Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's chair, writes about Mozilla's direction, Thunderbird, the open internet, and leadership changes.
HN links it for Mozilla announcements and policy posts like zero rating, while some commenters use it to criticize Mozilla's politics and direction.
ere is a (selective) look at the management of Mozilla in the recent past.
From Mitchell Bakers blog https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gervase-markham/
“Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encoded into law. These views made their way into the Mozilla environment. They have been traumatic and damaging, both to individuals and to Mozilla overall.”
From http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/07/29/gerv.html
“I bring up Gerv's open-mindedness because I know that many people didn't find him so, but, frankly, I think those folks were mistaken. It is well documented publicly that Gerv held what most would consider particularly “conservative values”. And, I'll continue with more frankness: I found a few of Gerv's views offensive and morally wrong. But Gerv was also someone who could respectfully communicate his views. I never felt the need to avoid speaking with him or otherwise distance myself. Even if a particular position offended me, it was nevertheless clear to me that Gerv had come to his conclusions by starting from his (a priori) care and concern for all of humanity. Also, I could simply say to Gerv: I really disagree with that so much, and if it became clear our views were just too far apart to productively discuss the matter further, he'd happily…
Interesting society argument. For sake of argument I'll just talk about Mozilla employees. Does being a CEO require you to take political actions to support (or at least, not hurt) your employees in their outside lives, over other local political concerns? As a citizen, is that ethical?
People who oppose gay marriage typically believe it would hurt "society" at large -- do you really want to say he should have taken an action (or inaction) he believed would generally hurt everyone in his political jurisdiction (which the vote was in), so that he could help his Mozillian sub-society? (The typical proponent response would be that it doesn't hurt anyone, but that's the crux of where people disagree.) What other areas does this reasoning extend to? Maybe I'm making a straw man here, but how is this sub-society argument different than "The majority of my employees are white people or supporters of white people, so I should vote and campaign to support white people even though I believe it would hurt others"?
For what it's worth, Mozilla reportedly offer healthcare benefits to same-sex couples[0], and I've read several reports that Brendan personally treated gay employees equitably. I recognize the difficulty of reconciling all this, the near-hypocrisy of campaigning to ban legal unions of people you're cordial with at work, but I can't find a way to support the idea that he should be accountable to them for his legal participation in a process that transcends Mozilla. …
> If anything, they should spin off development of Thunderbird into a separate company with its own independent funding structure.
They already did that.
- In 2012 Mozilla (the corporation) started this move by announcing that "Thunderbird was not a priority for Mozilla" [1]. At this point Mozilla (corp) stopped actively investing in Thunderbird.
- In 2015, Mitchel Baker made it clear that the Mozilla (corp) wanted to get rid of Thunderbird [2]. At this point the Mozilla corp started shutting down support services for the Thunderbird project.
- In 2017 Thunderbird was legally moved to the Mozilla Foundation (instead of the corporation) and started surviving mostly on its own, with some minor help from the Mozilla Foundation [3]. Here Mozilla (corp), the company responsible for Firefox, already got rid of Thunderbird entirely.
- In 2020, it became clear that Thunderbird can survive entirely on its own donations and could even try to provide commercial services. Thus, the Mozilla Foundation created a new "MZLA Technologies Corporation" that is now the legal entity responsible of Thunderbird [4]. MZLA Tech is not responsible for any other product that I know of.
[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability-and-community-innovation/
[2] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.governance/c/kAyVlhfEcXg/m/Eqyx1X62BQAJ
[3] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-home/
[4] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
Votes are private. Donations are public.
The LA Times reported Eich's donation in 2012. Mozilla leadership including Baker knew about it before 2014. Eich knowing not to broadcast his support for discrimination is the minimum expected of most employees.
Eich himself said he resigned because the controversy was hurting Mozilla. He also said it would have been illegal to fire him.
Baker publicly supported Eich's promotion.[1] At least before he botched a predictable and winnable PR crisis. Other people did say his actions and standing by them meant he couldn't credibly promote Mozilla's claimed values. And his belief his discrimination wasn't discriminatory called into question how he could do the CEO's job of preventing discrimination. But basically no one said he couldn't work there with his views. He remained CTO after his views and actions were widely known. And board members asked him to stay in another role after he resigned.
The US Supreme Court recognized marriage as a civil right in 1967. It's the law of the land. And same sex marriage was legal in California before Proposition 8. Believing reducing some people's rights is justified doesn't make it not reducing their rights. And calling it what it is isn't persecution.
I've never worked for someone who publicly said I should be a 2nd class citizen. I feel sorry for you if you have. It sounds like you might have your own definition of civil rights though.
[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/26/
Yeah, I remember being disappointed about the Mozilla chairman's announcement[1] that Thunderbird "not a priority" and they were essentially giving up on it. (I don't personally use Thunderbird, but we have a lot of Windows users at work who do).
So this bubbly and optimistic-sounding blog post confused me a little. But then I looked next at the previous entry in this blog[2] and it states that at the end of 2014 they reorganized and elected new leadership to take over from the Mozilla people who weren't working on it any more.
So apparently there are at least some people actively working on it again, and they are hoping for financial sponsorship to cover a full-time developer.
If it works out, then actually it seems like Mozilla's handling of the problem ('we have a standards-based IMAP email client with millions of users, but nobody -- including the team in charge of it -- wants to work on it any more') was pretty good. They did keep the project on life support with security updates, for a little over two years, until they found some people that did want to work on it.
[1]: https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability-and-community-innovation/
[2]: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2014/11/thunderbird-reorganizes-at-2014-toronto-summit/
I think there's some truth to this. Mozilla has become less of a technology organization and more of a political one.
There have been quite a few instances over the past few years of Mozilla demonstrating its left leaning politics:
* The Brendan Eich situation where his private contribution to a conservative cause impacted his employment
* Baker calling a former conservative employee's views "traumatic and damaging" in their obituary - https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gervase-markham/
* The removal of "meritocracy" from the governance document in the name of D&I - https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-meritocracy/
* Promoting BLM and anti-racism content via Pocket and their homepage
* Replacing "master password" with "primary password" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replacing-master-password
Agree with their positions or not, they are definitely alienating to some. Even if just delivering a great browser and getting people to use it is not their primary mission (and it's not directly if you've ever read the Mozilla Manifesto), it is the means by which they retain the ability pursue those goals.
Recall Michael Jordan's reason for staying away from politics, "Republicans buy sneakers too".