So please do not accuse me of “making stuff up”. I was simply repeating what literally every article on this matter says. If the entire media got that wrong, then fine. Ultimately only you know why you left. But I “made up” nothing.

You also seem to have assumed that the “employees” who called for my resignation reported to me. Not so: they all worked for the smaller Mozilla Foundation, which has arms-length structure as parent non-profit to the for-profit Mozilla Corporation of which I was CEO.

Again, that’s not “made up”. It’s a logical conclusion based upon the facts of what happened. You are saying that the facts of your case are not evidence that this could possibly happen to anyone else at that organization in the future. I hope you’re right. But the reality is that if they pushed one person out because of ideological differences, it is quite probable that it has happened to others and will continue to happen.

The bottom line is this: You made a minor donation to a conservative political cause years before you became CEO. That ultimately led to your departure. I don’t think even you would dispute either of those facts. This pretty well supports the conclusion that anyone with even mildly conservative views is not welcome there. I’m not sure how else anyone would interpret that. You seem to have a much more charitable interpretation of it than the facts support, but that doesn’t mean that people interpreting what happened in the most obvious way are “making up” that interpretation.

I'm disputing your absolute-sounding "Mozilla’s employees are fiercely liberal". Even if you define "liberal" broadly, are they all? Really, no moderates or righties? As I happen to know some, and so do other people, you seem to be using hyperbole at best, if not making things up.

Also your absolute, unhedged "If you have a conservative bone in your body, you are not welcome on the Mozilla campus." Again, counterexamples are known personally to me and others on HN such as @roca. So instead of persuading, you're exaggerating for some reason (to divide and conquer, to get sympathy, it doesn't matter -- the exaggeration is the point and it blows back, assuming you are actually trying to persuade anyone; perhaps you are writing not to persuade?).

Mozilla would have trouble with state law if they actively fired or demoted anyone over past political acts, per California Labor Law 1101 and 1102. Let's agree that is not the case.

That leaves subtler biases. You could be right, especially after I left, that anyone who is known to be "on the right" (conservative is almost useless as a clear political term) would face subtler kinds of hostility, skepticism, pressure. You are probably right about executives, but that's true at a lot of places. Anyone pushing buttons by boosting Trump at lunch or water-cooler time, wearing a MAGA hat, etc., would run into complaints and escalations.

But at this point we are far from your absolute, unqualified assertions about "are fiercely liberal" and "not welcome". See what I mean?

P.S. See https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/04/fighting-media-narrativ... including all the comments. I'm not taking anyone's side there, but if it were as absolute and simple as you asserted, many righties would have quit too and we'd hear from them. If I missed such testimony, please link.

I probably should have hedged it to some degree, but I feel like you’re being pedantic. Of course there are exceptions to every rule. This was a comment on HN, not a research paper. I was making a generalization, perhaps one worded too broadly, but one that you seem to eventually concede to in the latter part of your last comment.

FWIW, I mentioned your case as an example because I think you suffered a terrible injustice. I can’t stand hypocrisy, and to have things like this being brought forth by people that belong to a party that calls itself the “party of tolerance” disgusts me in a way that I couldn’t fully describe in writing. I don’t even agree with your stance on the issue you donated to, but I think that incidents like yours have a chilling effect on free speech, and that isn’t good for anyone. Too much of this kind of thing happens across the board. I find it fascinating that you seem to be defending the other side in your situation, but I am sure you have your reasons.

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

Eich was kinda a moron and I don't think they realized that after he was onboard. IIRC, he saw no reason to move forward with the Firefox Quantum support and generally had some other bad software decisions.

I suspect the anti-gay stuff was more to justify a way to get rid of him and score some points in the process.

Not even Brendan's worst enemies have ever accused him of being a moron.

Brendan was a leading figure at Mozilla since the very beginning of the project. Everyone very well knew who he was.

I didn't agree with all of Brendan's decisions. For example I think we should have prioritized process separation higher than we did, and Brendan was partly responsible for deprioritizing that, which I viewed as a serious mistake. But Brendan made a lot more good decisions than bad ones and from that point of view, everyone I know was confident in him as CEO.

Engineers certainly weren't looking for an "excuse to get rid of him". I assume executives and the board weren't either, or they wouldn't have made him CEO just before the controversy exploded.

Quantum (or part of it; much good work done in C++ code too) is based on Rust and Servo, projects for which I was sole executive sponsor from 2010 onward: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224047.

It's fair to say Rust and Servo would not exist as such if I hadn't been at Mozilla.

I'm among the actual founders of mozilla.org, we started working on it in fall 1997. Earliest wayback snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/19981202152141/http://www.mozill...