Right I'm not sure why this guy is blaming Brendan Eich for what sounds like both an ethics and business problem at Mozilla. If a single donor can bully your CTO out of the door over something unrelated to your mission you are a shitty organization.
I would do the same thing Eich did in that position. I don't agree with his opinion but I respect his right to hold it in an open society. Just another of Mozilla leadership's many bad calls over the years
Is Mozilla Foundation political activist organization?
When you donate to MF, you do that in order to further MF mission. Political activism should not be that[1]. When Eich donated to his cause, he did to organization that had the cause in it's mission; he did not set additional condition (e.g.: fire these people, because I don't like some aspect of their look and they refuse to change).
[1] Now, interesting thing would be to know, how many people didn't donate to MF since they turned into political activist organization.
Mozila is not a political organization but someone in a position of power took an action that hurt some big donors. Those donors are well withing their right to stop donating after that.
But since they believe in the foundation mission, despite the actions from the leadership, they looked for an compromise that Eich accepted (apologizing) and then refused to fulfill his end (the real big problem).
At this point there was no more compromise, either Eich is out or the donors are and Mozilla does not have the luxury of losing donors, most of their money may come from Google but for then every penny counts.
This was not political activism by Mozilla, it was choosing between a rock and a hard place, either losing a big chunk of money or loosing the CEO and making some irrelevant people unhappy, the best decision is very clear to me, CEO is easy to find a replacement, money not so much and 99% of the people complaining are not either.
This was political activism by the donors and they are totally within their right to do it with their money.
Sorry, frustrating that a lie goes around the world six times before the truth can put its boots on. Also that I've abided by Mozilla NDAs while others there (or who used to be there) have not.
I was not repeating someone else lies, i was discussing the topic posted with my understanding on what was posted here with the information i had at the time.
Your replies to him were posted much later then my comments and by the time you posted i could not edit or delete my post.
I did posted some other reply further down in this thread that while were posted after you replies i wrote then before i saw your replies, so also based solo on the information post by the OP.
If the information is incorrect then my apologies.
To anyone else looking at this please look at the OP posted here and at Eich replies and reach a conclusion by yourselves.
@dang if you see this fill free to delete my comments.
EDIT: just to add that i have sent an email requesting my comments to be deleted, although i do not know how long that might take.
Thanks for this, I misread your comment. Sorry about that.
It's still tricky to believe a claim made by one person on the Internet, but in this case, I think one should look at who said it, when they said it, whether it's credible (this "board secret plan" claim is not), and what people directly involved have and have not said. I've said my peace now.
Which donor? Only Google and Microsoft make up 90% of Mozilla income. So a 10% guy is that powerful? Epstein? Mozilla turned too political in the last 10 years. I dont bother with that ki d of company. Anyway, Brave is damn good compare to sluggish Mozilla especially their older gecko. Their newer quantum also terrible when compared to Brave, Arc, or even a niche Floorp or Thorium. VPN? I go with Proton or setup my own. As for app? Dolphin and Opera works way better. Mozilla is a relic. They turn themselves one.
It does not matter which donor.. MF does not have many new sources of money coming around so they need to keep every penny they get coming.
Even if Google and Microsoft were 99% of their income they can still do not have the luxury of losing that extra 1%, loosing the CEO is still a better option then loosing 1% of their income.
And unless you were donating anything closer then that 1% to MF then you and your opinion are irrelevant for their situation. You may belive they are political all you want, it will not change the fact that they could not afford to loose that donor.
As for the other browsers, they are a joke, Brave, Dolphin and Opera are all just chrome with a different skin, might as well be using chrome then. No thank you.
Any browser that use webkit is ultimately bound by google decision on what they want to do with their engine, just like when google make manifest v3 the only one available next june and break most, if not all, ad blockers. It will affect all those browsers eventually.
Now if any of those browsers want to keep manifest v2 to keep ad blockers working they will have to put the manpower to do it themselves and have to fight Google every step of the way because Google will surely start breaking things they need for the effort, the amount of work will only grow over time until they give up.
Maybe it should be political activist organization. As it comes to topics that are important for the mission it holds. Nothing wrong in being political activist in relation to these topics.
Now, it should be purely and absolutely neutral in any other area that is outside the mission.
Well sure I think that in broad moral strokes you have the right to not support someone who you disagree with. (BTW not sure if you saw the comment Eich posted here yesterday, dang has now deleted it for policy violations, but it looked like Eich was saying that the donors didn't try to force him out, and that doing so would have been illegal under California law. So make what you will of that...)
But at the end of the day I would rather live in a society where we have the ability to cooperate with other people in the pursuit of a good cause, even if we disagree with them about some other cause. Like if you follow the attitude of those donors to its logical extreme where do we end up? We end up with no one cooperating on anything, many projects that could have improved society never happen, many opportunities for people with differing viewpoints to learn about each other's perspectives never occur, and so on.
I think if you take what those donors did to the logical extreme you end up with some form of societal collapse, and history teaches us that what happens after that is a strongman shows up and enforces a far worse type of social order.
I think those donors pulling out of Mozilla hurt the cause of free software, hurt Mozilla, and was one instance in a multi-year process of American political polarization that led to the election of a demagogue like Donald Trump, and is still going on. All because one guy in the C-suite had a bad position an issue that was totally unrelated to Mozilla. This is a very dangerous road for our society to tread.
I actually read a blog post at one point by the donors about their decision - short version is Prop 8 would have prevented them from marrying and one of them was here on a visa which they would have lost. So I really feel for them and understand why they would be angry at Eich. Still think they should have selected a different outlet for it.
I would do the same thing Eich did in that position. I don't agree with his opinion but I respect his right to hold it in an open society. Just another of Mozilla leadership's many bad calls over the years