Brendan Eich is surprisingly un-cancelled for a guy who thinks his employees shouldn't be able to visit their spouses dying in hospitals[1]. He's literally still around.
[1] Which happened a lot during the AIDS pandemic and was essentially the purpose of the gay marriage campaign. It was actually relatively culturally conservative; super-liberal SF gay people wouldn't want nuclear families after all, they'd want to live in communes or something.
Sadly, people like Eich have been forced to become so defensive on this topic that there's no real hope of reaching them intellectually. This is how humans work: when we feel forced to defend something, most of us will defend it far beyond the point that it's rational.
The broader gay marriage movement is, in my view, a canonical demonstration about how effective positivity can be. Truly inspiring. Some more contemporaneous social movements could learn a thing or two from the cultural normalisation of homosexuality. Rather than learning from success, what I see it a whole lot of hateful negativity on Twitter... and little else.
Low-quality.
And of course, CA did introduce something like "marriage with a different name" afterwards, but it didn't seem like the Prop 8 defenders liked that either, and the courts still found it unconstitutional.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo...
It is often a negative stereotype that gay people want to live in communes.
> Brendan Eich is surprisingly un-cancelled
No, he was cancelled by Mozilla for something that has nothing to do with his work. The company lost a lot of goodwill because of that. Liberals too btw. If you preach tolerance and pull stuff like this, your statements won't have much weight further on.
However, I suggest skipping the extra and disingenous step of pretending there's some objective universal standard of "neutrality."
Your "neutral" may be somebody else's idea of "left" or "right."
What you're doing here makes as much sense as inventing some arbitrary personal definition of "rock and roll music" and then criticizing some performer for not hewing closely enough to it.
2: Why should I care about the politics of the software company I use, as long as they abide by the stances they say they have regarding my privacy and making the best product possible?
Protecting privacy, holding big tech accountable, etc are not divisive topics. Any internet user wants that.
Yet if you tread in more divisive topics, you may lose part of your audience. Examples: women in tech, trans rights, advancing the black community with special projects.
Each of these are politically divisive. It doesn't matter where you stand on these issues, I'm just commenting on how they are divisive topics in an extremely polarized political landscape.
If these issues are central to your belief and mission, one should go for it. Yet you then need to accept the risk of abandoning part of the potential user base.
Which for a browser maker is dumb. But I wonder what Mozilla really is these days.
Why should I care about the politics of the
software company I use
You might also choose to care about the people working at that company. Suppose they support and/or practice policies that are harmful (or beneficial) to their employees. You might choose to discourage (or encourage) such policies by voting with your money.
Really, your question is disingenuous -- surely you understand? It seems like you simply don't want to care or don't feel that giving or witholding your support will make a sufficient difference. That's your call. Just be honest with yourself and others.
It does, but Mozilla is not representative of those values to my opinion. They represent the values on the left of humanism, but are opposed to right values, and therefore it doesn’t embody neutrality or democracy.
They go as far as thinking everyone should share their opinion on gay marriage, and a private donation in that matter is grounds to fire someone. Given their clear left leaning on other public stances, I think activists on the right should be wary of sudden account deletion if they store data with Mozilla (e.g. the password vault).
Not that they could trust Google either, of course. But neutrality would be much better if we mention democracy.