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Comment by Todd | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn't OkCupid take a bolder stance and remove all JavaScript from their site? Brendan invented it. I guess that wouldn't be convenient. Better to ask users to inconvenience themselves. This really isn't fair to all of the people who have worked so hard to make Firefox what it is today.

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Why doesn't OKCupid take a bolder stance and give a button to all their users when they sign in, asking, "Do you support marriage equality?" If they click "no", it deletes your account.

I mean, as long as you've decided this is the sort of thing your business ought to be concerning itself with...

Although that situation you outline might seem pretty extreme, spare a thought for those who suffer far worse discrimination in real life, where it actually matters. Cf. the bed and breakfast owner who asks "Are you gay?" and if the answer's "yes", shuts their door on you.

I have never in my life been asked if I was gay before any business transaction.

I was specifically referring to this case [1]. The status has gone back and forth several times on appeal, but it's most definitely an example of horrible bigotry.

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/christian-bb-...

I will spare a thought! However, I will request that we could consider whether this marginalization and inconvenience is in fact effectively remedied by seeking systematic vengeance upon all people who oppose government recognition of these marriages...

No, fair point. Although I would like to think that a) those "seeking systematic vengeance" (which I agree is an overreaction) are in the minority of those raising this issue b) most people's concern isn't with the very narrow issue of "government recognition of these marriages" but the much wider issue of homophobic discrimination which the former is but a small part.

Wonderful idea!

Somebody should cook up some javascript (yes, grumble grumble) and start a campaign to embed this on every major site.

As clicking YES is too easy for bigots to get around, another version might require signing in to Facebook, Google or Twitter and upon clicking YES, posting a public message that you support marriage equality.

Obviously any website which does not take part in this campaign is not gay friendly and should be immediately boycotted.

Obviously.

They should just merge with upworthy

Probably because while he may have invented Javascript, many people have contributed to it, so that's not really the same issue. We should assume there might be racists/biggots/etc working at Google on Chrome, at Apple on Safari and at Microsoft on Internet Explorer, too. That's not the point.

The issue is with Mozilla placing him as their executive leader; the endorsement that makes and the message that sends to the technical community & the wider world.

You can argue the exact same thing for mozilla and firefox: Brendan did not create firefox/mozilla, he's one of thousands who contributed.

People can have their own personal beliefs and as long as that doesn't effect the organization's open and inclusive policies.

I obviously wasn't clear enough - it's not about the contribution it's about leadership.

Brendan was an employee of Mozilla when he made his Prop 8 contribution - that's fine, that's his right and as you point out people are entitled to their own personal beliefs.

The issue is who a company/foundation/organization decides to be it's leader and the values that leader will exert upon the company/foundation/organization and the products it produces.

To be clear, my beef isn't with Brendan Eich (although I'd disagree with him if I met him), it's with Mozilla for selecting him to become CEO.

>people are entitled to their own personal beliefs //

You say that but the rest of the post makes it clear you don't believe that Mr Eich is entitled to his beliefs and that he shouldn't be employed [in this role] only because of those beliefs.

If he's entitled to hold those beliefs then he's entitle to be treated without prejudice for them, otherwise what do you mean by "entitled to"?

> technical community & the wider world

Hah, wider world. For most people, a browser is "the internet". They don't even care that it is made by a company. They certainly don't care about the CEO of this company who gave some money to some thing sometime in the past.

I think that is not how this is working out. Go to Google News, enter "eich" and see how much coverage this is getting in the international mainstream press.

> how much coverage this is getting in the international mainstream press.

Almost none. US based tech sites are reporting on it. I saw an article in the Guardian and HufPo as well. That's it. It's definitely not taking the world by storm.

There are plenty of companies I boycot and avoid patronizing based on concerns I have with their owners, executive leadership or company's position on issues important to me.

I don't think that is that uncommon, actually.

So, I'm guessing you don't watch movies made by 20th century fox, you don't read the Wall Street Journal, you don't shop at Kohl's, you don't eat any fruit from Dole, you don't eat at a Dairy Queen etc.

And if you take into account the whole wage-fixing cartel of Apple and co. you don't buy Apple products, you don't visit pages that display ads from Google etc. etc.

Javascript is not solely the product of Mozilla. It exists by itself, is standardized as ECMAScript, and provides no royalties to Brendan Eich. Firefox is a product of Mozilla. Mozilla, and by extension Eich, benefits from people using Firefox to browse the internet, particularly from searching Google through Mozilla's start page.

Whatever you think of Eich, of Mozilla, or of the entire situation, Firefox and Javascript are not the same thing here. If anyone means to make their displeasure felt in Mozilla's revenue, banning Javascript wouldn't make sense.

> This really isn't fair to all of the people who have worked so hard to make Firefox what it is today.

Do you mean it's not fair because it hurts these people, even though they haven't done anything objectionable?

Does he have any control over future development of javascript and how this future development will affect a wider community? I don't think he does.

But he is the CEO of the company, and what the company does going forward does depend on him a lot.

I think this is the key difference between boycotting the browser and boycotting the language.

And has he been directing Mozilla in a way that would reduce equality for all its users? Is this even remotely likely?

He's quite active on the ES-discuss mailing list. Though he expressively said he'd tone down his involvement on it with this appointment.

Because there is no trivially replaceable substitute for JavaScript in the site construction, as there is for the browser.

So you're saying that even someone who once made a morally wrong decision can still be competent enough to produce a technology that could serve to become a foundational component to the web as we know it?

Have you ever seen anyone suggesting anything remotely contrary, or are you just setting up the mother of all strawmen?

Last time I used OkCupid, I can't remember anything that would actually require JS to work. Real time updates (for instance, in IM) wouldn't be possible, but exchanging messages, looking at profiles and answering quiz questions is perfectly doable without JS.

(I know I always sound like someone who hates JavaScript, but at least for the stuff OkC had two years ago, it's not really crucial. IIRC, you could browse user profiles with JS off, but IM didn't work with JS off.)

> Real time updates (for instance, in IM) wouldn't be possible

If we're going back in time, you can get this via Flash.

Flash uses ActionScript, which is an implementation of ECMAScript, which was designed by Brandan Eich. ECMAScript is a standardization of Javascript.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript

The IM case can be done without JS, actually, using chunked encoding [1]. This is similar to the MIME multipart/x-mixed-replace technique [2] that was used for "streaming" webcams in the late 90s.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Mixed-Replace

Heh. Just the other day at work I joked that people might get so upset at this that they organize and deploy a better JavaScript substitute for every possible use case.

One can hope ...

> Brendan invented it.

You're just giving people more of a reason to hate him.

I agree with the last sentence, but the first is a bit silly.

So boycotting something thousands of developers have worked on (including add-ons) because you don't like something the new CEO of a company did once that has nothing to do with the product you're boycotting is not silly.

But boycotting something that same person invented is.

I don't see the logic here. Really.

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