Mozilla CEO resigned

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  1. That is a baseless assumption, I directly quote him in many of my posts.

  2. Your quote is from after he already resigned, prior to his resignation he defended his position in 2 separate interviews, maybe if you followed this story more closely you’d know that.  In the same interview you quote from he says he hasn’t changed his stance and he believes that changing his stance would make him “appear to be the kind of person that bows to pressure” and that while he still holds the same opinion he believes his other actions will show him to be a tolerant person. He also defended it weeks before when the board appointing him to CEO questioned him specifically about this.

  3. None of us in this thread are “running him out of town on a rail”, this entire comment thread is ex post facto to his resigning, if you are going to be an apologetic at least get your chronology straight. None of this conversation has had any effect on his position on Mozilla.

  4. Even he admits that his actions make him not the best choice for the position which is why he stepped down. Mozilla has set itself apart from other organizations by being a bastion for personal freedoms. No one would bat an eyelash if he was CEO of Chick-fil-A, or if he was CTO or a technology consultant at Mozilla. The problem was he was at the visionary leadership position of a company that stands for very different values then his actions. He agrees and says the exact same thing, but why take the guys own words for it…

Of course all of these things have been addressed dozens of times in the above discussion.  I know it is quite lengthy so i wouldn’t have expected you to read the entire thing, but i don’t see how it would be possible to miss them all.

I’ll leave you with the words of chenille which also apply nicely here… :slight_smile:

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He was fired, as CEOs are fired - meaning they are forced to resign. Thats how things work in big business. Whrn is the last time you ever heard of a CEO being fired? They can’t be. They are forced to resign. As for your inverted logic on why taergeting and attacking someone for the beliefs is somehow a blessed gestyure when you believe in it, but beyond reproach when someone else does it, lets go to Andrew Sullivan, who is above criticism when it comes to gay causes:

"If it is unconscionable to support a company whose CEO once donated to the cause against marriage equality, why is it not unconscionable to support Hillary Clinton, who opposed marriage equality as recently as 2008, and who was an integral part of an administration that embraced the Defense Of Marriage Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton? How do you weigh the relative impact of a president strongly backing DOMA – even running ads touting his support for it in the South – and an executive who spent $1000 for an anti-marriage equality Proposition?

Hillary Clinton only declared her support for marriage equality in 2013. Before that, she opposed it. In 2000, she said that marriage “has a historic, religious and moral context that goes back to the beginning of time. And I think a marriage has always been between a man and a woman.” Was she then a bigot? On what conceivable grounds can the Democratic party support a candidate who until only a year ago was, according to the latest orthodoxy, the equivalent of a segregationist, and whose administration enacted more anti-gay laws and measures than any in American history?

There is a difference, of course, between Brendan Eich and Hillary Clinton. Eich has truly spoken of the pain he once caused and owned up to it:

“I know some will be skeptical about this, and that words alone will not change anything. I can only ask for your support to have the time to ‘show, not tell’; and in the meantime express my sorrow at having caused pain.”

Has either Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton ever expressed sorrow that they hurt so many lives, gave cover to some of the vilest homophobes, and credentialized themselves with some on the right by rank homophobia in the 1996 campaign? Not to my knowledge. They have regretted what they did but never taken full moral responsibility for the hurt and pain they caused.

My view is that the Clintons are not and never have been bigots.

They’re human beings in changing times who had good intentions and sometimes failed to live up to them. The same with Brandon Eich, a man with infinitely less power than the Clintons but who nonetheless did the wrong thing."

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huh? i guess that setting up straw men that have already been smashed dozens of times in this discussion thread is somehow more fun then addressing any of the actual points i’ve made. :frowning: didn’t address a single one…sighs and i’d actually bothered to reply to your points.

i’ll gladly respond if you want to address some of my actual point. just a though.

to address your main new point here, i’d never ever vote for a presidential candidate that was currently against gay marriage, period.

Eich defended his stance against gay marriage weeks before during the CEO interviews by the board, which is how this all came out -again- btw (this isn’t the first time he had defended his position of being against ssm rights), and again he defended his stance during the 2 interviews prior to his resignation. In the interview you cherry pick from he also says that he isn’t going to change his position because that would make him appear to be the kind of person that bows to pressure. So you might want to rethink that very mistaken assumption you have about his stance at the time of his resignation.

Also, even he agrees that he his views make him not the right person for the position, but you are welcome to keep arguing the guy about himself…what does he know about it?

