You seem sincere, so here's an honest answer.

What you're missing is the nature of the job of CEO, especially in Silicon Valley. It's not a job where you bury your head down and get the work done, a huge part of the job is being the public face of the company.

The Mozilla Corp. has decided that their public face should be someone who is opposed to equal rights for gays. That's completely different than having a racist working as a programmer or in the mail room or even as CTO.

Boycotting javascript would be silly. Nobody is trying to say that everything Eich has touched now has cooties and we should stay away from it. However, it's perfectly reasonable to ask what kind of company Mozilla wants to be when they decide they want Eich as their public representative.

I wonder how many people making this "public face of the company" argument could name the current CEO of Netflix.

Or, before the recent controversy, name any of the prior Mozilla CEOs. (It hasn't seemed to be an organization reliant on big-personality/high-profile CEOs.)

So I'm downvoted to hell, but what about my question?

It's easy to do a boycott that doesn't hurt you. Everybody can live without Firefox.

So why not get serious about this and show people that you are willing to make an actual sacrifice as a stand against his position?

Maybe that would be inconvenient?

>> What am I missing here?

> So I'm downvoted to hell, but what about my question?

The question does not deserve an answer, but you are obviously not going to realize and will remain enraged, which would be counter-productive.

Firstly you are missing that there is choice about browsers; but no choice whatsoever in a scripting language in browsers. They are asking their users to make a choice, one that will not hurt their users. By removing all use of JS they would actively hurt their users.

Secondly you are missing that even as CEO of Mozilla he does not remain in control of JS, even if he created it.

Hey, I would totally be in for a boycott of Javascript. Let's do this.

Pick a Time Machine, and go back to 1995, I wish you the best of luck.

A boycott is meant to inconvenience the target of the boycott. If your goal is to nudge the Mozilla Corp into action, Firefox downloads is really the way to do it, as that's pretty much their sole source of revenue.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

JavaScript is something he produced, think of it as a work of art. The language itself doesn't portray his personal beliefs on topics other than language design. Putting him in charge of people who lifestyle he is not accepting of is different. It will influence the choices he makes in dealing with people and in how the organization behaves.

If the language had something like logging levels which were labeled by derogatory terms for a subset of people that'd be another issue but it doesn't.

Imagine if Ted Bundy had created a cure for cancer. Would you want to boycott it? Would you put him in charge of people? Now admittedly Bundy might be a bigger danger to a specific subset of people than Eich but Eich is still a danger in some way to a subset of people.

Boycotting FireFox isn't about the product, it is about sending a message to the organization that puts him in a position of power over people.

So you're saying you'd boycott Nazi Germany, but you wouldn't boycott an art gallery that displayed Hitler's paintings?

The point of a boycott is to pressure some company or person to change. Boycotting Javascript is too abstract to be valuable. Javascript can't fire him, to cite the obvious example.

The fact that it's realistically possible to boycott (i.e. not use) Firefox, but boycotting Javascript is - essentially - impossible. Sure, you can disable it in your browser, but that's nowhere near an outright boycott.

(BTW, this is just one difference, one that I haven't seen anyone else pointing out, whilst other, just as good - if not better - differences have been identified in this very post)

Ok I see that it is quite unrealistic to go community-wide with a Javascript boycott (and I was talking about developers, not users). It's just that singling out Firefox to me seems so arbitrary.

Now the target is Firefox, the last big independent browser, even though it was _Mozilla Corporation_ (not the foundation) that made the wrong choice. Mozilla Corporation is IMO the place were pressure should be applied.

I realize now that this is probably what annoyed me most about how this affair developed. I am quite attached to Firefox and was rather surprised that it became a target in a scandal that revolves around a stupid move by Mozilla Corporation.

Have you ever tried to program in JavaScript? It doesn't have classes but the syntax looks similar: this is actually a pointer to that.

null == false // false

!null // true

He should be exiled for inventing JS.

</joke?