We have a strongly-worded manifesto that lays out what we believe: https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/
Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, talking about how the current political environment in America might overlay that manifesto: https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2017/03/13/the-worldview-of-...
I'm an employee at Mozilla, though am trying to set personal politics aside to present public explanation of our institutional viewpoint.
If a leader does anything to lose a consensus of respect from their workers (and ultimately authority over them) the long term productivity of the organization is imperiled. Firing everyone except the leader isn't going to be a good option.
Politics is a contentious issue, no matter how much people wish it wasn't. Involvement in it makes you polarizing, whether you like it or not.
Do I believe in marriage equality? Absolutely, yes.
Am I personally outraged that Eich donated that money? Not at all.
Is it reasonable for him to expect to maintain authority and influence over a building full of relatively young and well-educated people, in San Francisco, after publicly (though perhaps inadvertently so) working against marriage equality? Of course not. Morals aside, it's a low probability outcome.
There were some comments on twitter calling on him to resign from some people at the Mozilla _Foundation_ (not to be confused with the _Corporation_), starting with one of the then-interns, iirc. The irony is that those particular people wouldn't have had any interaction with Brendan anyway...
Of course the reporting on the whole thing blew everything completely out of proportion, like the media usually does.
Oh, one other inaccuracy: I'd guess something like 1/3 of Mozilla's employees are in the SF bay area. Others are in other places, with a variety of cultural and political outlooks. So assuming that "Mozilla" is well-represented by "young, well-educated people in San Francisco" is not a great idea.
I would say that a CEO’s authority and influence does need to extend well beyond the people they work with day-to-day (though I doubt this is a point of disagreement).
Do you have any thoughts on the parent discussion?
Of course there may be other tradeoffs, and maybe there are other organizations that aim for the same goal that are more closely aligned with one's views, and then it may make sense to support those. But the important thing for me is not having everything decided by ideological litmus tests. Results matter more than affiliations, at least for me. I'm not sure that's true of everyone...
Political bias is generally supposed to be bad for business, and the current tendency of tech companies to take active political stance is a sign that something very rotten has happened to the public discourse. Indeed: entire sectors of society (mass media, universities, now tech companies) are becoming increasingly hostile towards still widespread conservative views, excluding huge sections of the population from political debate and deligitimizing their views. That population is now oppressed and unable to advocate their views in a public way, but they can still vote, so now USA has leftist mass media going nuts over the election of President Trump. But it's not going to end there: when the conservatives realize that Trump has failed to turn this oppression around, it might come to violence and who knows what else.
First, even given a narrow set of goals you can end up with other organizations that are aligned with your organization on some but not all of those goals.
Second, my point is that when someone _is_ aligned with your organization on its narrow set of goals, they may be worth working with even if you may disagree with other goals they have. The devil is, as usual, in the details.
So the leader has to go because employees can't separate work life from home life? Usually it's the other way around with companies being to over bearing of en employees private life.
> Is it reasonable for him to expect to maintain authority over a building full of relatively young and well-educated people, in San Francisco, after publicly (though perhaps inadvertently so) working against marriage equality? Of course not. Morals aside, it's unrealistic proposition.
Yes, because his opinion on gay marriage is irrelevant to his work as a CEO, just as my activities on the weekend should have no bearing on my job.
I have to imagine it would be hard to separate your work life from your home life when you know your boss doesn't believe that you have the right to your home life.
We can follow it to it's logical conclusion because it happens all the time. People get fired for unpopular opinions frequently. This case is interesting because the unpopular opinion is "political" to some. I would contend that breathing is political.
I can't answer any of the hypotheticals you present because they are exactly that: hypotheticals. It would require additional context for me to give a personal opinion on any of them. Even with that, your or my opinion on the situation would be irrelevant to the employees who are actually part of the organizations in question. They would be taking action to fix something within their organization that they found to be uncouth. Why shouldn't they be able to?
I am getting the impression that you see a clear line between what belongs at work and what belongs at home. How do you define it?
In most of the Western World that would be illegal and you'd have a clear cut wrongful termination case.
> I am getting the impression that you see a clear line between what belongs at work and what belongs at home. How do you define it?
Most of it is incredibly clear, what I do at home or while I'm not representing the company is none of the companies business, what I do at work is the companies business, there are only a few places where the line is blurred. The first is posting from company property (like I'm doing now), I'd say this should be either completely prohibited or allowed, and if it's allowed they shouldn't be able to police what I say. The second is on social media, companies and governments have definitely pushed beyond what should be allowed here, anything I post on facebook is only relevant to the company if I'm representing them or divulging private information. The third is lunch room or water cooler chatter, I'd argue people should be allowed to share their opinions here, but it's blurry enough that most people just stay away from anything remotely controversial in these environments.
