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Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

> Even the bible says, "You will know them by their fruits," meaning that it's reasonable to judge people by what they do.

That's reasonable enough.

On the other hand, it's selective at best to limit the applied focus to his donations.

He's spent a lot of time/effort working at and building up Mozilla, a Mozilla that has an equitable/inclusive code of treatment, a Mozilla where by several LGBT accounts his co-workers felt interaction with him was free of aggression, a Mozilla where where co-workers felt free to defend or reject his appointment. And he invited everyone to judge him by those standards had he kept on.

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Sure. And I hope people were weighing that. It definitely meant something to me.

But Eich promising to only work against gay people's civil rights in his off hours wouldn't strike me as enough if I were a Mozilla employee. It's not the kind of promise I'd fully trust.

Really, I feel for Eich. If I had to guess, he's somebody who grew up around a lot of religiously-driven intolerance of gay people. And, like many smart people, he used his smarts to compartmentalize one set of views from another. It must be heartbreaking to be forced to deal with those inconsistencies in the eye of the national media, and to handle it poorly enough that he ended up quitting something he started and believes in. I wish he had sorted this out years ago, but I hope this serves as an opportunity for him to do so soon.

>But Eich promising to only work against gay people's civil rights in his off hours wouldn't strike me as enough if I were a Mozilla employee.

Do you actually have a source of him saying that? Or are you basing it solely on his political donation?

If that's the case, you're engaging in nothing more than pointless conjecture.

He previously worked against gay people's civil rights. When questioned about that, he promised that at work he wouldn't do that. But he has conspicuously avoided any substantive statement about his donation or whether he'd do something similar in the future. So there's no conjecture here, just a rephrasing.

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