Mozilla CEO resigns after OkCupid boycott

[Pæs]

Mozilla Chief Executive Brendan Eich has stepped down, the company has said, after an online dating service urged a boycott of the company's web browser because of a donation Eich made to opponents of marriage equality.

The software company came under fire for appointing Eich as CEO last month. In 2008, he gave money to oppose the legalisation of marriage equality in California, a hot-button issue especially at a company that boasts about its policy of inclusiveness and diversity.

"We didn't act like you'd expect Mozilla to act," wrote Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker in a blog post. "We didn't move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We're sorry."

The next step for Mozilla's leadership "is still being discussed," she added, with more information to come next week.

While activists applauded the move, many in the technology community lamented the departure of Eich, who invented the programming language Javascript and co-founded Mozilla.

"Brendan Eich is a good friend of 20 years, and has made a profound contribution to the web and to the entire world," venture capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted.

Eich donated US$1000 in 2008 in support of California's Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in the state until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in June.

His resignation came days after OkCupid.com, the popular online dating site, called for a boycott of Mozilla Firefox to protest the world's Number 2 web browser naming a marriage equality opponent as chief executive.

On Monday, OkCupid sent a message to visitors who accessed the website through Firefox, suggesting they use browsers such as Microsoft Corp's Internet Explorer or Google's Chrome.

"Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples," the message said. "We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid."

- Reuters

[Reginald Ret]

... This is really happening isn't it. The world has gotten very strange. I can't decide wether i am happy that equality is such a hot issue with so many people or sad because of the thoughtpolicing.

[East Coast Hustle]

I don't buy the "thought policing" crap that's going around in regards to this.

And the next time I hear someone spouting off that crap I'm going to ask them directly and hopefully in public whether or not they would have the same respect for the guy if he had been publicly outed as a racist, because I see no functional difference at all. Bigotry is bigotry.

[Reginald Ret]

I don't buy the "thought policing" crap that's going around in regards to this.

And the next time I hear someone spouting off that crap I'm going to ask them directly and hopefully in public whether or not they would have the same respect for the guy if he had been publicly outed as a racist, because I see no functional difference at all. Bigotry is bigotry.

I agree that there is no difference.
The punishment seems like overkill though, if we don't give people the room to be idiots and wrong every once in a while then i'm afraid for my own job. I know I'm nowhere near perfect enough to withstand that level of scrutiny.

[East Coast Hustle]

Being wrong is one thing, donating money to a hate group intent on legally restricting the rights of other people is a whole other thing entirely IMO.

[Cramulus]

No fuckin way, he resigned! I had to google this to make sure it wasn't an april fool's joke.

That's unexpected! I had no idea he'd crack under the pressure. Brilliant marketing on OkCupid's part.



Funny how nobody boycotts javascript though.

[The Johnny]

Im sure every single company and brand have something worthy of being boycotted over.

How bout boycotting Facebook? Of course not, because its inconvenient, but switching browsers takes less than a dozen clicks to do.

[Cramulus]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2014/04/brendan_eich_quits_mozilla_let_s_purge_all_the_antigay_donors_to_prop_8.html


While I think people have every right to be angry at people who donated to prop 8, I still don't see how it has anything to do with mozilla. They have a great corporate policy about diversity. As an organization, they give no money to political causes other than Net Neutrality and privacy.

Even in terms of employee donations to prop 8-- Mozilla employees gave 3x more to fight it than they did to support it.


Tech Companies whose employees gave more money than Mozilla to prop 8: Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo, as well as Disney, DreamWorks, Gap, and Warner Bros.

[LMNO]

Much like everything else, it's in the messaging and the symbolism.  If the other companies had CEOs who were openly bigoted, then you might get the same response, maybe.

The CEO is pretty much the public face of the company; therefore, people tend to associate the company's beliefs with the CEO's.

[Cramulus]

It's just weird how Eich giving $1000 to prop 8 got people to sit up,
but Enron, Goldman Sachs, the Walton Family, Rupert Murdoch, all these guys... doing much more measurable harm -- where's the pressure on them?

[The Johnny]

Boycott finance 

[LMNO]

One other reson this stuck: The employees themselves objected to his appointment.

The first week of Eich's tenure had been marked by a series of public statements by Mozilla staff protesting his appointment, [and] the resignation of three of Mozilla's directors...

So, it looks like it wasn't all OK Cupid and Twitter, some of the pressure came internally.

[Pergamos]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2014/04/brendan_eich_quits_mozilla_let_s_purge_all_the_antigay_donors_to_prop_8.html


While I think people have every right to be angry at people who donated to prop 8, I still don't see how it has anything to do with mozilla. They have a great corporate policy about diversity. As an organization, they give no money to political causes other than Net Neutrality and privacy.

Even in terms of employee donations to prop 8-- Mozilla employees gave 3x more to fight it than they did to support it.


Tech Companies whose employees gave more money than Mozilla to prop 8: Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Yahoo, as well as Disney, DreamWorks, Gap, and Warner Bros.

Donations by the CEO seem more important than ones by employees who are not directly steering the course of the company, to me.

[East Coast Hustle]

No fuckin way, he resigned! I had to google this to make sure it wasn't an april fool's joke.

That's unexpected! I had no idea he'd crack under the pressure. Brilliant marketing on OkCupid's part.



Funny how nobody boycotts javascript though.

[Cramulus]

AHHHHHHHHHHahahahhahahaHAHAHhahah

http://uncrunched.com/2014/04/06/the-hypocrisy-of-sam-yagan-okcupid/


Turns out OKCupid's CEO has donated to strongly homophobic politicians too! Anybody else think this wasn't just a PR stunt?

Donations by the CEO seem more important than ones by employees who are not directly steering the course of the company, to me.

If you can show me how Eich's opinion on The Gays influenced Mozilla's company policy in any way, I'm all ears.

Funny how nobody boycotts javascript though.

You don't browse sites that use javascript? That's some dedication! Javascript runs the front end for google, facebook, youtube, yahoo, wikipedia, twitter, wordpress, amazon, ebay...