"This is a strange one to me and can indeed be a sticky situation. I am NOT judging people who use Firefox, work at Mozilla, or even support Brendan’s right to his opinions. It’s fine that you think I shouldn’t judge his opinion. (This is getting confusing). However, this particular subject is not one that is negotiable to us. We are personally affected by his actions.<p>It’s not his belief that hurts us. It’s that he actively donated to a cause that directly negatively affected us, personally. It’s not abstract. It’s not a witch hunt. He’s certainly allowed to have his opinion, of course, but I’m allowed to judge his actions of supporting the cause financially.<p>Actions have consequences."<p>There you go, sums it up right there. Some past actions are hard to overlook when you're personally affected by it. However you view the news of Brendan Eich's new CEO position and people's opinions of that, you can't ignore the human element of his insignificant (financially) but significant (philosophically) prop 8 contribution and how people take it personally.<p>Edit: Adding onto my thought of how I view the human element in this story: we all try to be rational, but I bet you everyone of us throw that away for a gut feeling we have of someone. If you don't like someone, no amount of reason will make that go away. That feeling spreads to what they're associated with. In retrospect, we reason our gut feeling and we either turn out right or wrong. I understand hcatlin's decision in that sense since I have felt that way before.
Gay rights is not a "moral fashion" as some people are calling it.<p>This is a group of people who have been systematically terrorised throughout history, and some people still want to keep that status quo that holds them down as second class citizens, with less legal rights (like the right to immigrate in order to live together.)<p>Screw that meta-ethical/normative moral relativism[1].<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism</a>
Good for you. I also up until now thought Mozilla was fighting for the little guy and as a developer I've been wanting to work for them. Not anymore. There's no way I want to work for a company whose CEO has publicly supported voting against two people's right to be happy.<p>For those that say don't mix business with politics, think about what you are saying. Politics affect our day to day lives and the way we live or die. How can we separate politics from any other sphere of our lives?
I understand where the authors are coming from. They're made that Eich supported a bill that denies their rights. However, what Eich does is his own, personal business. The writers, at least in my mind, are mixing business with their personal lives.<p>I support gay marriage, but I think that this isn't too much more than needless outrage. When someone boycotts Google because Google supports gay marriage, a lot of us look at them and go "Wow! What an idiot, boycotting Google because they think that Google is immoral! They're the immoral ones!" This is the exact same thing, it just happens that the authors' views align with our own. I think it's ultimately just petty. I'm glad gay couples can marry in California, where I currently live. I think it's a step in the right direction. I just think that needless outrage like this, which only isolates you from potential customers, gets us nowhere. We get it, you disagree with the CEO's personal values. I understand your outrage, and that might mean nothing to you. I just think there has to be a better way than this to actually get your point across.
I understand your posture and I totally support gay marriage, but you're mixing politics with work, and you're taking a personal issue to a professional level. It's Brendan Eich that supported the prop 8, not Mozilla. That's a very very very VERY unprofessional stance. From now on I will be very careful in buying/getting anything from your company because of huge lack of professionalism being shown here.<p>This said, I wish you the best luck in your personal life and I hope you get that gay marriage bill ASAP! All my support from Morocco!
"By using Arabic numerals you are helping terrorists."<p>As long as Mozilla products do not feature a "Not to be used by gays" warning, whatever Eich does in his time is irrelevant. He's free to spend his money in any way he likes. What prevented the authors of this article to spend $1000 to counterbalance Eich's contribution if they are so concerned?