Yeah, and bad companies. But a leader has to lead. And it wasn't just employees having issues. The CEO is the face of the company, and if they can't lead either employees nor can they effectively be the face of the company, they have to go.
> Yes, because his opinion on gay marriage is irrelevant to his work as a CEO, just as my activities on the weekend should have no bearing on my job.
Your activities don't involve being a leader or being the face of the company. If you can't do that, you can't do your job as CEO. This happens all the time. See Equifax as the latest example. The CEO wasn't personally responsible for the security issue. But he was the leader, and his priorities sets the companies priorities. He leads, and his failure in leadership is what fundamentally failed the company.
If you think a CEO and a junior level employee have the same responsibilities and are graded on the same metrics, you are sorely mistaken.
And yet no one has explained why a guy holding particular political views can not effectively be the face of the company. If one does believes in gay marriage rights, can they effectively be the face of the company? Clearly, many people oppose that view, so let's oust every CEO out there who donated to gay rights campaigns.
What differentiates between these two CEOs with opposing views on gay rights in this respect is only how much public outrage there is about their biography. Somehow, people holding left views tend to be much louder than people holding right views. Which, without a doubt, has a lot to do with leftist bias in the mass media. So, taking your statement to its logical conclusion, what you are suggesting is we give up any sense of fairness and work ethic and bow to our mass media overlords because they have the microphone.
I'm pretty sure they have, many times, but you presumably don't agree - which is perfectly fine but don't say it's not been explained!
(To recap: someone with exclusionary views, donating money to promote and enforce those exclusionary views, cannot effectively be head of a company specifically promoting inclusionary views.)
1) What does inclusivity have to do with Mozilla's core business, namely open-source Internet software?
2) Can any organization declare inclusivity as one of its core values and start enforcing it by firing every person in position of power who holds an exclusionary view on any subject? By the way, there are more people in positions of power than just the CEO. Every person in the corporate hierarchy, except perhaps the lowest, holds power over other people. The exact same argument you make about the CEO can be made about a VP, a CTO or a teamleader. They all represent their group in front of everyone else and they are all looked up to by their inferiors.
3) What is an exclusionary view? Is it one advocating that people in certain category deserve less than in another category? But by that logic, you hold an exclusionary view: after all, you support the idea that people with particular views should not occupy positions of power.
4) Why is it a good idea for an organization to declare holding exclusionary opinions a punishable offense? I can tell you why it is a bad idea. Quoting an excellent comment [1] below, "there's something wrong with injecting ideology into everything, that is, dividing everything in the world into what supports your ideology and what doesn't, making all judgments based on it, and shunning all who don't share your ideology. All must prove their purity and loyalty or be excommunicated. It's a very dangerous approach, and a quick glance at history books will tell you what's at the end of this path."
The life is a complex, non-binary (in fact, multidimensional) thing, and we all err in some regard, including yourself. You don't want to be discriminated based on your opinions, unless you overstep the boundaries of law.
Irrelevant - it's a stated organisational value. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Diversity_and_Inclusion_Strategy
> Can any organization declare inclusivity as one of its core values
Yep.
> and start enforcing it by firing every person in position of power who holds an exclusionary view on any subject?
In the US, probably, although it may depend on which state and precisely which exclusionary views are in play. In the UK, maybe, depending on what those exclusionary views are.
> But by that logic, you hold an exclusionary view
I do, yes. Well done! I hold many exclusionary views but they are all targeted at people who people who want to exclude or hurt others for what I consider bullshit reasons.
> "All must prove their purity and loyalty or be excommunicated."
Nonsense.
> You don't want to be discriminated based on your opinions
I am 100% behind discriminating against people who hold opinions that another class of person is lesser than them.
Besides, you are still missing the main point. Discriminating against people for their opinions is nonconstructive - by excluding them from dialog, oppressing them in daily lives and proudly putting your intolerance to their views on display, you just make them angry and more entrenched. That kind of demonization might feel really nice (when you're on the giving end of the stick), but it works against liberal values in the long run. Where do you think Trump and Brexit came from?
The witchhunt on Eich was primarily by the media, that of course had found the most exciting story in the tech industry in a long time.
And as far as we know, Eich stepped back by himself. Maybe he was pressured to do that, but until you can find evidence for that, you're being dishonest, if you tell the story different.