And as to him being fired, the board asked him for an official apology, he chose to resign instead.
He publicly argued for his right to hold personal beliefs contrary to those that guide the company he was heading. But don’t let silly facts stop you from forming opinions contrary to them…facts, who needs them anyway…lol.

yep, that statement most certainly was, and ignorant.  The idea that marriage should be a monogamous relationship between a single man and woman originated between the 6th and 9th centuries as the result of a power struggle between the catholic church and the royal family.  Hardly the beginning of time.

Addressed dozens of times above. we aren’t discussing his right to have an opinion. we all agree he has the right to have any opinion just like we have the right to have an opinion about his opinion. If you are against same sex marriage, fine don’t marry someone of the same gender. If you try and force your opinion onto other people and take away their rights, that is NOT an opinion. That is discrimination and bigotry. You really can’t conflate those two very different things and have any sort of meaningful or intelligent conversation on the subject.

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Related:

After Eich resigns, conservatives slam Mozilla—and call for boycott

article:

ars writer:

Will we soon see the day in which each faction in a political battle backs only its “own” technical products—one side using only Google, the other using only Bing—based on the personal views of the CEOs?

My response:

I hope so and I hope it spreads to affect all big corporations.

It would be ideal if corporations started being viewed more like human institutions than some amorphous safe haven for rotten behavior all in the name of people being able to hide behind non-human, corporate non-accountability via an artificial wall of paperwork and legalese. The wall between themselves and greater society needs to come down. Bring down the wall.

Besides, corporations asked for this.

Corporations wanted to be treated like people with free speech rights, etc. - They got it.

Corporations wanted to be treated like people and be able to make unlimited donations to candidates in campaign ads, etc. in order to drown out the speech of average Americans. - They got it.

Corporations wanted to be treated like people and be able to sue for libel, etc. - They got it.

Well, you got what you asked for, corporations. We are now going to pick you apart and see what kind of “people” you really are, just like we should have been doing in the first place.

It’s time for all these people (corporations) to understand that there’s a line drawn in the sand on many issues. Just like all other public people, it’s time for you to choose a side and deal with the benefits and potential consequences from choosing those sides.

If you, as a corporation, want to attack civil rights, we will come at you like any other person deserves.

Welcome to the bed you made, corporations. Congrats, you’re “people” now! You got it.

[evil grin]

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I can see why people who not want him in it (heck, I didn’t care for it either) but once he was hired, being forced out by a public inquisition is a bit extreme and doesn’t speak well for people either.

Why is it OK to say you’d prefer he didn’t be the CEO while within this same thread you said it was a cowardly act, etc. to voice that opinion? Shouldn’t you be keeping your opinion to yourself just the same? Or, is the free speech moratorium over now that he’s stepped down? What if you’re damaging this bigot’s future employment by piling on the consensus that he shouldn’t have been the CEO at Mozilla?

I’m not sure free speech hypocrisy speaks well for people either.

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I say allow people to be wrong and to learn from it. It takes patience and lots of tongue bitting.

So if you think it’s wrong to ask that a bigot CEO steps down, why aren’t you patiently biting your tongue in this case? Shouldn’t you just allow us to be wrong and learn from it?

Martin Luther King’s “I bite my tongue” speech he secretly gave to his cat while alone in his kitchen did wonders for civil rights.

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Brendan was not forced to resign. I’ve actually heard the board members discuss this and they were very clear that not only was he not forced to resign but he chose to leave at this point rather than discuss potential other roles that were offered once he said he was going to resign.

This isn’t one of those corporate things where he was forced out but we’ll all pretend he wasn’t. He was very clearly not forced out by the board, by their own statements. I’d quote them directly but the presentations were done to staff.

That said, Mozilla did post a FAQ about this.

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This is factually untrue. I know it is untrue by statements I’ve personally heard from board members. It is untrue based on the FAQ that was posted by Mozilla yesterday. No “apology” was ever demanded of him by the board. So, citation?

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@cowicide and @albill Stop replying to each other.