I have a hard time understanding all the call for separating private and work. The issue brought by this post is not private (in the sense that the donations were public) and the purpose of the donation was to make a private view to pass into law, not just express some personal opinion.<p>Also, the position of a CEO on social issues has non negligible impacts on the organization. He won't block Mozilla from hiring gay people of course, but nobody would expect him to actively push gay peoples' rights inside the organization if these were not upheld enough. Or does Mozilla have full parity when it comes to married gays and married hetero couples ? Will married gay people get to work intimately with the new CEO (and not just as a token gay people in the team)?<p>These are all legitimate questions. Perhaps Eich won't be worse than anyone else on these issues, but now his public karma is negative. If from here Mozilla appeared to be championing gay rights and parity more than ever before, then I think team rarebit would revise their position. But until then their reaction, while emotionally charged, seems fair enough※ and sends the right message.<p>※ especially as in anyway they are bound to build for Mozilla's platform nor use Mozilla's products.<p>PS:
From Mozilla's donation page :
"<i>At the heart of Mozilla is a global community with a shared mission—to build the Internet the world needs. Support Mozilla with a donation today—for a better web and a better world.</i>"<p>I think a lot of people really see Mozilla as organization with strong moral stance, and actually working towards making the world better. Visceral reactions on events like this one are the flip side of the coin.
This is definitely one of those moral fashions [1] that Paul Graham wrote about:<p>"What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed."<p>Society has shifted on this issue, such that the traditional is considered unacceptable to hold; you're ostracized with negative labels should you hold the unfashionable position. This is precisely what TeamRarebit is doing to Brendan Eich: ostracizing him for his moral stance, one that has fallen out of fashion.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html</a>
Would you also reject Tomas Jefferson as a founding father of America because he owned slaves? Should Martin Luther King also be rejected as an icon of the civil rights movement because he plagiarized material and had extramarital affairs with women. What people do or think in their personal lives and the value they add to a company are two different things. What about Nelson Mandella? Bill Clinton? Or all the other men with weaknesses, sins, mistakes, and flaws?<p>Sit down with me for 5 minutes and I'll find a whole bunch of personal things about you I don't like either, but should that affect weather or not I employ you?
Relevant link to Eich's suppport of California's Prop 8: <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/04/business/la-fi-tn-brendan-eich-prop-8-contribution-20120404" rel="nofollow">http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/04/business/la-fi-tn-br...</a><p>This is not something that I was familiar with.
I support your decision to boycott, although I personally disagree with it.<p>I wish you would give Brendan the chance to repent.<p>First of all, and most importantly, it's unlikely they are going to shitcan him as CEO.<p>Second, he has not spoken about his motivations for donating to Prop 8. If he was doing so in pursuit of abolishing the marriage institution altogether, I consider that very different than doing it because he only wants straight people to marry. (Since this is a politically charged issue, I will say that while I am personally in favor of abolishing marriage altogether, I think actively working to deny gays the right to marry in the interim is an exceptionally absurd idea.)<p>Third, his views may have changed over the years.<p>If he came out saying he was wrong and donated 10x the amount he donated to Prop 8 to a LGBT charity, I would consider that a win. There are ways to make this right without shitcanning him.
Irrelevant of any feelings towards being gay or not.<p>Surely this is a form of oppression in itself. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, whether you approve of them or not, and so by effectively black-mailing others to conform to your perceived social 'right'.<p>I see this as a sad attempt at press. Having never heard of this company or product before.
I don't know what it is about gay marriage that draws people in to this ridiculous witch hunt. I'm neutral on the issue because I feel it's complicated like every other polarizing topic, but to a lot of folks it's solid black-and-white, good-vs-evil. But the pro-gay-marriage crowd seems to go beyond that. To them, it's so black-and-white that one's not even allowed to <i>hold</i> the other view. These people don't even acknowledge the legitimacy of any other beliefs but their own and refuse to stoop to the level of debating the other side on intellectual grounds.<p>> It’s not a witch hunt.<p>You bet your ass it is. It's another in a string of incidents, including boycotting chick fil a for it's owner's beliefs, boycotting duck dynasty for that one guy's beliefs, boycotting starbucks for it's owner's beliefs, the list goes own.<p>Now this is not to take a particular stance on the issue. It's to say that dismissing the legitimacy of other's beliefs besides your own shows a pretty absurd level of intellectual hubris (not unheard of around these parts).
