Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript and was the CTO of Mozilla.
He is intelligent and works hard on open source. However,
he HAD opposed same sex marriage.
While he was CTO of Mozilla, no one cared. When he became CEO, there was a smear campaign to get rid of him.
I respect his contributions, but not his politics. He has the freedom to say what he believes - I still use Firefox. IMHO this was just an excuse to get ride of him as CEO.
But on a more serious note, from the little I know he got fired because he supported banning same-sex marriage. Which is not just about 'opinion'. That's about discrimination and he should be called out for it.
They all said they didn't resign because of Eich. Sure, they could have been lying. But I'd rather not get into divining intentions and back room discussions none of us were privy to.
I'm all for freedom of speech and quite opposed to the recent college campus behavior of throwing huge fits over anything remotely politically incorrect. Anyone is free to think whatever they want about my marriage and that of others, but the law should always treat people equally. When Eich donated money (and thus most certainly voted) to literally strip existing equal rights away from a minority, it ceased to be about just speech and opinion, and instead became something quite vindictive and nasty.
I'm not going to get into whether it was right to pressure a company over a certain number of employees and/or when they reach a certain position in the company; I'm just going to say that I don't care for Eich's donation to Prop 8 (nor for his design of Javascript, but that's a separate discussion.)
> Mozilla literally forced out the creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich, because of his religious and political views.
That's inaccurate and unfair. He resigned (was not forced out) and the backlash he faced wasn't because of his religious and political views, but because he was working to impose his religious and political views on others. Nobody was demanding that Brendan get gay married, but he wanted to prevent others from getting gay married if they wanted to.
Brendan Eich ran his own smear campaign by generally being a self-centered asshole, and dug his own grave by being a homophobe who refused to back down. On top of that, there are plenty of people (myself included) who will boycott any browser designed by the dude who brought us Javascript.
Nobody looked into Eich's voting record. Eich donated to a campaign against gay marriage, and donations above a certain threshold are public record. Gay people and people who support civil rights who are strong enough coders to work for Mozilla will easily find employment at any of a number of other Bay Area employers run by people who support them. Mozilla was losing developers[1], and Eich took the reasonable action of stepping down instead of destroying his organization. You can imagine a CEO spending money to bring back California's antimiscegenation laws and how Asian employees and their allies would react.
> Mozilla employs someone who is (was?) anti-gay marriage.
Funny that Mozilla had employed a stance, but grammar aside, Brendan Eich isn't employed in Mozilla anymore. In fact he quit under pressure for contributing to an anti-gay marriage campaign.
Eric S. is as far as I know still employed by Google.
He mentions Brendan Eich who was ousted from Mozilla for his anti-gay views. I have little sympathy for someone who feels marginalized by views they choose to hold and express when I, as a gay man, could be marginalized simply for who I am, something I did NOT choose. While most people may be able to just put their political opinions on the shelf, any time discussion turns towards family or after-work hobbies I have to make a conscious decision based on who I'm talking to and how it could affect the situation.
I can be professional and work on a temporary basis with people who hold anti-gay views, and I'm not going to go out of my way to attack them. I don't know much about how Eich ran Mozilla, I couldn't say if he deserved what happened, but I know that I would not consider a job at a company with anti-gay leadership.
I think it's ok to name Brendan Eich here. Just saying "[person who] created JavaScript" makes me think "that's either Brendan Eich or someone lying about having created JavaScript"
If he's chosen to be the CEO of a company again, then he's also chosen to put his social/political views on equality into the public sphere again.
CNET asked him if he would donate to a Proposition 8 cause again. He said he hadn't thought about it and didn't want to answer hypotheticals.[1]
Eich claiming he wouldn't discriminate against anyone doesn't mean much. He also claimed stripping marriage rights from same sex couples wasn't discriminatory.
I think Eich should have thought about it in the intervening 6 years like many of his fellow Californians. He should have expected his promotion would be divisive since he got a preview of the backlash in 2012. He should have felt remorse for contributing to a campaign that demonized LGBT people even if he still believed they didn't deserve equality. He should have apologized. And he should have explained how he would be held accountable like he claimed he wanted.
I wouldn't want him to pretend to apologize if he didn't mean it. He should have expected the backlash though. He could have withdrawn from consideration and just been CTO.
I don't know why you keep missing the mental leap here: Yeah, people at the company--and outside it--did not want a CEO willing to spend money to actively remove the rights of a group of people. That is the thing they did not want.
They didn't go digging to find something to hurt him: he took action, public and on the record, specifically taking away the rights of others.
It is true, people did not want that, and they did not hide that fact.
Signed,
a gay, now married, 2011 Mozilla intern who did not pick up a full time offer in part because some 2012 news of Eich's donation surfaced around the time I was considering pursuing it.
I really dislike that Brendan Eich was appointed because the board appointed him while knowing his position on prop 8. Yet no statement while there was a huge backlash at the time that news came out. For me CTO vs CEO matters a lot.
CTO vs reversing gay rights: don't like the person, wouldn't want to work directly or indirectly for that person
appointing someone who you already know reversed gay rights and causes an uproar: wtf
I'm not gay and also not part of any gay rights organization. In tech sites within Netherlands the views expressed are totally different than here on Hackers News. Meaning: most are amazed how he could have been considered a CEO.
In my opinion the real issue has little to do with Brendan Eich's political views. Regardless of how you stand on the issue of whether one's politics should impact one's suitability for a job, no one can claim surprise at the community backlash. Least of all the Mozilla board.
The real issue is that the Mozilla board saw this coming, and didn't think it mattered to upset a big chunk of the community. That is hubris, plain and simple.
When your organization is dedicated to community, you can't put community second in your decision-making process. The decision made the Mozilla board look out of touch with their mission.
Following this line of thinking, you can see how even an ardent opponent of gay marriage could be upset by Brendan's appointment, purely on the basis that risking the community is the last thing they should do. I wish more of this discussion would be about the Mozilla board's tone deaf decision, and less grandstanding about politics or freedom of speech.
In the same line, Brendan Eich. I completely disagree with his views on marriage of homosexuals, but disagree that it led him to have to quit his position at Mozilla Foundation.
Brendan Eich is entitled to his opinion, and a large not for profit is entitled not to want someone with that opinion as a figurehead.
As for who has done more for what — web browsers were going to have a scripting language. Is Javascript so astoundingly good that we can only assume any alternative would have been worse?
Eich is not just the inventor of Javascript, he's also the CTO of an organization that prides itself on being open and tolerant. I really can't support an organization where the CTO supports bills that cause the opposite.
Then they came for Douglas Crockford and I did not speak out because I did not attend JavaScript conferences.
Then they came for me—and it did not matter because I am a C# programmer.
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