Mozilla announced some management changes Monday, but it turns out the shakeup isn't over
Three members of Mozilla's board resigned over a disagreement over the Firefox developer's promotion of former Chief Technology Officer Brendan Eich to the chief executive job, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
Eich
took the new job Monday and, in an interview with CNET that day, said
three board members had resigned: John Lilly, a former Mozilla CEO who's
now working at venture capital firm Greylock Partners; Ellen Siminoff, CEO of online education company Schmoop; and Mozilla's most recent CEO, Gary Kovacs.
Mozilla said the board changes happened last week, but disputed the Journal's account.
"The
three board members ended their terms last week for a variety of
reasons," the non-profit organization said in a statement. "Two had been
planning to leave for some time, one since January and one explicitly
at the end of the CEO search, regardless of the person selected."
As
those three directors left, a new member joined: Spiegel Online CEO
Katharina Borchert. That forms what's become a board of three along with
Chairwoman Mitchell Baker, who co-founded Mozilla with Eich, and
Netflix CEO Reid Hoffman.
The board members left because they
wanted an outside executive whose experience would help Mozilla gain
influence in the fast-growing mobile computing industry, the journal
reported, citing unnamed sources. Mozilla's mobile version of Firefox
has vanishingly small usage, and its mobile operating system, Firefox
OS, is a new arrival in a market dominated by Google's Android and Apple's iOS. Gary Kovacs speaking in 2013 when he still was CEO of Mozilla.
Stephen Shankland/CNET
Mozilla,
a nonprofit organization with an unusually principled mission to keep
the Web open, is an anomaly in the middle of a Silicon Valley generally
more concerned with profitable technology startups. But apparently
it's not immune to the boardroom politics of more ordinary
corporations, and it's philosophical stance perhaps makes it more of a
target for disagreements involving social politics, too.
Eich, on a
plane to California on Friday evening, couldn't immediately be reached
for comment. On Monday, he said Lilly was "stepping off [the board] to
focus on work at Greylock."
Eich's appointment triggered some protests, including one prominent one from app developer Rarebit.
"As
a married gay couple who are co-founders of this venture, we have
chosen to boycott all Mozilla projects. We will not develop apps or
test styles on Firefox anymore," said Hampton Catlin,
Rarebit CEO. "Effective today, we're removing Color Puzzle from the
Firefox Marketplace and stopping work on all of our Firefox-related
applications, notably the about-to-launch Firefox version of the popular
Dictionary! app for iPhone and Android."
Mozilla employees also took to Twitter to protest. "Have waited too long to say this. I'm an employee of @mozilla and I'm asking @brendaneich to step down as CEO," tweeted designer Jess Klein.
Mozilla
is sensitive to the criticism. "Our culture of openness extends to
letting our staff and community be candid about their views on Mozilla's
direction...We expect and encourage Mozillians to speak up when they
disagree with management decisions, and carefully weigh all input to
ensure our actions are advancing the project's mission."In addition, Eich, Baker, and Mozilla itself posted statements on the organization's policy embracing diversity.
"I
am committed to ensuring that Mozilla is, and will remain, a place
that includes and supports everyone, regardless of sexual orientation,
gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, economic status, or religion,"
Eich said in his blog post. "I know some will be skeptical about this,
and that words alone will not change anything. I can only ask for your
support to have the time to 'show, not tell'; and in the meantime
express my sorrow at having caused pain.
Daniel Glazman, chairman
of the World Wide Web Consortium's group that standardizes the Web's
CSS formatting technology, wrote a defense of Eich's right to an opinion.
"Pointing...at someone of our community for his/her beliefs can only
have one side-effect: people will stop expressing their opinions because
they will be afraid of the kickback," Glazman said. "That's not the
world I want to live in, that's not my concept of democracy and freedom
of opinion/speech."
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