I was unaware of this issue until today but I think Hampton is really great. And I think his position here is thoroughly defensible. How unfortunate this all is.<p>Edit: I see he is being accused here of blackmail and oppression himself. Wow. Fuck you guys.
I am sure this was a hard decision to make but this was the right one. It is hard to overlook one's past actions and afaik brendan has not apologized/redacted his stance.<p>BTW, Apple rejected quite a few gay apps in the past. They should strongly consider rejecting everything Apple made.
Gotta be extreme to get any attention. At least give Brendan a way out other than stepping down. Maybe he will apologize and try to make amends in light of his new responsibility.
Eich's response to the publicity surrounding the donation in 2012: <a href="https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/" rel="nofollow">https://brendaneich.com/2012/04/community-and-diversity/</a>
Their actions seem perfectly reasonable considering they are a gay, married couple in California. And they are just announcing why they are breaking off their association with Mozilla. As far as I can tell they aren't making a "with us or against us" stand against anybody else not following suit, so I can hardly begrudge them this.
This is an absolutely knee jerk reaction. Just the way I stand for a gay couple's right to remain together I also support Eich's right to oppose a government policy which he believes is not right. I do not think anyone should boycott Eich or his organization because of the opinions which he holds about an issue that has nothing to do with his organization.<p>Also please do not paint the Gay marriages as some kind of black & white issue. There are plenty of subtle differences here. Traditional marriage laws which gives so many benefits to couples were designed with an assumption that marriages are only between man and woman. We can not mindlessly extend them to all kind of marriages.<p>Just the way I support gay marriages, I also support man-woman-woman or man-woman-man or [man|woman|<i>]</i> relationships also. Does that mean if an American man marries 3 Arab women all of them should get a green card ? Should a person with two wives be given more tax benefits ? What happens to parent's property distribution when brother marries his sister ?<p>The only moral position I feel worth taking is that government should protect individual liberties which involves getting into any kind of partnership among consenting adults. Beyond that everything has shades of grey.
Good luck finding a browser where the ceo or vps behind it agree 100% with anyone's views.<p>Unless you can point out that his (asshole, imho) views affected how he worked for Mozilla, than doing what you are doing is as bad as people that fired or did not purchased from companies supporting gay rights.
I wouldn't necessarily do the same thing but I can understand why they did it. It can be really really hard to stomach doing work that in anyway benefits somebody so opposed to something that fundamentally defines you as a person.
Boycotting over this issue is reasonable. However, I hope that the author also understands that different people can have freedom to express differing views, in a private capacity.<p>In my experience, anyone expressing any viewpoints other than a pro-LGBT one are vociferously attacked, which again would be fine if the tone was more reasonable. People who fight for LGBT rights were once treated with extreme disrespect and abuse. It sadly still occurs. But now the shoe is on the other foot: I think it's odd that those who were previously mistreated start mistreating others when they gain acceptance.
ComputerIndustryBlacklist.com is availble as of writing if someone was looking for a side project. Considering the professions involved, I'm sure we can do better than a bunch of Hollywood execs.
Let me get this, if some one donates his own money to a totally legal cause should be fired?<p>This has a name, is called extortion, I would definitively boycott Firefox if they remove this person.
