We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940778 and marked it off-topic.

You've already managed to post a lot of flamebait and many unsubstantive comments to HN. That's exactly what this site is not for, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take them to heart from now on?

For what it's worth, the Eich incident has been in the back of my mind reading these comments. I was surprised it wasn't coming up more in all the "et tu Mozilla?"

To be clear, moderating for trolling is fair, but past PR disasters are pretty on topic assuming they are earnest thoughts on the news.

I don't quite agree, because as the HN guidelines have pointed out for years, classic flamewar topics rarely involve anything new to say. And boy is that one a classic.

Yes, I understood as much.

It's also useful for people to understand that longstanding disagreements are still there. People have been sharing their estimations of the Mozilla organization and for many people, that estimation took a huge hit with the Eich business.

If we're not willing to keep talking about controversial issues, even at the risk of flamewars, we just retrench in our old us vs them mentalities and bubbles. And that has proven to be bad in all sorts of ways in recent history.

Anyway, I thought it would be useful to register another opinion explicitly. I hope it is taken well.

For sure and no problem! And I think you make some fine arguments. In cases like what we're discussing, though, we need to remember the focus of the site: intellectual curiosity. Knowing what HN is trying to be and what it is not trying to be is critical.

Keeping intellectual curiosity as the top priority has surprisingly strong consequences if you think about it. It means, for example, that any social benefits are side effects—welcome side effects, but not the purpose of the site.

He had only been CEO for two weeks. Three board members quit before he started, likely due to the fact that they wanted to hire an outside person to help revamp the company. I don't think his short tenure is the real reason Mozilla has been falling from grace.

CEO for 2 weeks doesn't accurately capture his contribution.

"He started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995"

"In early 1998, Eich co-founded the Mozilla project with Mitchell Baker, creating the website mozilla.org that was meant to manage open-source contributions to the Netscape source code. He served as Mozilla's chief architect."

"In August 2005, after serving as Lead Technologist and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Mozilla Foundation, Eich became CTO of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich

If your publicly held view is "a big chunk of people don't deserve the same rights as others", and your job requires working with lots of different people, then I'd argue you're probably not a good choice for the job.

A big part of any CEO's job is to be a public representative, and such a representative should not air controversial public views that have nothing to do with his job.

What he believes in private, and shares with his friends and family is his own business. What appears in news stories is not his own private business, and needs to be managed.

To be fair to Eich, he didn't really "air" said views, iirc they were brought to light through a $1000 donation to an organization that was campaigning for California Prop 8, which would have re-banned gay marriage (and did, briefly, when it was passed before being struck down in court). Also it was made ~6 years prior to his brief tenure as CEO of Mozilla.

Not that I agree at all with the withholding of rights on the basis of sexuality etc, and am particularly disappointed and confused when intelligent people hold such retrograde views. But I don't think it would have precluded him from being an effective leader until third parties, likely with ulterior motives, launched media campaigns about it.

It's really unfortunate how the oppressed turn into the oppressor the moment they are given power. It tells us a lot about humanity right there. The very people telling other's to accept they have a different opinion when they are in the minority, but then turn around and deny opinions to those they disagree with when they are in the majority. It is shameful.

No, he took action to bring pain and suffering to a group of people because of their sexual orientation

Oh? Because anyone has an opinion that doesn't agree with the hive mind is a bigot. Got it.

His opinion wasn't the issue. It was his action, he donated money to take rights away from others, including his employees.

No, anyone who would discriminate or support discriminating against someone based on something as irrelevant as sexual orientation is a bigot. Got it?

"I don't believe that your friends and loved ones deserve the same rights I have" is not a point of view I am particularly worried about learning about. It is prima facie unacceptable and should be rejected by organizations that care about being decent; digging into the disaster represented by that hidebound bigotry (and it is an insult in the company of decent parts of humanity) just cements it.

'Abortion is murder' but I bet you still eat meat...

Outside of a few extremely devout Buddhists, very, very few people I've spoken with adhere to a consistent set of first principles when it comes to making moral decisions across abortion, infanticide, euthanasia and vegetarianism.

The question of what gives a life its value is a difficult one and is nearly impossible to discuss on a forum like this.

You say you don't "insult" pro-choice people, but you use the term "abortionist" which is weaponized specifically by the fundamentalist right wing to imply that people who don't feel that they can assert supremacy over the bodies of women like abortions. Meanwhile, pro-choice folks, in most of the Western world, have generally sought policies that make abortion as "safe, legal, and rare".

So forgive me if I don't buy in. Words mean things and words tell you things and yours underline your bad faith.

And where do you stand on that specific issue? I think it's cards on the table time.