alt Hacker News> Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party
This is not what happened. He gave money to a cause with the explicit goal of using that money to prevent his coworkers and users from having equal civil rights based on an inalienable trait they were born with.
That's not an "American Democratic Party" alignment issue, and if you genuinely believe it is, your dog whistle may be broken. It's sounding an awful lot like a normal whistle.
He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
> A same-sex marriage lawfully performed in another state or foreign jurisdiction on or after November 5, 2008 was fully recognized in California, but Proposition 8 precluded California from designating these relationships with the word "marriage." These couples were afforded every single one of the legal rights, benefits, and obligations of marriage.
Note the last sentence!
Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters, and Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
> He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
I never argued that Mozilla doesn't have the right to fire people for their political views. We're just establishing that Eich _was_ fired for his political views, and that that shows Mozilla had become a political organization first, and a technological company second.
In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters. The fact that that is not true of Mozilla proves it's not a politically neutral company; it's a political project that inherited a software project they are not particularly interested in maintaining except as a vehicle for further promoting their politics.