I should start this off by saying I believe gay couples should be allowed to get married. I cannot fathom what reasoning you can use to say that gay people should not be allowed to marriage. However, the more I learn about the topic, the more I realize it's actually very complicated.<p>With that being said... Marriage seems screwed up. Why do we have unions of two people? Why don't we allow the union of three people? Or more? Where do we draw the line? What if some guy/gal wants to marry his waifu/husbando, or another person wants to marry their car?<p>People say stuff about the sanctity of marriage, but it seems like a horrible joke. Look at divorce rates! Traditional marriage looks like a joke.<p>I'll admit I'm not very well educated on the topic, I'd love to hear the reasoning for these limitations. Maybe it would make sense to just break out the benefits [1] into more types of unions. For example, I can see how you might not want to allow a 5 person marriage where only 1 person has citizenship in the US; then you would have four people gaining citizenship at the same time.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_and_responsibilities_of_marriages_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_and_responsibilities_of_...</a>
I find it fascinating how so many people are content to crucify Mozilla for appointing as a CEO a man who had the sheer gall to contribute to a PAC opposing gay marriage.<p>Yet every time Rand Paul gets brought up his own opposition to same-sex marriage doesn't seem to draw 2 separate 200+ comment HN threads dedicated to how morally bankrupt he is. Is that simply because opposing the NSA is more morally noble than building an open browser that we feel inclined to overlook <i>his</i> baggage?<p>Better yet, what about people who support the Republican Party. As recently as April 2013 (i.e. not even a year ago) the Republican Party re-affirmed (unanimously) their opposition to same-sex marriage in their party platform. If you donate to or support a GOP candidate you are opposing gay marriage just as surely as if you'd funded Prop. 8 yourself.<p>It's for this reason that it's very important to separate a person's own political preferences from professional duties to the extent possible.<p>And since I apparently have to be worried about pitchforks I'll pre-emptively make clear: I'm proud to support, and have supported, equality of gay marriage rights.
I can't believe this absurdly tiny donation to a single organization, 6+ years ago, has produced so much anger. This seems pretty ridiculous to me, no matter what the organization.
So this thread is a good candidate for the "pending" feature (it has rapidly and predictably become toxic), yet it doesn't seem to be turned on here...
I don't think that the reaction of these people is proportional to what's happened.
The CEO of an organisation supports a cause that he wants in a private capacity, and the people at Firefox Marketplace are conflating this guy with what Mozilla does.
Mozilla isn't this CEO, and this CEO isn't Mozilla. Would you boycott the US constitution because a couple of the authors owned slaves?
There is no "except for gays" part in the TOS or anything, but they decide to go full "except for Mozillians" over one person's acts, who acted not as a will-be-CEO, or as a Mozilla member, but as a single civilian individual.
Technically, they <i>are</i> doing against Mozilla what they think Mozilla <i>could be</i> doing against them, but it doesn't.<p>As Uncel Dolan once said:
Okei, bai
It's not like he hasn't been at the company all along in a management capacity. I don't see how this changes anything or why anyone should choose now to retaliate as opposed to any other arbitrary time.
When you're attempting blackmail, you need to ensure that your hostage has value to your victims that is commensurate with your ransom demand.<p>You have a shitty puzzle game that's getting "thousands of downloads" and you want Mozilla to fire their CEO over that.<p>Not going to happen. We can do without your shitty puzzle game, thanks.
Goodbye, Firefox Marketplace?<p>All right, goodbye... some marginal puzzle game.<p>The part these folks don't get is that their tantrum is not affecting Brendan Eich as much as it's insulting to the fans of their game (whoever they are). They're trying to sic <i>their fans</i> and us against Mozilla with their actions.<p>Prop 8 was justly overturned. It was a battle worth fighting. But we're all equal now. So do we owe these two fools our support right now? Is this "battle" they're starting worth fighting? What's the cause? To prove we don't take kind to them folk like Brendan Eich round 'ere?<p>Hell no. Part of equality is that I, Mozilla and our society as a whole shouldn't feel the need to care more about the games (literally and figuratively) of these two guys than we care about anyone else out there, <i>now that we're equal</i>.<p>I don't care about "your history", I don't care about your wedding photos, I don't care about any of that. To me, you're just two average folks with a crappy puzzle game. Might be gay, straight, white, black, red, brown, tall, short, I don't care. Your cheap outrage doesn't mean anything more than usual to me <i>just because you're gay</i>.<p>I'm <i>equally</i> indifferent.