And lastly, yes, it was said by Mozilla that they should have reacted earlier, but that was not in the context of throwing Eich out, like you turn it, it was in the context of clearing that situation up, maybe talking to Eich, so that he makes a public statement about it or whatnot, before the public pressure gets big enough for him to step back. Because this story had become public at an earlier date already, Eich just wasn't yet CEO then, so it got much less press coverage.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/03/brendan-eich-steps-...
I don't want my activism on one set of issues co-opted to bolster other people's activism on completely unrelated topics.
Mozilla insists on doing that; I won't be part of it. (And I encourage others to avoid that kind of extremist partisanship.)
After browsing RiseUp's site, you would certainly think otherwise.
Try and stop HTML5 video from autoplaying. Try walking the talk for once.
Some sites are buggy with this preference. Hopefully you will not lay that at Mozilla's feet.
Why?
> except when something related to free software is at stake in politics.
They're the Mozilla Foundation, not the Free Software Foundation.
The free software movement has always been intertwined with more or less radical political movements to lesser or greater extents over time. It's only relatively recently that "open source" is primarily the thing you do so you have a GitHub profile that will land you a 100k paycheck.
>And requesting the latter to be politically neutral is... well.
I don't see any incompatibility between free software and any political ideology.
My point (now edited into the comment) was that political activism has been intertwined with free software for a long time. Just think about the absurdity someone complaining about leftist politics at Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation. This intertwining isn't some new thing, and it shouldn't be surprising.
> I don't see any incompatibility between free software and any political ideology.
But for many of the original strong advocates for free software, there was an enormous link between larger political issues and free software.
You can argue that those links aren't fundamentally necessary or have eroded over time, but to deny them is an anti-historical understanding of the free/open source software movement.
> then the organization would lose credibility and support from a lot of people. If the Mozilla CEO wants to do that, then fine, we'll find another organization to support and to look up to.
Open source wasn't always so mainstream. My money is that the people who have been around for decades aren't fased by these sorts of threats.
Only in the sense of privacy and civil freedoms e.g free speech, copyright. Not in the sense of capitalism/socialism, collectivism/individualism, more taxes/less taxes. In this case, Mozilla supported an organization that is openly against capitalism. I would have applauded Mozilla if they'd supported an organization in favor of free speech, privacy, freedom of information, etc. But that wasn't the case. Capitalism is a gray area for the free software community: some support it, others fight against it.
There are a lot of software developers I used to respect and followed on Twitter whom I stopped following because I got sick of their American politics tweets. I'm sure it's the same dynamics with American celebrities tweeting about Donald Trump. Most of the world don't care about Donald Trump nor want to hear about some privileged rich Americans complaining about their politics.
They havre their own shit to worry about and don't have time to be force-fed all the American political propaganda.
I can understand individuals being political, but if you're an organization like Mozilla, you have a clear goal, and that is NOT left politics. They should aspire to be as neutral as they can.
Which organisation would this be? Mozilla is pretty unique.
And a lot of people across the world in different countries. Compared to a lot of the rest of the developed world US liberals/Democrats are centrists.
If you are American and are looking at their 'leftist' views using only US politics as a reference point you may be skewing your results.
Err, no, growing up in an European socialist country I can say this is not true. The left in the US has caught up pretty well ..
Free software goes pretty strongly against market capital as a philosophy.
It goes against the idea that people will pay for things they need/want. It goes against the idea that commerce will spawn progress.
That's fine, and people don't need to be that ideological. But if you want to promote free software, then: basic income, single payer, the 30 hour week, greater research spending, stronger practice of public domain-ing government financed work will all help
And lots of more left-leaning orgs will go along that.
There's something wrong with injecting ideology into everything, that is, dividing everything in the world into what supports your ideology and what doesn't, making all judgments based on it, and shunning all who don't share your ideology. All must prove their purity and loyalty or be excommunicated.
It's a very dangerous approach, and a quick glance at history books will tell you what's at the end of this path.
