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JavaScript Inventor Brendan Eich Named New CEO of Mozilla
darthcamaro (735685) writes "Mozilla today announcedthat Brendan Eich would be its new CEO . Eich had been serving as Mozilla's CTO and has been with Mozilla since day one — literally day one. Eich was a Netscape engineer when AOL decided to create the open-source Mozilla project in 1998. The choice of Eich as CEO seems obvious to some, after a string of recent short-tenured CEOs at Mozilla's helm."
Sorry about the mess...
Eich? Man!
...today would not be its best day. (As much as I wouldn't mind seeing a js alternative gain traction.)
(no sig)
There may be some backlash, such as RareBits pulling their app from the Firefox Marketplace, due to Brendan Eich's support of the anti-gay marriage Prop 8 initiative in CA. Eich publicly responded back in 2012. The issue is being discussed on Hacker News as well.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Met him in Whistler back in 2008 when he was doing JIT.
"AOL decided to create the open-source Mozilla project in 1998"
I don't think AOL would have created an open source browser. AOL never did anything with Netscape.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
Wasn't he the one who's been pushing so hard to get proprietary codecs being used in Firefox? (Not just h.264, but also the proprietary OTOY "orbx.js" codec for remote video)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I'm amazed at how much negative feedback this is generating. He had to list his employer to make his donation, it wasn't Mozilla supporting Prop. 8. He seems like a genuinely nice guy, and (at least a few years ago) he was active in the newsgroups and willing to help / support developers. As to his support of Prop 8., I'm sure he had his reasons. He's entitled to his opinion and he's entitled to spend the money he has earned as he sees fit.
Just because an individual may not support gay marriage does not mean they also hate gay people. Personally I would prefer it if the state would just wash it's hand of the 'marriage' issue altogether. Introduce civil unions between people and award benefits and/or tax breaks accordingly. If (as some suggest) the motivation behind a tax break is primarily to help support children / raise a family, strip the benefit and award when they actually have children (their own, or adopted children). Leave marriage between individuals to the churches.
The choice of Eich as CEO seems obvious to some, after a string of recent short-tenured CEOs at Mozilla's helm.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The issue gets a lot more thorny when you remember that he's the CEO of the foundation and is now the ultimate authority on employee benefits. I've already seen people express concern that their top-level boss, or potential boss, thinks they should not be able to get married and has put forward money to try to make it that way.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
Leave marriage between individuals to the churches.
I would be okay with this if it meant that there was no longer such a thing as legally defined marriage. If people could only get legal civil unions, calling it marriage could be a personal choice.
I know some people who would never get married due to the sexist origins of the term; I wonder whether the same would be said for civil unions.
PHP doesn't bypass the firewall and get downloaded from arbitrary 3rd parties to execute on your machine, deep inside your privacy domain.
Those who believe in the security of their browser's software sandbox are prime candidates for being sold the Brooklyn Bridge. They clearly haven't been paying attention to the thousands of bugs, weaknesses, exploits, privilege escalations and privacy leaks in the Javascript engines, the DOM, and their respective browsers, which are legion and undoubtedly a delight to organized crime.
PHP, for all its woes and comedy, does at least stay put and executes at the server end of a web communication.
i was one of the 60 or so helped netscape get out that code....not a bad choice.
As to his support of Prop 8., I'm sure he had his reasons.
Yes. That reason is he's a piss-drinking fuckwit who should be voted off the island.
Hurr durr opinionz lololol.
No. Fuck off. Nobody is entitled to shit down the throat of Liberty. If you think it's cool to attempt to enact legislation to deny equality to people - over a matter which has absofuckinglutely no bearing on yourself - you're fucking wrong.
Disclaimer: Strong words because you asslicking fuckheads are reprehensible nut drizzlings. Embarassments to humanity itself, the lot of you.
i was one of the guys that netscape gave the source code too , ot release to everyone it was the communicator 5 source...AOL later with that code created mozilla.
it was one reason a lot of us took source and created our own browsers and moved away for a while
btw i our server admin went to work at pentagon,,,,,i became president of f hacker club....
lots a knowledge when you bring everyone of all kinds from pirates to hackers and sys admins to one spot and let them play...
i got to learn what hacks worked and how to fix a lot....so did that sys admin....ya know whom you are hercules....
that the Eich were a bunch of evil aliens, enemy of the Lensman series (E E Doc Smith)
Does it make sense that we would elevate the creation of an interpreted C variant to the level of invention? It reminds me of a self-promotor type who was bending my ear with the tale of how his team "invented an XML" - meaning, they came up with an XML spec for their data.
