You should remove that. Otherwise, you should receive down votes.
Edit: For clarity's sake, you should remove the complaint about downvotes.
I understand why people had a hard time with the donation. I did too. The pro-Prop. 8 campaign was a river of vicious lies. My initial reaction was the same as a lot of other people's, and indeed I signed one of the online petitions calling for Eich's ouster, which I now regret.
But eventually it became clear that he really did keep his politics out of the office -- there was not a shred of evidence to the contrary. He should have been allowed to remain CEO.
It's old hat at this point and likely not worth rehashing, but the way I ended up looking at the problem that made the most sense to me was to look at it as a chain of events, and determine if there's any event in that chain that I'd want to prevent. Obviously I don't want to prevent people from choosing which products they use; I don't want to prevent people from discussing their product choices with each other; I don't want to prevent these discussions from happening publicly; I don't want to prevent companies from acting based on public and internal opinion. Eich's departure, for better or worse, was at the end of a chain of reactions that we don't only need to accept, but defend -- an essential consequence of a system that we want to perpetuate.
Eich was CEO for less than 2 weeks (March 24 to April 3rd)...
> He should have been allowed to remain CEO.
Technically he was. The board didn't move against him, Eich resigned.
But he was hardly a newcomer to Mozilla, having been CTO for years. I believe I read that he had also participated in the drafting of Mozilla's diversity policy.
And as far as him being "allowed" to remain CEO, I was really speaking about public opinion, not about the board's actions, though I am extremely unimpressed with the way the board handled the whole thing. He claimed that he had initially been uninterested in the position, and they talked him into taking it. Given that, they should have supported him a lot more than they did, although they might still in the end have felt their hand was forced.
No, I don't think that's a justifiable claim. A political donation was the trigger for a public controversy, which was a key event leading to the previous CEO leaving the position. The evidence does not, however, provide anything like clear support that the political donation itself was the sole reason that the CEO left the position.
This conclusion is only justifiable with the assumption that the salience of politics to the community with which the incumbent in the office in question must deal is fixed. This is a fairly counterintuitive claim that requires some justification; salience of issues -- particularly those aside from the ones that define a particular community -- is generally quite fluid.
Do you agree that if he'd never made the donation he'd still be there?
From the very limited information I have, my impression is that he was a poor choice with weak support from the board from the outset and most likely a deficit in either ability or willingess to manage community relations rather than technical issues that would quite likely not have lasted long or been particularly effective as CEO at Mozilla at the time (and with the board in place at that time) he was appointed even if that particular source of controversy hadn't erupted.
Would he still be there now? Maybe. Hard to say.
EDIT: Why the downvotes?