, and I seriously doubt that Blink will be able to parallelize to the extent that Servo is planning to and that I think the web needs in the future.
For another example, once you have an engine monoculture, the developers of that engine become gatekeepers for what's possible on the web. We saw that once already with IE. While Google is not likely to shut down development of Chrome in the near future, they have their own priorities (e.g. getting video DRM implemented is a lot more important to them than anti-tracking countermeasures), so unless you think those priorities are perfect for the web you should be against them having a stranglehold over what ends up in the web platform. Just like you should be against any other entity having such a stranglehold. It was bad when Microsoft was there, it would be bad if Google were there, and it would also be bad if Mozilla were there.
So is Chrome, at least in the sense the iOS Chrome is slow as hell because Safari gets special privilege. But that is the case with all iOS software - you are beholden to Apple. I wouldn't consider success or failure there something you can control at all.
> Under heavly competition on Android.
True, but mobile FF has the best UI out of all of them, I think.
> Put the metro port on the back burner.
Because nobody used it. At all. It is senseless to make and maintain a product nobody will use. All this says is that Metro is systemically panned.
> Increasingly fighting to stay on feature parity with Chrome on the desktop.
Unless you mean things like MSE, I don't see where FF comes up short. Since version ~8 their engine has been on par or faster than Chrome and they support emerging web standards like RTC overnight.
> FirefoxOS still to make an impact.
It isn't targeting the first world, it will never make an impact here - it is a sound decision, it would be impossible to take Android on directly, and they really don't have to, since FF on Android has their marketplace. It is getting sizable deployment contracts in India and such, so I'd call that a success.
> I wonder if there's space for Firefox.
Of course. It is the only major web player pushing openness without an agenda (like Google).
> It would be such a shame not to see it around 5 years from now.
Even if Mozilla the company were a shell of its former self, I imagine the community would pick up a lot of the slack to keep Firefox at least usable, if not bleeding edge, like with how Thunderbird is doing.
> I wonder if it makes sense for a small organization to spend so much time and money on a custom rendering engine. Is it such a horrible idea to fork and contribute to blink? Just thinking out loud. Mostly out of despair.
Does it make sense to have half a dozen python interpreters? Or 3+ binary cross platform compilers? How about how many GUI toolkits are out there, from Wxwidgets and EFL to more popular cross platform ones like Qt or Mono.
And they are developing Servo as the solution to Gecko being really old at this point. And Rust is an amazing language, and I'd definitely look to develop in it as soon as it hits a 1.0 (probably when Servo is ready).
Thanks for the kind words :)
We expect Rust to be at 1.0 before Servo becomes a production browser engine.
With Mozilla?
Right now we find ourselves watching vital cornerstone of the Free Internet suddenly ripping itself apart. A community of people who would usually be working on improving (at least attempting to improve) concepts like freedom of speech and publication (press). This is especially important right now, given all of the NSA/Snowden drama of the last year, and the threats they revealed.
So I'm forced to wonder: who's the spy trying to wedge the community apart?
Yes, yes, we've been arguing about sexuality and marriage for a long time, and it should simply be old factions suddenly forced to confront their current situation. Normally, I would simply accept that explanation.
However, given that the spy agencies have been using[1] tactics to disrupt groups they see as threatening, I'm forced to wonder if these new "wedges" between previously-stable communities. Especially in the cases like Mozilla, where and its role on the world stage certainly makes them a target for COINTELPRO or similar attacks.
...
Because of this worry, I'm going to suggest something counter to my usual instincts. Being gay myself, I would normally be strongly against Mr. Eich for reasons already said elsewhere. There is a wisdom in picking your battles, and right now there are more important issues.
So, instead, I am choosing to see Mr. Eich as a strong ally against greater threats. Marriage rights won't easy to fight for if we lose the surveillance/police-state battle first. Emotions are running strong right now - I won't deny that the idea of having funded prop 8 does piss me of - but winning one war often means finding allies, even if you don't like them.
edit: forgot footnote
[1]: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...
You must not have been paying attention over the last couple of days. The bonfire has been stoked, the rope is ready, the judges have made their decision, and the ducks are ready to be weighed.
Eich has been found guilty, guilty, guilty in the court of public opinion: his offense is having the same opinion as 52.2% of Californian voters in 2008 and donating to that cause.
No apology is apparently sufficient, so he must be destroyed.
At least, that's sure what it looks like online.
Personally, I don't see it as hypocrisy. In the case of those opposed to Prop 8, people aren't arguing for some generic tolerance, they're arguing for civil rights, including equality before the law. Most of the gay people I've talked to figure the prejudiced are going to keep on with their hating; they just don't want that bigotry enshrined in law.
Also, FYI, trying to insult gay-rights fans with "you're gay" doesn't really work.