The choice of Eich as a CEO also made me wonder - they took a year to find a CEO, and ended up with their own CTO. Is it fair to assume that they searched long and hard but couldn't find anyone? If so, that's a real shame. I want Mozilla to succeed.
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.