On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 5:56 PM, SoCalAngel <[email protected]> wrote: > To Who It May Concern, > I am writing to you to express my outrage at the outright persecution and > grossly unfair treatment of CEO Brendan Eich. In a country that values as > the very first Amendment of our Constitution the right to free speech and > the free exercise of religion, to see people persecuted by a vocal minority > whose intention is to abrogate the rights of anyone with whom they don't > agree is something that everyone should stand against. The Constitution > doesn't include a right "not to be offended" by someone else's beliefs or > expression of those beliefs
I agree that some of Brendan's treatment was unfair, and it's sad that he felt he had to step down. But the First Amendment isn't relevant here, for better or worse, because the US government wasn't involved. John Scalzi has a good discussion of this: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2014/04/05/brandon-eich-and-mozilla/. Here's a relevant quote, but I recommend you read the whole thing: "So, the board of a private company appoints someone as CEO, many of the stakeholders of the company (employees, outside developers, companies whose products are accessed by the other company's products) object and decide to act in their own personal or private capacity to complain and/or boycott, and ultimately as a result -- and without governmental intervention at any level -- the CEO decides his presence in the position is not in the interest of the success and welfare of the private company and chooses to resign. What's the problem here?" > I will be uninstalling Firefox and I hope many others do the same. And it's your right to do so. But Brendan resigned because he concluded that his presence was hurting the Mozilla project -- something he's given his heart and soul to for over 15 years -- more than it was helping. Whether it was fair or not. I'm certain he wouldn't want people who are upset to boycott Firefox as a result. Nick _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
