On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 1:47 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > > 4. If an outside right-wing Christian pro-life group had organized a highly > visible protest against a Mozilla CEO who had donated heavily to Planned > Parenthood (and not just $1000 to Prop 8 years ago), would he or she have > been nudged out? I seriously doubt it. > Free speech, after all, is often just a measure of who agrees with you. I had > never heard of OKCupid until AFTER Mr. Eich was shown out. Yet, apparently > this small group had the power to derail an entire organization over > something very minor.
Brendan wasn't nudged out. It was his choice to resign. See https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignation/ for more details. As for your question... let's imagine what the past two weeks must have been like for Brendan. He co-founded the Mozilla project 15 years ago and has been the CTO of the Mozilla corporation for almost a decade. He's excited about being the CEO, but then the controversy starts. A handful of Mozilla employees ask for his resignation (literally a handful -- my understanding is that there were five). Many other employees express support, but the tech press only reports on the resignation requests, and uses headlines likes "Mozilla employees demand their CEO resigns", which makes it sound like most Mozilla employees wanted him to go. Then, the Wall Street Journal publishes an entirely false article that insinuates that three board members resigned in protest at Brendan's appointment. The "Mozilla revolts against its CEO" story, though almost entirely false, has formed at this point. Then OkCupid makes their protest. You may not have heard of OkCupid, but it is one of the bigger online dating sites, with millions of users. (A number of other organisations -- CREDO was one -- organized boycotts of Mozilla as well.) OkCupid's protest pushes the story out of the tech press and into the mainstream press. I saw Brendan's picture on the front page on my local newspaper, which is not something I *ever* expected to see; it was at that point that I knew this had blown up into something truly gigantic. At this point, Brendan is watching an incredible amount of negative attention rain down on his beloved Mozilla, all due to something he did six years ago, and on a topic that is entirely unrelated to Mozilla's core mission of promoting an open internet. It's an unbelievable distraction. Furthermore, he's almost certainly receiving a tremendous number of personal attacks, via email, Twitter, and other channels. Given the nature of the internet, a non-trivial fraction of it is very likely violent and nasty. At this point he decides that things cannot continue in this manner, that his presence as CEO is hurting Mozilla more than it is helping it, and the only way to stop the media firestorm is to resign entirely from the Mozilla corporation. (He is still, however, the technical leader of the Mozilla *project*, as he has been for over a decade -- the project involves many volunteers as well as employees of the Mozilla *corporation*.) And I can only imagine the personal toll the negative attention has taken on him and his family. It may not be *fair* that his position as CEO caused this incredible swirl of negative attention, but it is what happened. (One thing I've learned this week is that the CEO position is unique; it has a symbolism and attracts a level of scrutiny that is entirely unlike any other position.) And you might not agree with Brendan that resigning was the best way he could address it, but that's the decision that he made. Now, to consider your hypothetical: if this level of negative attention had been directed at Mozilla and Brendan for a different issue, I think it's quite likely the end result would have been the same. Whether such an issue exists that could generate the same level of attention as gay marriage is an interesting question, albeit one that's well beyond the scope of this email list. > 5. Next up -- are there any people of religious faiths working for Mozilla > that don't support women's rights or the right to even be homosexual? Will > they be purged? Just askin'. What's your level of consistency? This "will anyone be purged" question came up in internal discussions, and the question was an adamant "no". Section I of the Mozilla Community Participation Guidlines covers this: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/participation/ Also, you should read this blog post, written by a Mozilla employee: blog.gerv.net/2014/04/your-ire-is-misdirected/ Now, you may not believe what I've written, or still choose to disagree with the decisions made. And that's ok. But I hope you understand that much of the reporting of this story has been false or misleading, and the simplistic "Mozilla employees push out CEO" story is wrong. Nick _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
