[tomatocracy]

As I said, some people disagree that this type of speech is purely "political" - many others take the opposite side and would say that these viewpoints are legitimate political ones (even if they disagree with those viewpoints) which, when expressed in an entirely separate context, should not affect the workplace. I was trying to explain where people disagree.

Not that it's necessarily wrong that he left, but I think it is important to acknowledge that there were people at the time (and now) who felt that this was unfair and that it may have had an impact on certain people's likely participation in political speech, or put some people off contributing/working for Mozilla who otherwise wouldn't have been.

The dividing line between "workplace" and "personal" lives has been blurring for a long time which throws up many of these issues. Many people would like to undo some of that blurring - anti-discrimination laws in effect protect some of this but not all. This becomes even more problematic as the line between "volunteer community" and "workplace" is also increasingly being blurred in Open Source projects.

In the case of Eich, I would perhaps say it would be more accurate to say that he was hounded out - as the context was something coming to light that he'd done years earlier and not in a workplace context, when opinion polls showed the majority of the country agreed with him (and even President Obama agreed with him before Obama changed his mind).