A few days ago, Brendan Eich was named the new CEO of Mozilla. This news was met with a lot of resentment from the world at large (or at least my world). This was because Eich had previously supported Prop 8, which looked to ban gay marriage in California. Some services have gone so far as to actively encourage their users to boycott Firefox.
Personally, I think that gay people should be treated like all other people and should be allowed to marry if they want to. I quite dislike people who’re trying to curb their freedom since I will never understand why they would want to do such a thing.
Several years ago I was a huge fan of Firefox and couldn’t stop raving about it. After developing for Firefox in the recent past though, I’ve grown to hate it. It has grown warts over time, and makes my life more difficult (yes, really, I’d rather work with IE 9+ than Firefox).
Hopefully I’ve established that I’m not anti gay people, and I’m no fan of Firefox.
Today Eich resigned as the CEO of Mozilla. Presumably he did this because of all the pressure he (and possibly the Mozilla board) felt from the internet at large. I’m not sure I like that this happened. I don’t think his personal beliefs about Prop 8 should have had any bearing on evaluating his performance as CEO of Mozilla. Yet, it so clearly has. We are supposed to be the people who stand for tolerance. In our quest for tolerance, have we become so intolerant that we unnecessarily caused a man to quit his job? Shouldn’t Eich have the freedom to express his personal beliefs freely and not be persecuted for that? Is the world really a better place because of this?