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Comment by notsony | Hacker News Reader

One could argue Mozilla was quite purist when they ejected Brendan Eich because his personal beliefs were not shared by fellow employees... but more on that later.

Perhaps the real reason Brendan Eich was thrown out of Mozilla was because he didn't embrace DRM and EME? Given his stature as founder of Mozilla and creator of Javascript, he could have posed a significant roadblock if he had decided to reject EME's inclusion in Firefox.

If you put on your tinfoil hat, recall that Brendan's donation to Prop 8 was public information for several years... before it suddenly became an issue.

>"So long as people want Hollywood movies, and Hollywood is used to getting its way, and DRM vendors are pushing to perpetuate this and codify it, and put it under a fig leaf from the W3C, we have a real problem.".

http://www.computerworlduk.com/blogs/open-enterprise/brendan...

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This is an interesting theory and given what we know how how hollywood works in the backroom, plausible, but there are no facts to support it.

Eich was not "thrown out of mozilla". The board knew about his donation and appointed him anyways - the pressure for him to resign came from the community and Mozilla employees.

Hollywood is great at fomenting outrage, but not that much and not in that way :)

If only company boards listened to their employees and "community" all the time!

I think it's about opportunism. A situation developed and by simply stoking the fires of social media outrage, a major obstacle to adoption of DRM in a popular browser could be eliminated.

Consider the Mozilla position as soon as Brendan had been forced out - coincidence?

>"With most competing browsers and the content industry embracing the W3C EME specification, Mozilla has little choice but to implement EME as well so our users can continue to access all content they want to enjoy. Read on for some background on how we got here, and details of our implementation." - Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal, 14 May 2014

"Mozilla will be adding a way to integrate Adobe Access DRM technology for video and audio into Firefox, via a common specification called Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)." - The Mozilla Blog, 14 May 2014

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2014/05/why-brendan-eich-had-to-g...

Given that Mozilla is a nonprofit, they've got more reason than most to pay attention.

I don't really buy that narrative that all of Mozilla really really wanted to accept DRM in the browser, but this one guy is such a pain in the ass about shooting it down that they'll promote him and hope that the outrage machine takes him out, and thus fulfill their evil plan to ??????! Muahahah!

Ahem. Made-for-TV movie plots aside, it fails occam's razor, it fails basic logic, and as mentioned there isn't a single shred of a fact to support it. The actual story is shocking enough without trying to read patterns into it that don't actually exist.

Eich voluntarily resigned. He's not your martyr for freedom of bigotry.

Ridiculous! He was hounded out, forced to resign and you damn well know it.

Bigotry? What are you smoking?

> Ridiculous! He was hounded out, forced to resign and you damn well know it.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

"On April 3, 2014 Brendan Eich voluntarily stepped down as CEO of Mozilla."

(I'm not going to, but) I can tell you to stop posting on HN every single day of the year indefinitely. But I can't make you. I don't have that power. If you choose to, it's your choice. Eich was not fired. He resigned of his own free will.

If a customer comes into your job, tells you that you should resign, and then your boss says, "ignore him, you can stay", and you resign anyway, can you really tell me that your boss fired you?

> Bigotry? What are you smoking?

Unlike you apparently, I'm not. Since I know what words mean.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bigot

"a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion."

Eich was so intolerant of people who held a difference of opinion on what constitutes marriage, that he donated his own money to a cause whose sole purpose was to strip existing legal rights and protections, rights that he enjoyed himself, from a minority class through force of law. There is zero ambiguity here: I cannot possibly think of a clearer case of outright bigotry.

If you disagree, you might want to take a good, long, hard look in the mirror. Per the dictionary; I am selfish, tactless, and many other negative things. I don't pretend those words mean something that don't apply to me, just so I can feel better about myself.

This is madness. Have you ever heard of constructive dismissal?

California Supreme Court:

"the employer either intentionally created or knowingly permitted working conditions that were so intolerable or aggravated at the time of the employee's resignation that a reasonable employer would realize that a reasonable person in the employee's position would be compelled to resign"

Wikipedia:

"In employment law, constructive dismissal, also called constructive discharge, occurs when an employee resigns as a result of the employer creating a hostile work environment. Since the resignation was not truly voluntary, it is in effect a termination. For example, when an employer makes life extremely difficult for an employee, to attempt to have the employee resign, rather than outright firing the employee, the employer is trying to effect a constructive discharge."

Tell me again how Eich's employer made it a hostile working environment for him, please?

Given that he had no boss (being the CEO and all), we can only assume you mean the board members. Please point out to me a single board member who was in any way hostile toward him.

Even the two board members that resigned said it had nothing to do with Eich.

His employer is Mozilla.

The conditions were such that staying on as CEO was not an option for him.

> The conditions were such that staying on as CEO was not an option for him.

Why not? Plenty of companies have absolutely reviled CEOs, yet they stick around anyway.

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