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
... 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.
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.
Quote from: Jet City Hustle on April 04, 2014, 11:59:04 AM
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/25/matt-taibbi-corporate-evil-guy-power-rankings_n_3149839.html)... doing much more measurable harm -- where's the pressure on them?
Boycott finance :lulz:
One other reson this stuck: The employees themselves objected to his appointment (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/01/mozilla-ceo-brendan-eich-refuses-to-quit).
QuoteThe 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.
Quote from: Cramulus on April 04, 2014, 04:02:36 PM
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.
Quote from: Cramulus on April 04, 2014, 02:26:07 PM
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.
:wave:
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?
Quote from: Pergamos on April 04, 2014, 06:59:56 PM
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.
Quote from: Jet City Hustle on April 05, 2014, 04:17:52 AM
Quote from: Cramulus on April 04, 2014, 02:26:07 PM
Funny how nobody boycotts javascript though.
:wave:
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...
Cramulus, I don't understand what the complaint is, here. The public heard something they didn't like, and decided to do something peacefully about it while not being consistent and pure? That's hardly new. The public is made up of people, obviously, and people react to things they notice. For whatever reason, they noticed this.
Not sure what we should do about it, either, or whether we should so something even if we could.
Mainly I think it's a big manipulation -- people's reasonable need for social justice is being coopted and used as a weapon in unrelated fights and marketing campaigns which do not meaningfully serve social justice. I think that it's unproductive at best and harmful to the dialog at worst.
I'm having flashbacks to how Nabisco got a lot of street cred for releasing this image:
(http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/ht_oreo_pride_mr_120626_wblog.jpg)
---and yet the top recipient of Nabisco money is Rick Fucking Santorum. (http://influenceexplorer.com/organization/nabisco-brands-inc/181d3af138f74ba4844cd9d846729f55)
That's why I see high-profile corporate opinions more in the light of marketing than activism, unless a meaningful amount of money is changing hands. We crave the spectacle surrounding activism. If you could really support LGBT rights by not using firefox or javascript, that would be amazing. If we boycotted companies that gave meaningful amounts of money to trash gay rights, that would be amazing. I just don't think this is doing it.
It's probably good that we are driving homophobes underground though, don't get me wrong. I just feel like American activism is badly malnourished and we are just basically feeding it junk food.
Quote from: Cramulus on April 10, 2014, 07:16:39 PM
Mainly I think it's a big manipulation -- people's reasonable need for social justice is being coopted and used as a weapon in unrelated fights and marketing campaigns which do not meaningfully serve social justice. I think that it's unproductive at best and harmful to the dialog at worst.
I'm having flashbacks to how Nabisco got a lot of street cred for releasing this image:
(http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/ht_oreo_pride_mr_120626_wblog.jpg)
---and yet the top recipient of Nabisco money is Rick Fucking Santorum. (http://influenceexplorer.com/organization/nabisco-brands-inc/181d3af138f74ba4844cd9d846729f55)
That's why I see high-profile corporate opinions more in the light of marketing than activism, unless a meaningful amount of money is changing hands. We crave the spectacle surrounding activism. If you could really support LGBT rights by not using firefox or javascript, that would be amazing. If we boycotted companies that gave meaningful amounts of money to trash gay rights, that would be amazing. I just don't think this is doing it.
Problem: There isn't much dialogue in the first place. On one side, you have the tumblr social justice warrior assholes, on the other side the WBC shitbags and their ilk...While anyone who has a reasonable approach is ground into hamburger between the two.
What I saw here was a knee-jerk reaction. That's usually bad. But it was a knee jerk reaction
in the right direction. A majority of people got pissed because this guy likes to shit all over people who never harmed him, when they heard about it.
Sort of like if you're at a party, and some guy starts jawing racist bullshit. These days, most of the time, everyone's gonna look at him like he has a communicable disease. 40 years ago, they'd have agreed with him. 30 years ago, they'd have checked to make sure no minorities were around, and then agreed with him. 20 years ago, they would have made excuses for him.
And that's a sort of progress.
Quote from: Cramulus on April 10, 2014, 07:22:15 PM
It's probably good that we are driving homophobes underground though, don't get me wrong. I just feel like American activism is badly malnourished and we are just basically feeding it junk food.
Beat me to it.
But I think American activism right now is nothing BUT junk food. If my first experience with activism was the retards who are getting all the attention these days, I'd be a reactionary. No shit.
It's sad to say, but this IS the healthiest public reaction I've seen in a while.
I hear what you're saying. It's indicative of a positive trend, I agree.
It's just, like, Jim Walton (of the Walmart Clan) gave 75x more money than Eich to oppose gay adoption. And that's just one shareholder. The company as a whole has given unbelievable amounts of money to funding anti-equality legislation. (http://makingchangeatwalmart.org/files/2013/04/LGBT.pdf) But when I ask people why they're not boycotting walmart, they're like "Meh", or make a case that walmart's customers are already bigots, so what can you do? Well I guess making a meaningless browser decision is like helping. Might as well wank off over a gay rights sigil too. :p
Quote from: Cramulus on April 10, 2014, 07:37:59 PM
I hear what you're saying. It's indicative of a positive trend, I agree.