There are other priorities and issues in the world. Many who don't share your ideology do important things, deserve support, and in fact it's important to all of us to have a diversity of opinions in the world. Personally, I'm not so sure in my beliefs that I would rule out all the others.
https://riseup.net/en/about-us
>The Riseup Collective is an autonomous body based in Seattle with collective members world wide. Our purpose is to aid in the creation of a free society, a world with freedom from want and freedom of expression, a world without oppression or hierarchy, where power is shared equally. We do this by providing communication and computer resources to allies engaged in struggles against capitalism and other forms of oppression.
x We value, support, and engage in struggles for human liberation, the ethical treatment of animals, and ecological sustainability. We join in the fight for freedom and the self-determination of all oppressed groups. We oppose all forms of prejudice, authoritarianism, and vanguardism.
x We organize on the basis of autonomy, mutual aid, resource sharing, participatory knowledge, social advocacy, anti-oppression work, community creation, and secure communication.
x We work to create revolution and a free society in the here and now by building alternative communication infrastructure designed to oppose and replace the dominant system.
x We promote social ownership and democratic control over information, ideas, technology, and the means of communication.
x We empower organizations and individuals to use technology in struggles for liberation. We work to support each other in overcoming the systemic oppression embedded in the use and development of technology.
They seem like revolutionary socialists.
Also:
https://riseup.net/en/about-us/politics
>Economy — In a free society the means of production should be placed in the hands of the people, empowering communities to organize meaningful employment, and provide a responsible and sustainable standard of living which tries to meet the needs of all people.
Animal treatment is about drawing boundaries on what's considered humane vs. inhumane. Animal activists define that boundary so that it mandates humane treatment not just for humans but also for animals. Ethical stance, yes. Political, yes. Socialist/revolutionary, no.
Ecological sustainability is about whether you take a short-term vs. long-term view on profiting off nature and survival as a species. If you believe this is a "socialist" position to take, you have been successfully brainwashed by U.S. party propaganda that has coopted a legitimate issue and transformed it into partisan identity politics.
The tendencies in the US of tech companies coming out of their political closets is disturbing, at best. It worries me that this is being normalized and that it starts to lean toward corporatism as well in some cases.
Source?
If not, then consider that Mozilla is taking a political stance in that situation too by deeming those oppressive regimes as something to be bypassed.
It is not unlikely that capitalism is oppressive to certain groups of people (poorer groups everywhere in the world), and RiseUp has a mission to help alleviate that oppression. Again, not different from what Tor has done.
They haven't stated "Mozilla is against capitalism because it's oppressive blah blah blah".
From the principles that they've declared one can infer that they would help people in totalitarian regimes (any decent organization would).
Then you misunderstand what a 501(c)3 is and what it can do politically[0]. I expect Mozilla to get right up to the line of what is acceptable for that type of organization and probably cross it multiple times, because it appears no one is actually held to account unless the violations are flagrant.
Donating $100k to an email service that claims to attempt to keep the US Government from snooping your email[1] doesn't even come close, IMO.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)(3)_organization#Limitat...
I'm not saying that they did anything illegal. I said that I would not expect it of them.
Mozilla giving money away is totally expected. You may not like who they gave the money to, but that's totally within your rights. If you look at what RiseUp says they do[0], it's that they run an email system that they attempt to keep the US Government out of. I am being led to believe that you don't agree with their reasons why, which is fine by me.
In my opinion, the best model that I have seen for discussing politics actually focuses on the expansion or contraction of freedoms across the three dimensions: personal, economic, and political. By focusing on policies, we avoid using labels to describe one another, and evaluate actions based on outcomes (both consequences and outcomes). In this model, more freedom along an axis is not necessarily a good thing if it results in a loss of freedom along another axis e.g. slavery could be described as an economic freedom of one demographic to restrict the personal freedoms of another. Through this lens, Mozilla might be funding a cause that they believe preserves personal freedoms of all individuals against the encroaching economic freedoms of corporations with respect to computer security, privacy, and whatever other choices an individual can make in the growing digital world, which is consistent with my understanding of Mozilla's stated mission.
This model is not of my making; I came across it here: https://www.nationstates.net/page=create_nation , and I find it very surprising that model came from what is essentially an author's conception and implementation of a game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NationStates .
From a skim it wasn't clear to me why it was being attributed to RiseUp.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/12/giving_up_on_...
Shouldn't they be funding projects like Signal or Wire?
However, RiseUp has shown to be leftist several times[1]. If I was a right wing activist or something similar, I would not use RiseUp, because of the serious conflict of interest of the owners of the platform.
There's nothing wrong with RiseUp being leftist, but I expect Mozilla to be neutral politically, except when something related to free software is at stake in politics.
[1]Apart from their logo being a reference to the anarcho-communist flag, they've said "[...] We do this by providing communication and computer resources to allies engaged in struggles against capitalism and other forms of oppression." (https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/01/responding-to-antifa...) I'm sure I'd find other similar quotes if I looked it up.