Mastodawn

mhoye Apr 16, 2024

Since I see that a notable VC-famous jerk is now telling us that he wish he'd "stood by" Eich way back, I'd like to tell you a true fact: Eich didn't lose the CEO's job for his (reprehensible) Prop-8 donation.

Everyone wants to believe that's true, because fits nicely into useful narratives a number of invested camps want to champion, whether it's somebody being ousted for reprehensible views or the woke SJW mob somehow pulling down a great leader (tm) but that's not what happened.

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mhoye Apr 16, 2024

At the time, maybe still today, the largest-by-far donors supporting the Foundation were a financially-very-successful gay couple, I believe New York-based financiers whose names escape me, and who IIRC had the ears of a number of other prominent donors. A significant chunk of the Foundation's even-then modest budget came from that, and when this blew up, it put the entire financial structure of Mozilla as a not-beholden-to-shareholders, privately-held-by-a-not-for-profit entity at risk.

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mhoye Apr 16, 2024

After what I'm told was a few days of very difficult negotiation under extraordinary pressure, both internal and external, a deal was struck. The plan was that Eich make an announcement, apologizing for his "mistake" and making some public-benefit commitment about inclusivity, importance of diversity, etc.

Half the board resigned.

But he takes his public drubbing, apologizes and gets his company. The structure of the organization survives, the mission lives.

At the last minute, he reneged.

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mhoye Apr 16, 2024

Now, I have some feelings, still today, about that situation. That bullshit graph he's aired out about Mitchell's salary versus market share carefully omits the fact that he was CTO for most of that time, presiding over a long period of technical stagnation and market decline, and had never directly managed more than a handful of people in his career. It wasn't until years later under new leadership with Firefox 57, the Quantum release, that Firefox became performance-competitive again.

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mhoye Apr 16, 2024

But the real reason wasn't that he made a donation to some reprehensible cause.

The real reason he lost his job was because he showed everyone who mattered that when the chips were down - and I mean, 100%, the whole table is all the way in, down - that he'd put his own pride or vanity or who gives a fuck what ahead of the continued existence of the company and the mission.

He lost his job because he made a bet that he was more important than the possible end of Mozilla and he lost that bet.

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mhoye Apr 16, 2024

When he later announcing his resignation as Firefox module owner and mentioning Brave, he sent mozilla.governance email about how he'd compared other engines to Gecko on all sorts of axes and how Electron/Chromium was superior on all of them, and I can still remember staring at my reply, at the words "if only we'd had somebody at Mozilla for the last fifteen years, in some sort of technical leadership capacity, who might have been able to do something about that. Too much to wish for, I guess".

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Asta [AMP]Apr 16, 2024

@mhoye mannnnnnn, Eich literally burned himself on his last email to the company? He literally let the door hit him on the way out? Oh my god, that’s amazing.

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