It's just, like, Jim Walton (of the Walmart Clan) gave 75x more money than Eich to oppose gay adoption. And that's just one shareholder. The company as a whole has given unbelievable amounts of money to funding anti-equality legislation. (http://makingchangeatwalmart.org/files/2013/04/LGBT.pdf) But when I ask people why they're not boycotting walmart, they're like "Meh", or make a case that walmart's customers are already bigots, so what can you do? Well I guess making a meaningless browser decision is like helping. Might as well wank off over a gay rights sigil too. :p
True. I'm not expecting a perfect world by next Tuesday.
The best I can do is not spend a dime at WalMart, to be honest. But the idea that WalMart's customers are "all bigots" is pretty horrifying, when you consider that what they're ACTUALLY saying is "poor".
I can say that Walmart's harassment policy at least covers LGBT people...
But I can also say that the policy is roundly ignored, as well.
Quote from: CorbeauEtRenard on April 10, 2014, 07:48:25 PM
I can say that Walmart's harassment policy at least covers LGBT people...
But I can also say that the policy is roundly ignored, as well.
That's worse than no policy at all.
Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on April 10, 2014, 07:58:01 PM
Quote from: CorbeauEtRenard on April 10, 2014, 07:48:25 PM
I can say that Walmart's harassment policy at least covers LGBT people...
But I can also say that the policy is roundly ignored, as well.
That's worse than no policy at all.
Pretty much. It's one of several reasons I couldn't put up with their shit for two full pay periods before quitting.
I was always kinda in two minds about the Mozilla boycott. You all know I'm not exactly a fan of half-measures, or measures that turn out to later be counterproductive.
On the one hand, the CEO is a bigot. No question about it. Debate over. If you feel strongly enough about that to boycott the product, by all means I wont argue with that. I was considering it myself, though given how used to FF I am over the years, finding another browser I'd like would not be easy.
On the other hand...more than a few gay people in the media were not keen on the campaign. Andrew Sullivan (admittedly a bit of a strange duck, a Catholic gay conservative Obama supporter), compared the way in which the campaign was conducted as more akin to one of the religious right's five minutes of hate. And as others, riffing off Sullivan pointed out, it was giving a huge amount of ammunition to the FOX News "lefty socialist tyranny" meme.
Of course, FOX News would generate an outrage where one wouldn't exist anyway. But given 52% of California did, back in 2008 vote in favour of Prop 8, there's an argument to be made that the conduct of the protest was, perhaps...ill-advised. Furthermore, there's an unsavoury history in the USA of civil actors engaging in the policing of free speech, especially in California.
And, as Cram points out, the response was not very proportionate to what actually occured, when one really looks at the money flowing around to homophobic candidates and from other companies. At the very least, that leaves the protests open to the charge of hypocrisy.
I suspect one of the reasons the protest caught on as much as it did is because Firefox is a browser many internet-savvy people use. And those internet savvy people are also savvy in the realm of "hashtag activism". And that's the only game in town, because most of these people don't understand any other way of protesting, or have pre-emptively cut themselves off from the people doing other kinds of protests for some kind of ideological heresy (usually being far less accomodating of capitalism, as it turns out. See: popular bashing of Jacobin Magazine by Slate, The Nation, NYT etc etc).
Quote from: Cramulus on April 10, 2014, 05:55:03 PM
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?
Quote from: Pergamos on April 04, 2014, 06:59:56 PM
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.
Quote from: Jet City Hustle on April 05, 2014, 04:17:52 AM
Quote from: Cramulus on April 04, 2014, 02:26:07 PM
Funny how nobody boycotts javascript though.
:wave:
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...
That's how I know it's inherently homophobic. Otherwise it would run the back end too. [/borat voice]
Quote from: Jet City Hustle on April 10, 2014, 09:58:20 PM
Quote from: Cramulus on April 10, 2014, 05:55:03 PM
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?
Quote from: Pergamos on April 04, 2014, 06:59:56 PM
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.
Quote from: Jet City Hustle on April 05, 2014, 04:17:52 AM
Quote from: Cramulus on April 04, 2014, 02:26:07 PM
Funny how nobody boycotts javascript though.
:wave:
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...
That's how I know it's inherently homophobic. Otherwise it would run the back end too. [/borat voice]
(http://www.ski-epic.com/gifs/g007_citizen_kane_slow_clap.gif)
Quote from: Jet City Hustle on April 10, 2014, 09:58:20 PM
That's how I know it's inherently homophobic. Otherwise it would run the back end too. [/borat voice]
very nice :lol:
Quote from: The Good Reverend Roger on April 10, 2014, 07:25:02 PM
Quote from: Cramulus on April 10, 2014, 07:16:39 PM
Mainly I think it's a big manipulation -- people's reasonable need for social justice is being coopted and used as a weapon in unrelated fights and marketing campaigns which do not meaningfully serve social justice. I think that it's unproductive at best and harmful to the dialog at worst.
