Posted on 04/05/2014 4:49:51 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
NY Times: Mozilla CEO's 'Anti-Gay' Stance 'By Definition Disqualifying,' He Needed 'Rehabilitation' By Tim Graham Created 04/05/2014 - 6:59pm
Our web guru Steve Edwards passed along a tweet from Moe Lane that said "New York Times confirms: Open Source advocacy is for liberals/progressives only. "
Lane linked to an obnoxious blog post by Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times titled “Why Mozilla’s Chief Had to Resign.” You see, “Mozilla is not a normal company. It is an activist organization.” And activists apparently find it very distasteful to be less than “militantly tolerant,” as Manjoo put it:
Is this an instance of political correctness run amok? Is it a sign that Silicon Valley has become militantly tolerant, unwilling to let executives express their personal viewpoints on issues unrelated to their jobs? I’ve seen many such worries expressed online; even supporters of same-sex marriage have been characterizing Mr. Eich’s ouster as an awful precedent for giving in to moralistic mob rule.
But it’s a mistake to draw any such conclusions in this case, for one simple reason: Mozilla is not a normal company. It is an activist organization. Mozilla’s primary mission isn’t to make money but to spread open-source code across the globe in the eventual hope of promoting “the development of the Internet as a public resource.”
As such, Mozilla operates according to a different calculus from most of the rest of corporate America.
The company serves two markets, not just one, and the second market is “arguably more challenging — the tight labor pool of engineers, designers, and other tech workers who make software.” They have an ideology that must not be broached:
When you consider the importance of that market, Mr. Eich’s position on gay marriage wasn’t some outré personal stance unrelated to his job; it was a potentially hazardous bit of negative branding in the labor pool, one that was making life difficult for current employees and plausibly reducing Mozilla’s draw to prospective workers.
This became clear in a string of tweets and thoughtful blog posts that Mozilla employees (a.k.a. Mozillians) published this week. A number of them called for Mr. Eich’s resignation. One employee in Britain, Paula Le Dieu, put herself on “unpaid leave” in protest. Others stopped short of calling for Mr. Eich’s ouster but expressed frustration that Mozilla was being tarred with his views, and hope that they could rehabilitate Mr. Eich’s ideas about gay marriage...
“He is actively harming Mozilla by not making a proper statement on these issues and making things right,” wrote Ben Werdmüller, a Mozilla developer.
In other words, those "thoughtful Mozillians" believed Eich apparently needed to undergo "conversion therapy" and become an "ex-Anti-Gay," and then he would be "rehabilitated."
Manjoo bizarrely thought that this Mozilla mutiny is "slightly more nuanced" than liberals cry Negative Branding and get out the (career) guillotine. Imagine if the CEO were a gay activist who'd donated a mere $1,000 to support gay marriage and it ruined the "unit cohesion" of the company:
In such an environment, it isn’t out of bounds to consider how a certain leader’s political views might affect employees’ passion for their mission. If the community’s cohesiveness is Mozilla’s primary advantage over its rivals, the fact that Mr. Eich’s views on gay marriage might have posed some danger to that community was almost by definition disqualifying. If his job was to motivate people, and he was instead causing people to question the community’s ethic—well, at the least, you can say he wasn’t doing a good job.
To some Mozillians, this became especially clear over the last week, when Mr. Eich refused to recant his position on gay marriage in a series of interviews. “In his first test as C.E.O. of Mozilla, he failed to execute,” wrote Matthew Riley MacPherson, a developer who works for Mozilla in Montreal. “So while I think his donation to Prop 8 spurred the controversy and exposed his inability to think as Mozilla’s C.E.O. instead of as Brendan Eich, I don’t think it was his stance against gay marriage in his home state of California that should be named as the cause of his departure.”
Instead, Mr. MacPherson argued, it was Mr. Eich’s inability to keep his community together amid a growing firestorm that proved he could not lead the organization.
Mr. MacPherson added: “So while the mob might feel like it won, proving that there is some kind of zero-tolerance for homophobia in America, Eich’s departure from Mozilla tells a slightly more nuanced story than that.”
No, you "thoughtful" Mozilla mobsters, it's not more nuanced than that, no matter how you try to spin it.
Many are apparently not surprised by that....
Kinda makes you wonder what it means to be the CEO of a company that’s not interested in profitability, doesn’t it?
Militancy needs to be met with militancy. Mozilla must recant what it has done and rehire Eich or be destroyed.
NYT goes in to bat for the SA
You mean countries - I couldn’t agree with you more. But again, the libs are all for freedom in Ukraine, but not for Americans.
Wow is Amerika going down fast with the POS mozlum at the helm.
After cankles is elected because she allegedly has lady parts, you may as well stick the fork in.
(with all due respect to excrement)
Affirming biblical marriage is now a hate crime.
Sadly, they know exactly what they are doing, they have have been pushing this agenda for decades and feel they are at the point they can be as militant as they want. I do not include all Homosexuals in this, I know many who want nothing more than to live their lives quietly and peacefully like anyone else. I am speaking to the QUEERS, the flaming in your face disgusting public behaviour queers.
I am very, very disappointed in this.
I have been using Ubuntu for years.
Firefox has been my default browser forever. I’m going to go back to Microsoft.
I’ve got it at work, but haven’t used it much at home for probably more than 5 years. Maybe 10.
This is a huge mistake by the liberals. Bigtime.
We talking re-education camps here?
That’s why I don’t ask Jesus to forgive them (not now, anyway) but to STOP them.
Im all for that..you can have all the lib freaks on their own island, they can redistribute all the wealth they want, give it to each other in the rear, have all the Common Core teachings they want and have super high taxes for those mean mean rich libs and see how they like it, bet they cant last a week before they start killing each other
Ben Werdmuller
Web technologist & developer
I’m Ben Werdmuller, a web product manager, platform architect and developer, specializing in social software platforms for business.
I’m based in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can contact me at ben@benwerd.com.
should the company be allowed to continue its discriminatory ways?
if so... then why was the Colorado bakery forced out of business? wouldn’t the members of the company be forced to allow him to work there, regardless how they feel about his personal opinions?
and what about hobby lobby and chik-fil-A? corporations attacked for their beliefs... shouldn’t Mozilla also be attacked for having similar, if polar opposite, beliefs?
LOL you comment reminds me of the conservative boss in this clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auK3t0MSsCA
So when are we going to have a “Night of the Long Knives”.
New mouthpiece?
LOL never watched that show but funny clip
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