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http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/fivethirtyeight/2013/03/01/poll-finds-record-support-for-same-sex-marriage-in-california/

This article is from a year ago, but I presume this trend is continuing at a similar rate. It looks like a number of people have evolved in their position on SSM since 2008, such that prop 8 would presumably have failed badly if it had been proposed now. It seems to have been pretty difficult up to this point to change people’s minds, so why now? Of course there have been a number of factors (internet activism, force of numbers, increasing visibility, it’s become a shibboleth of being a reasonable person, growth of equality laws etc.), but I wouldn’t be surprised if Modern Family has played quite a significant role. Many opponents of gay marriage don’t know any gay couples personally, so it’s easy to base your views on how fundamentally different you feel gay couples are from straight couples. This is a show that isn’t overly preachy but shows a normal couple who have differences and normal couple problems that people can relate to. This is the closest many people have come to getting to know a gay couple not “being gay” (campaigning, criticising, forwarding the “gay agenda”), but rather having the same struggles, squabbles, worries, victories and problems with family that everyone else has. It’s easy to argue with statistics or talking points, but meeting real (or realistic; it is just a tv show) people is very disarming.

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I didn’t say he can’t contribute, I said if he’s gonna contribute he has to live by his actions. I personally would do anything I can to fuck the career of someone with such offensive views … that’s my right as well.

I don’t care when the contribution was, especially since it was only 5 years ago. I also find it entirely ridiculous that anyone could defend financially contributing to restricting the freedoms of people whose choices have no effect on you. What does it matter if gay people get married? It’s not like stopping gay marriage will stop homosexuality and it’s not like gay marriage won’t eventually be legal everywhere in the developed world.

It’s a losing battle being fought by assholes who can’t accept that society isn’t here to be shaped by their shitty opinion. They need to learn that they should butt out of people’s personal lives or their own personal lives are fair game to be laid bare for all to judge.

Your last point is very odd. Who would be expecting you to recant your pro-gay marriage views? Why would explaining that supporting the rights of people to make choices about their own lives be difficult?

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My apologies, I was mislead by poor wording in The Verge’s coverage 2 days ago, it was Hampton Catlin who was calling for him to apologize when he refused to. Upon rereading the article to find the citation i realized that the sentence I had read was ambiguously worded but the proceeding paragraph pointed it to being Catlin, not the board.

I’m glad they posted that to clear some of these lingering questions up. That either hadn’t been posted, or I was not yet aware of it, when I made that comment. But thank you for posting the link to that, it is helpful. I don’t see anything on the FAQ as to whether or not they asked him to issue an apology, I don’t even see the word apology mentioned, but I’ll concede that they probably didn’t seeing as I’d misunderstood the source I was pulling that tidbit from. cheers.

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You sure about that?

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What is inclusiveness?

In Cnet’s interview with Eich, from a few days before his resignation, Eich gives an indication what he means, by talking about working with people in Indonesia who oppose same-sex marriage:

We have a strong Indonesian community. We’re developing Firefox OS to go into market there. I have people there on the other side of this particular issue. They don’t bring it into Mozilla when they work in the Mozilla community. I met a lot of them at Mozcamp 2012 in Singapore. They don’t have quite the megaphone in that part of the world. But the Mozilla mission and our inclusiveness principles really must matter to include them too.
{…}
Do you think we should judge executives by their political beliefs?
Eich: For Mozilla, it’s problematic because of our principles of inclusiveness, because the Indonesian community supports me but doesn’t have quite the megaphone. We have to be careful to put the principles of inclusiveness first.

So, for Eich, inclusiveness means being careful not to alienate people who want to suppress the rights of others; whereas many of us see inclusiveness as a matter of supporting and extending the rights of those who have been and are excluded. I am fairly certain there are gay people in Indonesia.

Whose voice is more deserving of inclusion? The oppressed, or the oppressors?

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It is simple really, to be truly tolerant we must not tolerate intolerance.

“We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.” -Karl Popper

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Things went a LOT smoother behind the scenes for MLK once he got the cats on board, though. No mean feat, either. Cats hate speeches.

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Cats hate speeches.

Not to mention you’ve got to herd them together in the first place.

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You sure about that? Medium

And the real tragedy here is that Mozilla would have sorted this out satisfactorily if it hadn’t been sensationalized by the media and turned into an internet witch hunt.

He spewed the well-worn “witch hunt” talking point. Credibility on topic… lost.

Also, David Flanagan seems like yet another person who thinks the real tragedy is that people used their free speech rights to ask a bigoted, public leader to step down. Right… blame everyone else except the bigot’s actions while ignoring the real tragedy of how this bigot contributed to the loss of civil rights for Americans.

Like many who attack those who used their free speech rights to ask this bigoted CEO (who attacked civil rights) to step down, David Flanagan’s sense of ethical priorities is pretty screwed up. And, that’s tragic.

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Speaking of…

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Just the CEOs of “tolerant” and “progressive” organizations.

So is any company entitled to ask for the resignation of an employee whose actions off the job are not in accord with what that company sees as its world view??

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