I wonder how much of this, has too do with social justice going to far in the harassment of Brendan Eich.<p>I mean, maybe someone with his background in charge would know why its important for Mozilla to keep this kind of projects even if it looks they are not going anywhere, because this is what gives Mozilla meaning in the end.<p>Im not a mozillian, so i might be totally wrong, but maybe
this is a case of the MBA's taking over and trying to focus into what they have learned to do.. look at the profit margins and think they are spending too much in research projects.<p>There are a lot of examples of other companies losing their engineering culture, starting to think more in terms of cash and profit, and finally vanishing its purpose and meaning.<p>IBM(lost in the 80's), Microsoft almost loosing it in the Ballmer era, Sun, and the most proeminent case: Yahoo.<p>Just to make it clear: Tech companies as any other company must have a good financial health and this is very important, but they cannot afford to loose their soul.<p>Once their engineering and innovation culture is gone, they become void and suffer from a slow bleeding til the death.<p>We must face it, our economical systems of incentives, the economical game generally speaking, its broken.<p>And tech and arts are proeminent endeavors that tend to get trojan horsed by this yuppie mentality turning things that once had meaning, into meaningful cash cows that work for the few people that cash out from the corrupted source.<p>(Apparently, it works a little better for industrial-level enterprises).<p>My hope is that, with time, this will become more evident, and research find innovative ways to make a better economical game so that creative, art and engineering culture kind of companies can have a much larger life span.<p>By the way, they had a pretty good leverage on Rust (and Rust was a really risk bet that ended doing great). The fact that they fired the people with this background just shows that they have no clue of what they are really doing.<p>* Edit: just being clear about people with conservative views.. I dont like and even despise what he did politically speaking, but as long as he were a good fit for the job, and never forced his political and social views into the company, i dont agree with the outcome.. and the reason is starting to show up now.. Much more important things are starting to fall out, and in the end even people with progressive views and good engineering background ended fired in the long term. <i>