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Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

To piggyback, there's an additional difference between being a public-facing CEO of, say, McDonald's, Exxon or Apple, and being the public-facing CEO of a non-profit which exists due to the donations of primarily liberal and libertarian internet people. The prior case might cost them a little revenue due to boycotts but if the person's effective, you can make a case for 'private views' and 'shareholder value'. When your whole company is an activist platform, it's a bit harder to say that political positions of the CEO don't matter.

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"non-profit which exists due to the donations of primarily liberal and libertarian internet people"

Citation needed.

On the topic of being an "activist platform", I strongly suggest you read <http://incisive.nu/2014/thinking-about-mozilla/>, and in particular the paragraph starting "Several of my colleagues have called for Brendan’s resignation. I have not done so ..."

> When your whole company is an activist platform, it's a bit harder to say that political positions of the CEO don't matter.

I see the point that it's different for a non-profit than it might be for a for-profit, but I'd also think differences in primary focus matter too.

If I was looking at the conversation over the last week as a representative, I'd suppose that Mozilla is more of an LGBT standard-bearer than an open-web advocacy group.

One could argue that's a ridiculously narrow window to focus on, and that's probably correct, but it's no more narrow a focus than that turned on Eich's donations vs the whole of his behavior and what he had to offer as CEO.

I thought mozilla exists mainly because of google?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing

Pretty sure that is incorrect.

The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donations and "search royalties". Since 2005, the vast majority of funds have come from Google Inc....Mozilla Corporation [is] "a taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation"

Mozilla =~= Google

>being the public-facing CEO of a non-profit

He was the CEO of the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, not a non-profit.

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