NYT On Eich: ‘Mozilla Is Not A Normal Company. It Is An Activist Organization.’

In a highly-popular post on their tech blog, Bits, the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo explains “Why Mozilla’s Chief Had to Resign.”

Farhad Manjoo, who recently replaced David Pogue at the Times‘ as the new State of the Art columnist, calls it “a mistake” to draw any conclusions from Brendan Eich’s resignation as CEO, such as “political correctness run amok,” nor is it “an awful precedent for giving in to moralistic mob rule.”

Why?

“Mozilla is not a normal company,” Manjoo explains. “It is an activist organization. Mozilla’s primary mission isn’t to make money but to spread open-source code across the globe in the eventual hope of promoting “the development of the Internet as a public resource.”

Like all software companies, Mozilla competes in two markets. First, obviously, it wants people to use its products instead of its rivals’ stuff. But its second market is arguably more challenging — the tight labor pool of engineers, designers, and other tech workers who make software.

When you consider the importance of that market, Mr. Eich’s position on gay marriage wasn’t some outré personal stance unrelated to his job; it was a potentially hazardous bit of negative branding in the labor pool, one that was making life difficult for current employees and plausibly reducing Mozilla’s draw to prospective workers.

Manjoo adds this important explanation:

“In his first test as C.E.O. of Mozilla, he failed to execute,” wrote Matthew Riley MacPherson, a developer who works for Mozilla in Montreal. “So while I think his donation to Prop 8 spurred the controversy and exposed his inability to think as Mozilla’s C.E.O. instead of as Brendan Eich, I don’t think it was his stance against gay marriage in his home state of California that should be named as the cause of his departure.”

Instead, Mr. MacPherson argued, it was Mr. Eich’s inability to keep his community together amid a growing firestorm that proved he could not lead the organization.

Mr. MacPherson added: “So while the mob might feel like it won, proving that there is some kind of zero-tolerance for homophobia in America, Eich’s departure from Mozilla tells a slightly more nuanced story than that.”

 

Previously:

Mozilla Mounts Major Social Media Defense: CEO Brendan Eich Wasn’t Fired, He Quit

Glenn Beck: LGBT Groups ‘Are Becoming Nothing But A Terrorist Organization’