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by uchi 4452 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.