mjg59 | Mozilla and leadership

A post I wrote back in 2012 got linked from a couple of the discussions relating to Brendan Eich being appointed Mozilla CEO. The tldr version is "If members of your community doesn't trust their leader socially, the leader's technical competence is irrelevant". That seems to have played out here.

In terms of background[1]: in 2008, Brendan donated money to the campaign for Proposition 8, a Californian constitutional amendment that expressly defined marriage as being between one man and one woman[2]. Both before and after that he had donated money to a variety of politicians who shared many political positions, including the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman[3].

Mozilla is an interesting organisation. It consists of the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, which is wholly owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The Corporation's bylaws require it to work to further the Foundation's goals, and any profit is reinvested in Mozilla. Mozilla developers are employed by the Corporation rather than the Foundation, and as such the CEO is responsible for ensuring that those developers are able to achieve those goals.

The Mozilla Manifesto discusses individual liberty in the context of use of the internet, not in a wider social context. Brendan's appointment was very much in line with the explicit aims of both the Foundation and the Corporation - whatever his views on marriage equality, nobody has seriously argued about his commitment to improving internet freedom. So, from that perspective, he should have been a fine choice.

But that ignores the effect on the wider community. People don't attach themselves to communities merely because of explicitly stated goals - they do so because they feel that the community is aligned with their overall aims. The Mozilla community is one of the most diverse in free software, at least in part because Mozilla's stated goals and behaviour are fairly inspirational. People who identify themselves with other movements backing individual liberties are likely to identify with Mozilla. So, unsurprisingly, there's a large number of socially progressive individuals (LGBT or otherwise) in the Mozilla community, both inside and outside the Corporation.

A CEO who's donated money to strip rights[4] from a set of humans will not be trusted by many who believe that all humans should have those rights. It's not just limited to individuals directly affected by his actions - if someone's shown that they're willing to strip rights from another minority for political or religious reasons, what's to stop them attempting to do the same to you? Even if you personally feel safe, do you trust someone who's willing to do that to your friends? In a community that's made up of many who are either LGBT or identify themselves as allies, that loss of trust is inevitably going to cause community discomfort.

The first role of a leader should be to manage that. Instead, in the first few days of Brendan's leadership, we heard nothing of substance - at best, an apology for pain being caused rather than an apology for the act that caused the pain. And then there was an interview which demonstrated remarkable tone deafness. He made no attempt to alleviate the concerns of the community. There were repeated non-sequiturs about Indonesia. It sounded like he had no idea at all why the community that he was now leading was unhappy.

And, today, he resigned. It's easy to get into hypotheticals - could he have compromised his principles for the sake of Mozilla? Would an initial discussion of the distinction between the goals of members of the Mozilla community and the goals of Mozilla itself have made this more palatable? If the board had known this would happen, would they have made the same choice - and if they didn't know, why not?

But that's not the real point. The point is that the community didn't trust Brendan, and Brendan chose to leave rather than do further harm to the community. Trustworthy leadership is important. Communities should reflect on whether their leadership reflects not only their beliefs, but the beliefs of those that they would like to join the community. Fail to do so and you'll drive them away instead.

[1] For people who've been living under a rock
[2] Proposition 8 itself was a response to an ongoing court case that, at the point of Proposition 8 being proposed, appeared likely to support the overturning of Proposition 22, an earlier Californian ballot measure that legally (rather than constitutionally) defined marriage as being between one man and one woman. Proposition 22 was overturned, and for a few months before Proposition 8 passed, gay marriage was legal in California.
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/02/controversial-mozilla-ceo-made-donations-right-wing-candidates-brendan-eich
[4] Brendan made a donation on October 25th, 2008. This postdates the overturning of Proposition 22, and as such gay marriage was legal in California at the time of this donation. Donating to Proposition 8 at that point was not about supporting the status quo, it was about changing the constitution to forbid something that courts had found was protected by the state constitution.

Threaded | Flat

I wonder where his friends and advisers were, or perhaps they were there and he ignored them.

A well written post. I agree completely. The only thing I would add is that, eh could have managed it a little better, maybe made a gesture to the community that he no longer feels that way or that he understood what he did was wrong and basically show leadership.

He didn't do any of those things and I don't know if that means that he cannot bring himself to support gay marriage or what? A lot of people have been saying that people who protested should have turned off javascript or something. Please. He represents an organization not a technology and that organization has products that are identifiable and easily avoided. Javascript is too technical for people to really understand. Mozilla is the symbol.

Why does it matter what he does with his money to support anything other than free-sotware?

Mozilla corp wants a CEO on technical merits.
If you sniff everyone's arses you are sure to find something disgusting.

I am not particularly against gay marriage either, but you are going to find something wrong with everybody in this world. Trying to politicize this by the media is unpleasant.

Since this thing has gone way out of hands, I dont understand why he continues to be the CEO with so much opposition on these grounds?
Ideally he should step down.

Quite sad affair tbh. First because some people failed to keep golden rule of keep politics and tech/business separated.
Second because it's kinda abuse of Mozilla Foundation mission to support one particular point of view. For a life of me, I can't find out how same sex marriage relates to webbrowsers and mobile OS. For me it simply don't belong there.

And finally iI find this situation harmful to the Mozzilla community. It might be taken as subtle hint that anyone not supporting same sex marriage won't 1st class citizen up there.

Beauty of open source is that it can be common ground for people of quite different beliefs. For each stance there is it's one absolutely opposite. And in my understanding tolerance is about mutual respect for right to have/express/support different opinion by other parties.
Sadly it doesn't seem to be that case. :(

With the way Eich was forced out, I certainly don't trust the leadership of Mozilla now. Eich never abused his authority. Those who forced him out did. That cuts more directly to the issue of leadership competence than whether someone once had an opinion that would become politically incorrect six years later.

"People don't attach themselves to communities merely because of explicitly stated goals - they do so because they feel that the community is aligned with their overall aims."

And that is a big problem, because then good causes will always be vulnerable to divide-and-conquer.

I think your assumption that the typical demographic for the Mozilla community has a liberal, left wing tendency is probably correct. Therefore it is not surprising that many folks at Mozilla want to see their community engaging in political topics that are unrelated to open source or technology topics - e.g. to support the attempts to redefine the meaning of "marriage" or to serve the feminist agenda by setting up "outreach programs" that create privileged job opportunities for women only.
Of course people at Mozilla are free to do what they want. However they shouldn't label themselves as a "diverse" community then. I am a software developer and actually interested in the technologies Mozilla develops. On the other hand I am also member of a (german) anti-euro party that opposes same-sex marriages or any "gender mainstreaming" measures that the European Union tries to enforce. So as long as Mozilla sees themselves as a lobby group not only for a free web but also for a left-wing social agenda I will not participate and stop further donations.

"The point is that the community didn't trust Brendan, and Brendan chose to leave rather than do further harm to the community."

Most people in Mozilla supported Brendan, even if after soul-searching. It was the relentless noise from outside which both prevented us from having the time and peace to work through the difficult questions raised, and prevented him from leading while we were doing it.

The second half of your sentence is right; but the harm was not due to his belief or donation, but the whipped-up Twitterstorm and news frenzy which was distracting us from getting work done. Now we have no CEO and no Brendan, and Mozilla is massively the poorer for it. Slow hand clap for everyone who contributed.

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Well said

Does it matter?

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Diversity

"The community didn't trust Brendan"