He gave $1000 donation to support a ban on gay marriage, to be clear.

A ban that was supported by the majority at the time and the donation was six years old at the time he became CEO. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461541

To Godwin a little, sometimes the right thing is not the majority thing.

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

The point was not "whatever the majority wants is therefore good". The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs. That is a pretty unreasonable standard to apply, imo.

Also, come on man. It's in really bad taste to compare stuff to the Holocaust. Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.

There is a difference between having an opinion and spending money to promote it.

Also, beside the direct murders as @ceejayoz mentioned, the social exclusion of LGBT folks drives far too many of them to many of them to suicide.

The legalization of same sex marriage cause a noticeable drop in their suicide rate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBTQ_people#:~:...).

> The point is that if you were to apply the "you get fired from your job for this" standard evenly, the majority of the country would've had to get fired from their jobs.

Standards should be higher for folks with more power. The cashier at the grocery store expressing bigoted beliefs won't harm me much; my boss doing it is more serious.

> Nobody was being murdered here, it's not remotely the same.

I assure you, homophobia has its murder victims. (Including a good number of Holocaust ones.)

> Standards should be higher for folks with more power.

Joe Biden voted for the "Defense of Marriage Act", Yet many LGBT people supported him becoming president.

Obama opposed gay marriage as well. As did many prominent politicians, left and right.

The swing from opposing it to supporting it was a huge cultural shift, and I'm not sure I've seen anything like that happen so quickly, except maybe during a time of war. It went from being opposed by a strong majority to supported by a strong majority in... maybe 5-8 years? It was pretty impressive, and I think it's a sign that the marketplace of ideas can still function.

It helps a lot that it's really a harmless thing. It's giving people more freedom, not taking any away from anyone, and so as soon as it became clear that it wasn't causing a problem, everybody shrugged and went 'ok'.

Supporting one of two candidates in a first past the post election is simply supporting the lesser evil. There is no other information to glean.

Same goes for CEOs.

I wonder if in hindsight he's embarrassed to have been on the wrong side of history. Imagine spending your time and money fighting inevitable social change. Fighting gay marriage is just a time-shifted fight against women voting or interracial marriage.

No, those are all completely separate things.

they really are kind of the same thing: basic human rights.

Only to bigots.

And people don't have to all agree on the same things. People can get together to work towards cause X and then individually believe in mutually exclusive causes alpha, beta, gamma.

Yes people can and should have differences of opinion but a line is crossed when you openly campaign to eliminate the differences of opinion by curtailing the freedoms of the people you disagree with.

Brendan is the one that crossed a line.

>curtailing the freedoms you disagree with

So pretty much any law that is opposed by someone. Shop lifting shouldn't be legal because there are people who like free stuff. Curltailing the freedom of people who want free stuff improves society by protecting people's property.

Who's rights are gay people impeding on in this analogy?

There doesn't have to be any for my analogy to make sense.

Saying that a law is bad because it prohibits someone from doing something is a position of anarchy.

I didn't say a law was bad.

Okay, I assumed that was meant by "cross a line."

Queer people aren't causes, they're people. Imagine I worked on the Brave browser, and in my personal time maintained a website aimed at discouraging personal relationships with him. This would probably make me difficult to work with, despite my personal views not impacting the quality of my work. You might say these examples aren't one-to-one, and you're right. My example doesn't actually push any legislation forbidding him from having a relationship with a consenting person, and it costs a hell of a lot less than $1000.

I dunno. Public Defenders (and defense attorneys in general, but PDs don't get oodles of cash) have to work with some pretty reprehensible people sometimes.

I used to live in Bahrain while my wife worked in oil and gas, and a lot of her colleagues had some... pretty different... views from us but we still got along. Hell, the country itself has a pretty significant Sunni / Shia divide, with employees being one or the other and they managed to work with each other just fine.