I'm having flashbacks to how Nabisco got a lot of street cred for releasing this image:
(http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/ht_oreo_pride_mr_120626_wblog.jpg)
---and yet the top recipient of Nabisco money is Rick Fucking Santorum. (http://influenceexplorer.com/organization/nabisco-brands-inc/181d3af138f74ba4844cd9d846729f55)
That's why I see high-profile corporate opinions more in the light of marketing than activism, unless a meaningful amount of money is changing hands. We crave the spectacle surrounding activism. If you could really support LGBT rights by not using firefox or javascript, that would be amazing. If we boycotted companies that gave meaningful amounts of money to trash gay rights, that would be amazing. I just don't think this is doing it.
Problem: There isn't much dialogue in the first place. On one side, you have the tumblr social justice warrior assholes, on the other side the WBC shitbags and their ilk...While anyone who has a reasonable approach is ground into hamburger between the two.
What I saw here was a knee-jerk reaction. That's usually bad. But it was a knee jerk reaction in the right direction. A majority of people got pissed because this guy likes to shit all over people who never harmed him, when they heard about it.
Sort of like if you're at a party, and some guy starts jawing racist bullshit. These days, most of the time, everyone's gonna look at him like he has a communicable disease. 40 years ago, they'd have agreed with him. 30 years ago, they'd have checked to make sure no minorities were around, and then agreed with him. 20 years ago, they would have made excuses for him.
And that's a sort of progress.
I keep coming back to this post.
Because if I'm honest with myself, I should put the Occupy protests and the Firefox boycott in the same boat. I find myself defending occupy on the basis that we need
something like it. And you can't expect hashtag activists to become real activists overnight, it's an iterative process. So maybe I shouldn't be as harsh on this thing? It's a start.
They say that for every thousand axes hacking at the branches of corruption, only one or two are actually swinging at the tree's trunk. There are meaningful battles and meaningless battles. You can extinguish the couch but if the house is still on fire, it's a losing game.
In a larger sense, what's do you guys think is the best way to help? Is it better to help redirect all these hatchets to the root of the tree? Or is just better that people get practice with a hatchet? And I realize this is a bit broader than just this particular civil rights battle. Are All forms of protest good, because the Body Politic needs to develop those muscles? Or is it actually destructive / distracting to waste energy on these trivial battlegrounds?
Your protest is insufficiently revolutionary,
return to the paddock IMMEDIATELY
\
(http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb163/wompcabal/forum/WATCHITBUDDY.jpg)
Quote from: Cramulus on April 11, 2014, 01:59:03 PM
I keep coming back to this post.
Because if I'm honest with myself, I should put the Occupy protests and the Firefox boycott in the same boat. I find myself defending occupy on the basis that we need something like it. And you can't expect hashtag activists to become real activists overnight, it's an iterative process. So maybe I shouldn't be as harsh on this thing? It's a start.
They say that for every thousand axes hacking at the branches of corruption, only one or two are actually swinging at the tree's trunk. There are meaningful battles and meaningless battles. You can extinguish the couch but if the house is still on fire, it's a losing game.
In a larger sense, what's do you guys think is the best way to help? Is it better to help redirect all these hatchets to the root of the tree? Or is just better that people get practice with a hatchet? And I realize this is a bit broader than just this particular civil rights battle. Are All forms of protest good, because the Body Politic needs to develop those muscles? Or is it actually destructive / distracting to waste energy on these trivial battlegrounds?
I think Occupy was a good idea that was poorly executed. It would have been really effective, if they hadn't decided it needed an internal government. A regular demonstration does nothing. A demonstration that gets in the way DOES do something. I think Occupy a banker's street (remember that?) is even more useful. Going after the banks while ignoring the actual people that do the shitty things is basically agreeing that corporations are people. I was trying to get this point across to St Mae when she decided I wasn't a person, the irony of which still makes me laugh.
Quote from: Cramulus on April 11, 2014, 02:02:26 PM
Your protest is insufficiently revolutionary,
return to the paddock IMMEDIATELY
\
(http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb163/wompcabal/forum/WATCHITBUDDY.jpg)
Not my point.
Hashtag activism signals a wider failure in the body politic, that, in a political system so utterly broken yet resistant to change as ours, language policing and internet mob fury are misdirected energy spent at exerting control over the only kind of politics people can actually engage in.
Hashtag activism will not overcome the conditions that cause hashtag activism, and that is a problem.
Quote from: Cain on April 11, 2014, 03:06:16 PM
Not my point.
sorry - to be clear, I was mocking myself