Posted on 03/25/2014 1:23:18 PM PDT by markomalley
A pair of gay developers have launched a boycott of Firefox in protest against the Mozilla Foundation's decision to appoint a CEO who appears to be an opponent of same sex marriage. Mozilla co-founder and Javascript creator Brendan Eich was awarded the top job yesterday.
Hampton Catlin, creator of Wikipedia Mobile and CSS extension language Sass, said he would no longer develop apps for Firefox after Eich's appointment.
The dev cited a six-year-old database of donor contributions to campaigns in support and opposition of Proposition 8 listing Brendan Eich, (Employer: Mozilla) as a $1,000 contributor to a campaign in support of the anti-gay marriage California ballot proposition.
Prop 8 was struck down after being ruled unconstitutional in 2010 and the final appeal was put to bed in June last year.
Catlin and his husband run a development firm called Rarebit which makes a game called Color Puzzle and was set to bring a dictionary app to Firefox Marketplace.
In a blog post, Catlin wrote: "As a married gay couple who are co-founders of this venture, we have chosen to boycott all Mozilla projects. We will not develop apps or test styles on Firefox any more.
"This is in protest of the appointment of Brendan Eich to the position of CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, where he had previously served as CTO. We will continue our boycott until Brendan Eich is completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla, which we believe is extremely unlikely after all he’s survived and the continued support he has received from Mozilla.”
Catlin and his British husband Michael were unable to get married in California until recently.
The pair always dreamed of starting a company together, but Michael's visa was tied to his employment status. As it was not possible to marry, they were unable to found a new firm.
When the Supreme Court repealed Proposition 8, the lovers immediately rushed to San Francisco City Hall to get married. A post-nuptials picture of them was then published on the front page of the New York Times.
“Today, Michael has a green card and we’re able to pursue this venture in the US,” said Catlin. “These days, I am so damn proud of my country for making this all possible. So, that’s why it’s personal for us. Brendan Eich was an active supporter of denying our right to be married and even to start this business."
We have contacted Mozilla to ask them for a statement on their position regarding Eich's contribution, but there has been no response. We'll update this article if we hear back.
Eich himself blogged about the controversy over his donation last year on his website, maintaining that "Mozilla had nothing to do with the donation" and "Donors above a certain amount are required by the State of California to disclose their employer". ®
Firefox is my primary browser and will remain so.
I support the new leader of Mozilla.
Enough of the PC nonsense.
I run Ubuntu.
Rage against the machine? /S
Same here!
This will makee so happy overtime I boot up my desktop which uses Firefox as my default browser.
I’ve been using Chrome more, but I think I’ll go back to Firefox after reading this.
I love my Firefox and will not give it up because of some anti-First Amendment Homosexuals.
Alas, I still like Chrome because Firefox still doesn’t support running each tab as its own separate process.
Why is it that every decision made by any company has to be judged by whether or not they support one man putting his penis into another man’s rectum?
...for thee, but not for me, so sayeth the homo lib.
Yup. The butt bullies are not that tolerant.
I figured all the gays were on Apple products. They are anti-capitalism liberals mostly, so why not use the products from one of the largest corporations in the world!
I never thought I’d ever actually make a substantial contribution to the Mozilla foundation, but guess what?
Never used Firefox - I just signed up for it!
Funny; I just downloaded and installed Firefox on my new computer, and this is the first thing I browse...
How tolerant of the Diversity Brigades.
Sounds like a good reason to use Firefox!!!!
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