And some people think being gay makes hurricanes. Until those people actually become relevant to this thread, let’s not bother rebutting positions no one has taken, okay?
If we’re talking about the mixed drink I wouldn’t be shocked if being gay had something to do with it.
I see what you did there. 
Should being the correct word there.
Exactly. They are for at will employment, until the people doing the hiring and firing don’t agree with them.
It wouldn’t have been hard for this guy to keep his job, as the inadvertently helpfully supplied examples of Obama and Biden have shown.
I like when homophobes lose. When we only had the option of bigger and lesser homophobes, we chose between them. Now we have the option of ditching the homophobes (the public ones, at least) entirely, and I say yay to that.
This post boils it down.
CEO is serves several roles including being the face of the company, especially in a tech industry company. A company should be analyzing who their customers are and how what their CEO represents to that customer base. To some degree many users choose a browswer based on the image it represents to them; not everyone is all about objective analysis of the interface. A CEO that now represents homophobia threatens to attach that homophobia to the brand and right now homophobia is not an image too many users want to attach themselves to. What matters when in the public eye to that image is a dynamic thing.
Could a CEO who was otherwise amazing bring enough other value added to overcome that? Sure. John Mackey of Whole Foods has endured despite his promoting political perspectives anathema to much of the company’s core customer base - including being strongly anti-union and thinking that climate change might not be a bad thing. This CEO must not otherwise bring enough to the table.
‘…has resigned following a furore (sic) over a donation he made in support of a ban on gay marriage in California.’
Good, I was not looking forward to dumping Firefox. I like Firefox.
As far as this Joker is concerned, he can believe what he wants. When he actively tries to restrict people’s freedom in The Land Of The Free, he can fuck off.
Good riddance. ( And I can keep my Firefox! 
)
I don’t think he should have been hounded from his job for that, but when he refused to say that he was wrong and that his views have changed, showing that he still has outdated, bigoted views, then it becomes acceptable.
This isn’t a case of two opposing sets of views with equal validity. Opposing gay marriage is unequivocally wrong, and this case just shows how widespread the view that it’s wrong has become.
The ridiculously small investment this guy could have made to salvage the situation but chose not to has me suspecting there are far greater issues at play. The anti-SSM contribution is just a cover story.
Or he’s a true believer, in which case fuck him.
Are you accusing me of making a subtle and totally uncalled-for Nazi dig at a person I don’t like, just because it amuses me? Well, I never!
To such a suggestion, you should go “Balls!”
From the company’s standpoint, he didn’t leave because of his political opinions - he left because he was causing a shitstorm that was going to hurt the company.
To get away from the politically-charged SSM debate, how would you feel if, say, Ford hired an ex-Chrysler guy, and it turned out that Ford’s customers were so anti-Chrysler that they started kicking up a ruckus? Would Ford be within their rights to tell the guy, “Sorry, but it turns out our customers don’t like you. You’ve gotta go.”?
The answer is yes. Those of us who believe in the market’s power to regulate companies who step out of the mainstream of moral or social views as an alternative to regulation shouldn’t complain when the market works exactly as we say it will. So if the customers of Mozilla are stongly pro-SSM, the company has every right, and possibly a fiduciary duty, to not hire an anti-SSM CEO.
This is entirely separate from the question of whether or not the people doing the protesting are being intolerant or hysterical. In 2008 support for prop-8 was not controversial, even among Democrats. And there’s still a wide swath of the population that is anti-SSM. So it’s not like the guy is expressing Nazi beliefs. He may be wrong (I think he is), but I know lots of people who are against SSM who are not monsters and who should not be denied employment over the issue.
Either I’m confused by your wording or your memory is failing you. Prop 8 was the subject of a national controversy and it passed with a very narrow majority (52%-48%). I can start linking to SDMB threads about it if you need proof that Democrats generally supported the law.
I wonder if some commenters may be taking it harder than the man himself. Someone with that career so far? Should be able to take his lumps and carry on.
In a perverse way I find this better than having to put up with an ostensible show of repentance and recanting that a lot of people would have never believed to be sincere. The market worked, as Sam Stone said – “the market” is NOT limited to sales totals at the end of the year. Everything going on around you is the market, and the brand’s good name and the public’s “good will” are very valuable things the corporation has a duty to protect.
And remember, it’s Mozilla. It exists in a corporate sociocultural ecosystem different from that of the old industrial-financial corporate world. They will be way ahead on things like this passing the tipping point of what can and can’t be overlooked.
Well, and that his customer base may find those issues not quite as objectionable or worth writing letters about, and the ones who would are probably already shopping at local-source farmer’s markets instead. Part of the matter with Mozilla is that they seem to cast themselves as some sort of movement rather than just another software company.
