Little bit of back-story in case you have not followed this specific topic over the last few days:
1) Brendan Eich is one of the founders of Mozilla and was recently promoted from CTO to CEO.
2) Brendan also created JavaScript – the same JS that many of us love and use daily!
3) He had, in 2008, put in a donation that went against gay-marriage in California – this was made public years ago and came from his personal funds.
4) Brendon was made to resign as CEO of Mozilla – remember, he is one of the founders – just like you and I are founders of our own startups.
5) You should not care what side of the debate I choose, as this post below is not about gay-rights. Either for it or against it – does not matter in this debate below.
6) Prompted to write this after reading this article: How Silicon Valley trolled Mozilla’s CEO out of office
I don’t usually comment on things like this because the opinion I will express is too personal and not for dissemination outside of discussions with my wife.
But this one time, I am truly outraged at what has been done to Brendan Eich.
Again, it does NOT matter which side of the debate you are on. That is Brendan’s personal choice and he has the COMPLETE right to make the wrong choice.
But what lead to his resignation as CEO of Mozilla was nothing less than a cyberspace riot.
OkCupid wanted to ban Firefox because their CEO supported Prop 8? Well, will they also strip out ALL JavaScript from their webpages because, you know, the SAME person also helped create Javascript? No. Because then it’s too much work. Because then the Signal-to-Noise ratio would be in favour of the Signal and not the noise they want. They don’t get the quick bang-for-their-buck that they now got!
Also, this concept of people being made to resign for their personal choices is just the wrong signal. Today Brendon was made to resign because he was anti-gay marriage. Maybe 50 years ago someone else was made to resign because he was pro-gay marriage – after all, that was what was the “common attitude” in that generation.
Where does this leave people who have a personal opinion that is independent of their professional career? Why should these two have to meet?
I’m a vegetarian. Should I then go against companies like FB, MS, Google (well, most of the Fortune 5000) because their CEO’s may be non-vegetarian? Does this affect how they run their company?
Brendon supported a choice in a politically legit manner and in his personal capacity. He could have done it anonymously but he choose to stand for what he may have believed in at that point in time. Again, it does not matter if that choice of his was right or wrong. It truly does not, in this case.
It’s a very hurtful and incorrect way of making a founder of a company step-down where his personal views didn’t mesh with the current politically-correct climate.
I don’t care what you say. I would rather have someone go against my wishes to my face than have someone who puts on a mask of agreeing with me while actually doing the opposite.