<story><title> Gay Firefox developers boycott Mozilla to protest CEO hire</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/gay-firefox-developers-boycott-mozilla-to-protest-ceo-hire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ender7</author><text>If this were any other company I don&amp;#x27;t think this would turn any heads. However, much of Mozilla&amp;#x27;s ethos and community support is built on ethical rather than capitalistic foundations. It&amp;#x27;s hard to reconcile thoughts on a company that seems to so value freedom in some areas but not in others [1].&lt;p&gt;[1] Inferring what Mozilla values based on the opinions of its CEO is not particularly &lt;i&gt;fair&lt;/i&gt;, but then again I&amp;#x27;m not sure it&amp;#x27;s unfair either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gojomo</author><text>Judge Mozilla on the actions of the organization, and the staff while performing their official roles.&lt;p&gt;What the staff does in other spheres of life, with their own time and money, is their own concern. It&amp;#x27;s a freer society, and a more pro-freedom organization, that grants individuals the widest range of actions and opinions when away from their official responsibilities.&lt;p&gt;The CEO position isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;mascot&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;most popular&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;dear leader&amp;quot;. (Those are cult-of-personality failure modes for a professional organization.) It&amp;#x27;s lead administrator, with specific on-the-job duties which involve essentially no electoral politicking nor meddling in employees&amp;#x27; lives.</text></comment>
<story><title> Gay Firefox developers boycott Mozilla to protest CEO hire</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/gay-firefox-developers-boycott-mozilla-to-protest-ceo-hire/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ender7</author><text>If this were any other company I don&amp;#x27;t think this would turn any heads. However, much of Mozilla&amp;#x27;s ethos and community support is built on ethical rather than capitalistic foundations. It&amp;#x27;s hard to reconcile thoughts on a company that seems to so value freedom in some areas but not in others [1].&lt;p&gt;[1] Inferring what Mozilla values based on the opinions of its CEO is not particularly &lt;i&gt;fair&lt;/i&gt;, but then again I&amp;#x27;m not sure it&amp;#x27;s unfair either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anaphor</author><text>Even if Mozilla started actively discriminating against people and campaigning against minority rights I would have no problem taking the code and starting a forked version. IMO that&amp;#x27;s what&amp;#x27;s so great about FLOSS, if you disagree with how something is managed you can ignore the people who created it and start your own version along with other people who agree.&lt;p&gt;So I wouldn&amp;#x27;t really be worried about the current state of affairs. If people want to boycott then they can do that, but I doubt it will have much effect unless Eich starts going insane, in which case Google will probably cut their funding. In that case we can all start hacking on Iceweasel and forget about it. Yay for free libre open source software!</text></comment>