08 April 2014

On the Mozilla scandal

Like many of you, I too received the Mozilla email about "helping" with communications regarding the "activities of the past week", which is an euphemism for the Brendan Eich scandal. It comes with a FAQ you are expected to quote when talking about the issue.

Since all communications from Mozilla on the topic were opaque, either in blog posts with comments disabled or emails from generic addresses where is useless to reply, I finally decided to write something. Anyway, April 1-st, when I learned about the topic, wasn't a good day to write about serious issues. It may be not me my business what happens inside the Mozilla corporation, but if the Mozilla community feels a need to guide my public communications about it, then maybe it is.

So I am totally unhappy with Mozilla to caving-in to pressure from bullies. It creates a serious precedent and a slippery slope. What's the next step? Once a new CEO is announced, no matter who he is, the browser will be blocked by anti-gay websites? It looks like we are going towards a Balkanized web, where the "best viewed with [Internet Explorer|Netscape Navigator]" buttons are replaced by "blocked for browsers whose CEO have private opinion X".

Seriously, instead of personal political opinions of the Mozilla CEO I was more concerned about him wasting resources on the mobile OS unicorn while the browser looks more and more like a Chrome copy-cat.

8 comments:

  1. sad but true.

    By the way, why it is quite hard to see that he was before homosexual mariages. He was not hitting they personal freedom.

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    1. it is reported he was *not* unfair to LGBT people working for Mozilla, nobody had complains about his behaviour.

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  2. You didn't read the FAQ though :) Brendan resigned, so Mozilla didn't cave-in to anything.

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    1. He resigned due to the pressure put on Mozilla and was not supported bu others inside the corporation, rad the declarations on the topic made by Mitchell Baker.

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  3. In many things relating to the the larger community that a company such as Mozilla serves, the statement "Perception is Truth" carries extra merit. Whether Brendan was espousing his opinions or not is irrelevant in the context of the above statement, since the community already had a firm idea of his opinions on such things as alternative lifestyles. I don't know the man, and take no position on the validity of his resignation. I will say this though, it would make little difference in actual affects to how the community perceives him or continues to perceive him if he were to openly support gay marriage as an attempt to mitigate the perception that currently exists out there about him on this subject. So, in the end, He did the only logical thing he could do, for him the community and Mozilla as a corporation.

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    1. As a member of the community and an occasional contributor to Mozilla, I wasn't aware about his opinion on this matter and wasn't interested about them. They are not related to what Mozilla is doing. Is irrelevant if he is pro-gay or anti-gay as is irrelevant if he is a Christian, Muslim, Scientologist or whatever other religion as is irrelevant if he likes football, American football, basketball or hockey.

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  4. > him wasting resources on the mobile OS unicorn

    As far as I know he wasn't focusing enough on the mobile, which some employees criticized.

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  5. I would argue that it's not his political views that ultimately cost him his job - it's the difficulty he had in interviews, as exemplified by http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/mozilla-ceo-gay-marriage-firestorm-could-hurt-firefox-cause-q-a/ - instead of taking a strong leadership line of "my personal views don't matter - Mozilla is an inclusive organisation, and there is plenty of room for people who disagree with me. Let's concentrate on the open web, not on personal politics", he took the line of "my views are perfectly OK - after all, they're normal for our Indonesian contributors".

    By doing so, he demonstrated that he wasn't able to cope politically with a rather fractious, very diverse organisation - that there was a permanent risk that he'd allow his political views to compromise Mozilla the organisation.

    Put another way; CEO is a political role, not a technical one. Brendan was fine in the CTO role, but as CEO, he risked making Mozilla into something many of its supporters would dislike.

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