Jerk off, the world would be better off without clowns like you dictating how people should think.
There are valid reasons for supporting prop 9 that aren't anti-gay.
Now that the inventor of Javascript is running Mozilla, they'll never implement Google's Dart language natively.
Captcha: outvoted
Contravening the fundamental right to pursue happiness as a free man is unforgivable. Skewer the homophobe and every last one of his ilk.
I once saw Brenda Eich at a conference in Amsterdam maybe 10 years ago, where he did the final keynote.
As usual for such conferences in Europe, 90% of the audience was not of English mother tongue, but spoke and understood it quite well (thanks, Slashdot). But Eich's keynote was barely understandable to many people : he managed to speak at the same time too fast and too low, with inside jokes that only a few Americans seemed to understand.
Most of us thought "What a jerk".
after a string of recent short-tenured CEOs at Mozilla's helm.
Kovacs became CEO in 2010, and announced his departure in 2013, I think 7-year veteran Jay Sullivan has been acting CEO since then. Before that John Lilly was CEO for 2 years, taking over from Mitchell Baker who remains as Chairman. Two short-term CEOs in a row makes a pair, not a string.
People who don't like Firefox's six-week release cadence can quit bitching and run the Firefox Extended Support Release.
=S
* Marissa Mayer (2012–)
* Ross Levinsohn _Interim_ (2012)
* Scott Thompson (2012)
* Tim Morse _Interim_ (2011–2012)
* Carol Bartz (2009–2011)
* Jerry Yang (2007–2009)
=S
Hopefully the Mozilla will get the "experience" designers in order and hire more developers instead of them. Many of us use Firefox due its customizability and technical advances, not since it has a new icon and it looks like Chrome. Please fix the existing issues instead of concentrating on cloning UI mistakes from the others. Why does one need to periodically clear the profile to keep FF responsive? Why is the damn browser single threaded, so a one misbehaving tab/flash-ad will freeze the whole browser?
The CEO cannot unilaterally change company policy on employee benefits or anything else. And if the extent of his activism is to donate to a campaign 6 years ago (he has not spoken publicly on the issue very much) then it probably isn't a major issue for him.
And even he were a major campaign leader against gay marriage, it doesn't necessarily mean he is going to bring his politics into the Boardroom. The founder/owner of the Stagecoach bus company in the UK (Brian Souter) campaigned very strongly and publicly against the repeal of Section 28 (an statute that banned the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools), especially in Scotland, using his personal fortune to run an unofficial 'referendum' on the law there. However, Stagecoach has an excellent record as an equal-opportunities employer, with no-one expressing concern that Mr Souter was using his company as a platform for his own view on homosexuality or that its employment practices reflected it in any way.
Ultimately, limited companies are not Leninist organizations, in the sense of being the personal tool of the CEO. The CEO has to answer to the Board and if he did want to change Mozilla employment practice to discriminate against gays, or use corporate money to finance an anti-gay-marriage campaign, other Board members would have to agree to it.
He is spending money to fuck with other people. And not in the literal sense. Frankly, if he would donate to a campaign to ban disabled parking spaces I would be a lot more understanding because there he could gain something. But supporting prop 8 is just pure jerkage.
In my experience, yes, it does.
There may be some pseudo-rational mumbo-jumbo but it almost boils down to outright homophobia.
So you propose that in the future marriage be called civil union, because...?
Real life is overrated.
He seems like a genuinely nice guy
Except the treating gays as less than human, and putting forward his own money to do so. That's the behavior of a genuinely not so nice guy.
It was prop 8, not prop 9, and it is now defunct.
As for those "valid reasons" that aren't anti-gay", if there are some, please enlighten us, as nobody on the "Yes on Prop 8" team during the trial could make a rational argument that wasn't anti-gay.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
TL;DR Javascript was created, not invented. IMHO of course.
He's entitled to his opinion and he's entitled to spend the money he has earned as he sees fit.
And everyone else is entitled to their opinion that he's a hateful asshole. What you're saying is, "he's entitled to his opinion, but no one else is entitled to a contrary opinion."