I think in general people should be able to work with others that they have significant differences in opinion with. Now, in tech, we've been privileged to be in a seller's (of labor) market, where we can exercise some selectivity in where we work, so it's certainly a headwind in hiring if the CEO is undesirable (for whatever reason), but plenty of people still will for the cause or the pay or whatever. You just have to balance whether the hiring problems the CEO may or may not cause are worth whatever else they bring to the table.

> Public Defenders (and defense attorneys in general, but PDs don't get oodles of cash) have to work with some pretty reprehensible people sometimes.

That doesn't mean they believe in the awful things their clients do.

That's exactly my point. They are able to do their job despite not believing in their clients, which for public defenders even means trying to let their clients go free, which is a fair bit further than is asked of a tech employee who disagrees with their CEO.

Public Defenders do not have a choice at who they defend.

That's the point. You don't need an alignment of beliefs to work together.

That's kind of the point of PDs, though. There's nothing similar in the corporate context.

If you were on a hiring committee, and your otherwise-qualified-candidate had a political opinion you objected to in this way, perhaps with a similar donation, would you refuse to hire them?

If you were about to hire a candidate and then found out that they donate regularly to the “Arrest kbelder and deport them to El Salvador” fund, would you hire them?

Is that a no?

It’s easy to claim neutrality when it’s other people being oppressed

Ok. I actually think you ought to be able to refuse to hire somebody you disagree with like that. I think you would be very wrong in doing so, though.

Would it be wrong to refuse to hire a neonazi? What kind of people do you think your organization will attract if you start hiring neonazis?

Ones that are sane enough not to bring culture war drama to the office.

I guess “kill all jews” is culture war drama now

Depends what you mean by “political opinion”.

If it’s about government fiscal policy, probably not. If it’s more along the lines of discriminating against or undermining people’s rights, then yeah I would refuse to hire them.

Perhaps we need stronger laws against discrimination then.

Marriages aren't people. And you probably unknowingly depend on a lot of people that despise many things you consider part of your identity. Touch grass and let people have opinions different from your own.

Donating any amount of money to prevent people you don't know from marrying each other is a clear sign of disordered thinking. Nothing more or less.

I'd donate to a campaign to ban child marraige, is that disordered?

If you think adults marrying other adults and adults marrying children are in any way equivalent, as you imply, then yes your thinking is deeply disordered.

That's not what he said or implied, he's merely responding to your argument 'Donating any amount of money to prevent people you don't know from marrying each other'. I think you might have a justifiable argument here, but it's not clear at all to me what it is.

I cannot imagine the mental model you're working with if my observation is not crystal clear despite omitting the word "adults" in my initial post. Both your and Y_Y's responses read as bad faith to me, but it could be extraordinary ignorance.

In either case I have no idea how to make it clearer for you. Good luck.

It's not really possible to do that when the opposing beliefs are so fundamental. Mozilla had, and has, a lot of LGBT staff.

How could you expect those staff to work under and trust a CEO opposed to their very existence as equal members of society?

What's so fundamental about marriage?

I don't think childless couples (of any gender) should get any societal advantages yet I have no problem working with people that disagree. Why has everything to be black-or-white, left-or-right, with us or against us? That's not a productive way to think about others.

It has to be us vs against us because that's what law is all about -- outlawing certain actions.

It's one thing to believe as you do, it's quite another to push for legislation that would (in your example) deny childless couples societal advantages, whatever that actually means.

If you're not in favor of a-or-b arguments the answer is to allow a and b, eh?

In a liberal context, marriage means nothing except for being a symbol of a union between two people. But all rules, obligations and rights that make marriage a meaningful institution are rooted in religion, and are hence not always respected outside of religion.

You could argue that there are laws that only apply to married couples, and that brings meaning to marriage. Firstly, generally speaking, things we associate with marriage culturally are mostly not protected by law, most notably: fidelity. Secondly, to my limited knowledge, the line between a married couple and two people living together is increasingly getting blurred by laws that apply marriage legal obligations even to non-married couples if they have lived together for long enough.

