[uchi]

>Changing your views, and admitting you were wrong is the best thing you can do.

Dude, what?

What if he doesn't feel it was wrong? Furthermore, who the fuck cares what he believes and what he spends his money on in his own PRIVATE time? That's COMPLETELY outside of his job at the Mozilla foundation which he's been working at just fine for 15 fucking years.

Your comment genuinely irritates me.

[wpietri]

If the view is that some of the people you will soon be boss of are not deserving of the same civil rights as everybody else, then that is entirely relevant to his job. Because those employees would have a reasonable fear of discriminatory treatment.

[uchi]

...but they haven't had a fear of discriminatory treatment since he's...a fucking founder of mozilla and worked at the company for 15 years and lead many projects.

If there was a fear of discriminatory treatment, we would've heard about it much sooner.

[wpietri]

He helped strip a civil right from gay people. That's discriminatory treatment. More evidence is not needed for people to have a reasonable fear of further discrimination.

"We haven't detected X, ergo X doesn't exist" is an obviously false notion. It's false even in the same situation, but it's even more obviously wrong in a different one. As CTO, he would have had a hard time making a bigoted technical decision. But as CEO, he's in charge of all sorts of stuff where a subtle bias could be expressed, and there's no longer an executive above him who could hold him accountable.

[uchi]

He donated money for a campaign that he believed in. You might believe that was discriminatory, he did not. Ultimately its up to the law to decide that. He gave money for a caused he believed in, even if that cause was wrong.

But contrary to what you're trying to link it to, that does not affect his professional life or the way he managed mozilla up until this point. There's simply no evidence of it. There's no logical fallacy. There's just no evidence that he's done anything discriminatory. No angry anonymous mozilla blog posts about brendan. No company leaks. nothing.

Saying that because he's CEO and in charge and doesn't have someone to hold him accountable so he can do whatever he wants...outlines your ignorance of company structure and...office politics. Sure, a CEO can call the shots, but Brendan had been in charge of many things at Mozilla for a long time and could've realistically gotten rid of people or shuffled them around whenever he wanted to. But he didn't.

Could he have been secretly scheming to get rid of "the company gays" at Mozilla for 15 years and only now finally realized his master plan that he was CEO? I honestly, seriously, doubt it.

The fact that you cannot, and will not separate personal life from business is what truly worries me. Many people are cooperative and productive despite having different beliefs and backgrounds. Sometimes they can offer insight from a different perspective and sometimes they can be a hindrance. This is a core prospect of working with a group of people, and it is a great advantage. Brendan has shown that he wasn't a hindrance the 15 years he was at Mozilla, and he's given back a lot to the open source community.

On an off note, and I am not implying that you are doing this at all, surrounding yourself by a group of people that hold the same mindset is bad. It creates an echo chamber and allows for really terrible ideas to flourish.

[wpietri]

I love that he is entitled to his views, but nobody else is.

I'm not accusing him of secretly scheming. I am saying that helping to strip marriage rights from gay people -- which is indisputably what his donation did -- is reasonable cause for employees and partners to suspect anti-gay animus.

It's up to each individual to judge his actions. If you would like to give him one scorecard titled "at work" and one titled "not at work" and believe them unrelated, great. Then you can make your judgments about working at Mozilla on that basis. But that is a very particular view. You don't get to decide that for everybody. Me, I think that people are unitary individuals, and their beliefs don't change depending on what building they've walked into.