[hijack] In Japan, a big teary show of repentance will cut years off your criminal sentence. So mobsters do it.
I’m all for it, even if they are insincere. Because those sorts of displays represent humiliation, which is a form of punishment. In Japan, I understand that the level of romanticism regarding criminals is subdued (not non-existent). They are thought of as losers and often perceive themselves as such.
It used to be this way in the West. Until Socrates refused to play along. That guy really was a threat to youthful morals.* [/hijack]
- Self-criticizing-woosh-irony! Allusion to underlying complexity! I still support insincere props for conventional morality. In general.
Not I. Now he’s a martyr. And I don’t care much if the repentance is sincere; for me the important thing is what makes it into the public eye. I believe that forcing opinions out of the mainstream changes the opinions for lack of reinforcement.
It’s strange, to me, that people are saying he shouldn’t have been removed.
This, really, is the only vote we as random consumers have against a company. Boycotts (for my purposes, here, extended to both monetary and user space gains and not just monetary as is traditional) are the only way to express displeasure with a company.
For instance: WalMart treats it’s working like crap. If you care about this, you don’t shop at WalMart and try to organize enough people to do the same so that it hurts them. If it doesn’t materialize, even if you believe it’s sad, the markets have spoken. (Granted, there is the extra dimension in this country of supposed-to-be legal equality that can force these things faster than if the glacial pace of social change happened on it’s own.)
In this case, people took offense to his history on views with SSM and they organized a successful boycott (or, at least, threat of boycott) and they convinced either Mozilla or the CEO himself that it was not beneficial for him to be there.
People spoke out using their free speech and a reaction occurred. In this case, it went in one of the better directions IMHO, but it could have also been something like an apology and a promise not to do it again or even a stubborn Mozilla keepin’ on keepin’ on.
The CEO has free speech rights, but so do the people who spoke out against him, and so does Mozilla (Assuming they didn’t fire him for a protected class reason). There is absolutely no reason to rally against this
This is the fundamental functioning of a free society. People decide upon their values and contribute them to society. Just because we are in the midst of a change of opinion right now doesn’t mean that it’s somehow abhorrent, even if Mozilla did one of the free speech options I wouldn’t agree with. But I would make it a point to contribute my efforts on software use to whether I agreed with what transpired. (And to be honest, dumping Thunderbird wouldn’t be that horribad for me. I don’t use Firefox.)
And I like hijacks 
This subtitled comedy about the “Tokyo Apology Center” has great send-ups of effective, although insincere, celebrity apologies:
http://japanesefilmfestival.net/jff_movie/the-apology-king/
If one believes the movie, the right Japanese PR consultant could have saved Brendan Eich.
P.S. I realize that Silicon Valley is years ahead of Japan on same-sex marraige, so this situation could not yet happen there.
I think the worst part of this is that Eich only donated $1,000. He has never spoken out against SSM, he’s never spoken out against gay people. He’s never expressed his opinion on the matter, even though he has a right to do so.
He’s basically, as a private person, taken an action. He’s basically supported something we can assume he believes in politically. This wasn’t a movement to put all blacks to death or start up the American version of the Holocaust and start raiding the synagogues. This was a valid political option in a State sanctioned election. This is not unequivocally wrong, this was a political decision we’re allowed to make in the ballot box.
Only because of strange disclosure laws do we even know Eich’s opinion on this issue. The whole reason we have a secret ballot was to protect people, not from the government, but from other private citizens who used to basically make sure if you were voting in their neighborhood you were voting for their guy. Oh? You don’t like that guy? Well maybe a decently vigorous beating will get you to change your mind? Oh, no? Well maybe it’s time you get “found” dead in a ditch somewhere eh?
What’s been done to Eich is basically the 21st century version of that, it’s basically punishing him for what he privately and discreetly supported. To me it’s a strong argument that these sort of political donations should be absolutely private/confidential. I find no compelling public interest in making them public, and in fact it appears they are being used for retributive purposes which is contrary to the democratic interest.
If something is fit to be on a ballot, no one should have to fear for his job or his safety or anything else in terms of how he feels about it. And something as innocuous as a minor donation, from a man who has done no campaigning or public advocacy on the issue, to me ought be as private as whom I vote for when I go into the polling station. There are different kinds of political participation, and we’ve already accepted that not all of them should be public (voting is one of them.)
I’ll note this is honestly hardly at all different from the retribution going on in Wisconsin these days, after Tea Party activists acquired the photocopies of the Scott Walker recall petitions and digitized them many of the persons on those lists have been the target of harassment, lost their jobs, otherwise innocuous local politicians have been targeted for political smears and lost elections etc.
It’s not a good thing in American democracy. Given privacy laws in other countries I would probably be surprised if many other Western democracies would even allow this sort of disclosure.