So you're also against Atheist Marriage, then?

Of course not.

If there's nothing fundamental about marriage and it's just some weird coliving arrangement, then why ban it for only some groups in the first place? Nothing productive or even rational about it.

Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but not the action that triggered it?

> Why is the reaction seen as irrational or immature but not the action that triggered it?

The analogous (but with an opposite direction) action would be campaigning to make gay marriage legal. Nobody has a problem with people doing that. The reason people object to Eich's firing is because it is a very clear escalation in the culture war, not because they have strong opinions about gay marriage.

For one, being childless is a choice (mostly, especially since adoption is a possibility). It's indeed OK to have different opinions for what how laws apply differently to people based on their choices. Being gay is not a choice, it is rather similar to race/ethnic background, and it's generally not OK to have laws that treat people differently based on something like that. I'm sure there are more nuances to add, but it seems to me that makes it quite a different situation.

I don't think everyone agrees that being gay is not a choice. There are no outward physical indicators of a person's sexual orientation. It's entirely behavorial and therefore plausibly under the conscious control of the person. Now, I would agree that a person doesn't choose which gender he is attracted to, but it not something than anyone else can see and immediately understand as an inborn characteristic.

Clearly being black, or hispanic, or asian, or white are physical characteristics. Far fewer people would argue that there is any element of choice in that.

This is the craziest example of “if I can’t see it, it [might not] exist” I have ever witnessed.

It doesn't even matter if being gay is a choice or not. PEOPLE STILL DESERVE THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE WHO THEY MARRY. It's basic human rights.

What unjust "advantages" do you think childless couples get that you would want to get rid?

Pretty much all of the legal benefits of marriage are contractual, not financial, and come at no cost to the public.

Things like spousal medical rights, a joint estate, etc don't come at the expense of anybody else.

Taxes would be a big one. There are substantial tax benefits to being married.

The tax benefits are sorta oversold.

The main benefits are tax free gifts between partners and filing jointly, both of which seem very reasonable and wouldn't be of value to single people.

The actual tax breaks most people think about are tied to dependents in your household, not marriage.

No, there aren’t. In fact, there was a tax penalty for being married until 2017 TCJA.

Your thinking applies equally to all people. His donation tries to take away a right from a minority group. They're quite different.

If you think for a moment, you'll realise that it's irrelevant whether marriage is important to you - it's important to many.

So when a person wishes to deny this important institution to a minority, they are creating an out-group and discriminating against them.

By that logic, we can put those discriminators themselves in an out-group and discriminate against them. We can deny them institutions such as directorships. Fair's fair.

It's more than fair - despite what conversion camps want to sell, being queer is an intransigent characteristic. Being a bully is just a choice. Discriminating against bullies is as morally just as discriminating against the incompetent.

Obviously it's fine to campaign against marriage.

> It's not really possible to do that when the opposing beliefs are so fundamental.

Sure it is. I've lived and worked in the Middle East and in China. People do it all the time.

Ive worked with Catholics and my views on sola scriptura and the authority of the Pope never came up once. Ive worked with Muslims, and it was never an issue. Ive worked with Hindus. Ive worked with Chinese, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Nigerians, Brazilians, Kenyans, Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Ghanans, Mexicans, and many other nationalities. I have been on many teams and in my companies with a combinatorial explosion of fundamentally incompatible beliefs.

So yes I do expect staff to work under a ceo that is opposed to gay marriage, an idea that I would bet globally has a less than 50% popular support.

Have you donated to anti-Muslim, anti-Christian etc. platforms in a public fashion while working with them? Because you would've found quite quickly how that changes the interactions.

I don't mind working with someone who has incompatible views with me, but I'd be quite unhappy working with someone who was actively working on undermining my rights.

