On Thursday April 3, 2014 CEO of Mozilla Brendan Eich resigned from his position saying that he wants to take trips with his family and to look at problems from certain angles. He then goes on to say that he will still be around but less visibly.
The inventor of Javascript who co-founded Mozilla received quite the amount of lash back from people when he accepted the CEO position last March. His stance on gay marriage had a lot to with it. In an article on Huffington Post written by Gerry Shih, said that some outside sources went to boycott the web browser because of certain actions that Eich was responsible for in the past ($1,000 donation to Prop 8).
Proposition 8, for those of you who don't know was on the November 2008 ballot making same-sex marriage in California illegal. The proposition said "only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid and recognized by the state of California." On August 4, 2010 Judge Vaughn Walker found that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional and after a long hard fought battle, in the summer of 2013 same-sex marriage was made legal in California.
The argument about Eich was taken to twitter when it was announced that he would be taking over as CEO. Remarks were made about how “all anti-gay Prop 8 donors should be purged”, some were saying that it was sad how people were being pressured out of their jobs because of personal views and opinions.
Social media has evolved so much since Prop 8 was first being voted on back in November of 2008. And there wasn’t a lot of insight to how this would affect not only California but the entire country, and how it almost seemed the world would now view our stance on equality. Today when anything happens that a large enough group seems unfair or not right, they take to the Internet. It is seen on YouTube and on FaceBook, as well as Twitter and other sites like Tumblr.
I am fairly certain that a lot of this argument has to deal with the fact that he works in Silicon Valley, where people want to believe is very accepting (and it is), but there is always the other side of the coin, and we can't disregard how their feelings are on the situation. A lot of times it is easy to not think that someones point of view matters or is important when it contradicts what we, in our (superior) thinking might have decided was true.
I don't think that adults give people the benefit of the doubt. Much has changed in the world since November of 2008 and we need to understand that a great amount of ideas were once thought to be bad or wrong and after time the less dominant/unpopular view gained support and is now nothing short of everyday normalcy.
Rarebit's Hampton and Michael Catlin wrote a post on their blog Titled A Sad ‘Victory’, where they talk about their viewpoints and how they feel about Eich’s resignation. This where I am going to talk about my opinion on the subject. Being gay myself I want to say that this is a leap forward especially since I am looking into a career in the corporate world, but I think that they way in which people have gone about slandering him is wrong and in bad taste. The idea of equality has really been almost forced down people’s throats for the past 5 years, and I think that we forget that there are going to be people who disagree with us and that differing opines are going to be everywhere we go and they are never going to go away. Overall I think that life goes on, that we as a country are changing and this is a sign that CEO’s from here on out are going to have to be accepting of a lot more than what was required of them in the past.
Being in Utah and watching the events of same-sex marriage be deemed legal (for however short amount of time), it was exciting. No one was expecting it, and what a sight it was to watch how the citizens handled something that I'm sure most never would of thought would happen, or in some cases in their lifetime(s). I am interested to follow the story and see what happens in the coming month as things are to unfold.