That depends. I have donated to Religious missionary work publicly, that could be seen by an extremist of any other religion who sees this as a zero sum game as anti their religion. But I don't bring this up in work because that is uncouth and not what my job is about, and would expect the same from co-workers. Eich also didn't donate publicly, this was dug up and then foisted upon him. If someone were to dig through records they could find my donations and party affiliations, which is what they did to him. He was being professional, they were the ones that were taking his private views and forcing them into the public sphere.

> taking his private views and forcing them into the public sphere

Donations in an effort to change the law are fundamentally a public action, whether or not the government requires the fact of your donation to be publicly disclosed. Seeking to use the law to hurt people is not a private view.

It's basic tolerance, it's not that hard. You do your job and collect your paycheck at the end of the week, same as everyone else.

>It's basic tolerance, it's not that hard.

That's right. To get a bit philosophical, it's interesting to see some people's justifications about how they are right to be intolerant in the ways they want to be, while still believing that they are free-thinking and tolerant. A lot of convoluted arguments are really about keeping one's self-image intact, justifying beliefs that are contradictory but which the person really wants to believe. I think that is a trap that is more dangerous for intelligent people.

For what it's worth, I support and supported gay marriage at the time, but don't think people should be forced out of their job for believing otherwise. Thoughts and words you disagree with should be met with alternative thoughts and words.

Could you summarize this into an argument of your own?

"I want to discriminate against others but still claim to be righteous."

Bad-faith putting words into my mouth. Take that shit elsewhere please.

That's kinda my point, this was already argued like 80 years ago.

> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

And how many Mozilla were fired while the CEO increased her pay to more than $7M per year?

How can staff members feel trust and been seen as equals when they get fired to make place for someone that is already earning 70x their wage. All while tanking the company to new lows.

Just because people can get together to work towards a cause while believing in mutually exclusive ideals, doesn't mean it's the most effective way for people to work together. The base ability to do something and the ability to do something well is a big difference.

Yeah except "people I don't like shouldn't have rights" is not a valid or defensible position. That makes you a bad person, no qualifiers.

Personal?

Also: Mozilla is a next level woke nest. I'm not even sure I'd survive there...

Oh yes, totally worth it to risk THE FREE INTERNET because of that.

He's not defending "THE FREE INTERNET" at his new place.

(Which for the record, is less important than physical freedom).

Maybe that has to do with Brave not getting a free check to the tune iof $500M Google every year.

That makes it more difficult to create "free internet" type projects.

Probably comes from the Crypto scam integrated into the browser.

I find it funny some people shit on Firefox for adding Pocket, but defend Brave for adding crypto scams to the browser.

I don't defend Brave adding this feature or believe that it is even a good idea but how does this constitute a scam?

> I don't defend Brave

Maybe not, but you spend quite some time spitting on Mozilla for taking money from Google.

Yes, because (1) they spent that money badly as can be seen from the non-Google revenue numbers of Mozilla and Firefox's market share and (2) people are comparing practices of a company that gets $500M for free and a practices of a company that is essentially bootstrapped, which makes no sense.

> risk THE FREE INTERNET because of that

Come off it, as if he is the only one who can save us. Spare me.

Brendan Eich is a rich nerd who probably got cornered in a party by someone smart and signed $1000 check.

It is like blaming me for giving $10 to an bump without checking what he was gonna do with it.

No part of this is true, fwiw. His salary at Mozilla was not high and he was a strong advocate of keeping executive compensation low (and as supporting evidence, that compensation shot up soon after he left). He may have made more from Brave, but that was obviously well after the donation. He also never backed down from his donation and the directly implied opposition to gay marriage, only stating that it comes from his personal beliefs and that he refused to discuss those openly. (I disagree with his position on gay marriage, or at least the position that I can infer from his donation, but I agree with his right and decision to keep it a private matter.)

I had... complex but mostly positive feelings about Eich in the time I worked for him (indirectly), but I can state unequivocally that he's not someone who would bend his principles as a result of getting cornered at a party.

What I meant is he is a guy who have evolved in the center of the tech revolution in the 90s and 2000s. If he is not horribly bad with money he probably made a lot at least in various investments.

So I would guess $1000 was almost nothing to him. He is not really supporting anything by donating $1000.

I listened to him in a interview once, he really feel like a nice guy.

In political terms $1000 is basically nothing.

In 2014, which is over a decade ago now.

Wikipedia also says he's Catholic. From what I understand, the Church's positions on such things have evolved at least somewhat since then. His views could have totally changed or evolved since then (can't find anything publicly myself).

But then he went on to make Yet Another Chromium Fork, so it doesn't seem like he was particularly attached to Gecko or what it stands for in the browser engine market anyway. What's to say that Mozilla wouldn't have given up the fight and pivoted to Chromium, like Opera and Edge did, if he was still in charge?

And he went in on integrating trendy things like Ads that pay crypto and AI integrated into the browser, so it's not like there wouldn't be AI if he were in charge.

Maybe that was necessary because they don't get a $500M check every year. Kinda makes things more difficult.

Is there a name for the fallacy where you assume the path not taken is much better? Because I agree, this is that. Mozilla’s challenges are foundational, Eich as CEO wouldn’t have made a dramatic difference in outcomes.

They originally started with Gecko and switched to Chromium.

"There were a ton of issues using Gecko, starting with (at the time) no CDM (HTML5 DRM module) so no HD video content from the major studios, Netflix, Amazon, etc. -- Firefox had an Adobe deal but it was not transferable or transferred to any other browser that used Gecko -- and running the gamut of paper-cuts to major web incompatibilities especially on mobile, vs. WebKit-lineage engines such as Chromium/Blink."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941623

And nowadays, I'd argue that there's more human eyeballs watching the Chromium source code vs the Firefox code.

It isn't really Yet Another Chromium Fork, they're the company that does most anti-ad research / development. Stuff like Project Sugarcoat[0]. Their adblocking engine is also native and does not depend on Manifest V2, making it work better than any blocker that has to switch to MV3 when Google removes MV2.

And they're the only browser that has a functional alternative for webpage-based ads. Active right now. And you can instead fund pages / creators by buying BAT directly instead of watching private ads.

On top of that, Brave's defaults are much more privacy-protecting than Firefox's, you only get good protection on Firefox if you harden the config by mucking about in about:config.

People love to hate on Brave because they made some weird grey area missteps in the past (injecting affiliate links on crypto sites and pre-installing a deactivated VPN) and they're involved in crypto. But its not like Firefox hasn't made some serious missteps in the past, but somehow Firefox stans have decided to forget about the surreptitiously installed extension for Mr. Robot injected ads (yes really).

If people could be objective for a second they'd see that Brave took over the torch from Firefox and has been carrying it for a long time now.

[0] https://brave.com/research/sugarcoat-programmatically-genera...

Yeah, I realized this recently. I want rendering engine competition, but it's clear that Mozilla isn't capable of doing that anymore.

Translation: he had donated to ban same-sex marriage in California[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...

Eich chose to resign due to internal and external protest in the form of petitions and resignations.

No one forced him to do anything, and Mozilla itself certainly didn't force him out.

His free speech was met with the free speech of others, and he decided it was too painful to stay in that spotlight.

How would you prefer it to have gone?

Not to have him cancelled in the first place. No need to pretend that doing something under the mob pressure is the same as doing something entirely willingly

Far, far more people have protested the positions of power held by (for example) Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle. They ignored the cancellation attempts, and they're richer and more influential today than they were a few years ago.

"Cancellation" is a state of being famous enough that your controversial beliefs upset a large, loud number of people. In Eich's case, it threatened to have no effect on his career. He chose to change his career because of it.

Eich expressed his First Amendment rights, and other people expressed theirs in return. Why should either of them give up those rights for fear of offending the other?