As for those "valid reasons" that aren't anti-gay", if there are some, please enlighten us..
How about a basic Epicurean argument? Like most people, I'm happy to tolerate gay partnerships. I'm not so happy about being forced to endorse gay marriage ("marriage" is, in essence, societal endorsement of a partnership). I'm very unhappy about subsidizing gay marriage - blindly offering gay couples the same immigration, benefit and adoption privileges as heterosexual couples.
I'm not so much "anti-gay" as "anti-being-forced-to-be-pro-gay".
I don't know that the name was his fault. Originally it was called LiveScript and was changed to JavaScript for marketing purposes. Myself, I have never cared for the name "ECMAScript".
FAQs are evil.
Let's not equate you being "discriminated against" by so-far-mostly-polite comments on a message board, to people being discriminated against by denying them spousal rights. It's also incorrect to suggest that marriage is somehow a religious institution -- it most certainly preceded all current religions. In point of fact it is primarily a legal construct, which is why we discuss it in terms of civil rights and not e.g. theology.
No one really cares about Eich, it's just an excuse for opination. Your opinion appears to be incorrect and impolite. Personally, I don't see what difference it might make to you whether I should choose to be married to a man or a woman, but you needn't attend the ceremony. I will console myself with the knowedge that the tide of opinion is flowing against you. This discussion is obsolete: each day brings the death of old reactionaries and the birth of scores who will not be taught to hate.
P. S. Reason being preferable to ad hominem invective, you might disengage your spleen from your keyboard.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Well, I'm very unhappy about subsidizing the marriages of those opposed to equal rights for everyone, but I still have to do it because that's how society works. If it were up to me, not a penny of my money would go to people who oppose equal rights.
... of prototypical, and not class, inheritance. Which is not to say Brendan doesn't have class, in fact he is a prototypical classy guy.
Marriage has a religious component. People can claim that marriage is only valid as it's described in their holy scripture, whereas a civil union is a purely political construct that has no additional historical / religious baggage. Honestly, I don't agree with the idea to just do civil unions for everyone, and having different names for gay and straight versions of the same basic principle is a terrible idea, but the religious aspect is usually why people suggest "make civil unions equal to marriage in the eyes of government and call it a day".
> Just because an individual may not support gay marriage does not mean they also hate gay people.
"I not hate black people, but black people should drink from a special sink, or should use a different entrance to bars". That is state and federal law what we are talking about, not some personal opinions. If marriage would be just a religious ceremony, then there would be no debate about gay marriage. But we are talking about the legal status of marriage, that have legal aspects, like tax breaks, property rights, etc. And laws against gay marriage are not about the religious ceremony, it's about the state and federal acknowledgement of a civil status. You are bear some people of some state and federal privileges because they are born like they are born.
> Leave marriage between individuals to the churches.
Yes, I wish. Tell that to the government. There are in the USA about 1,138 statutory provisions[1] in which marital status is a factor in determining benefits, rights, and privileges. Please let your government know that you would like to abolish all of them.
[1] http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d...
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Maybe he can help to bring Firefox back to where it should be, instead of making it a Chrome-with-another-rendering-engine clone.
I frecuently have to explain to "HeadHunters" that Javascript & Java aren't the same thing. Sometimes, to I.T. students or undergraduates.
In many forums the name change is debated, but, many people is too used to the "Javascript" brand. There are also developers who argue that there are so many versions or implementations of Javascript, that does not conform to the ECMA standard, that believe its areason not to support the "ECMAScript" name.
The world had s-expressions and common lisp sitting right there in front of it, but no, no no. Instead geniuses like Eich dragged us all down into the ditch while they reinvented a SUPREMELY INFERIOR wheel with rotten wooden spokes called "javascript" and "XML" and "JSON". At least 20 years WASTED on crap tools such as these
In the immortal words of Steely Dan, "the things that pass for knowledge, I can't understand.."
I'm withdrawing all of my support for Mozilla, including using it as a development target, until Eich is fired. I'm teetering on the edge right now of simply banning the browser from my sites. I only get maybe 10% of users with Firefox, but fuck those users too. Fuck every extra hour that I worked around some awful Mozilla bug for those users.
Pretty hilarious that the "inclusive" folks are trying to punish any voice of dissent
He seems like a genuinely nice guy
Except the treating gays as less than human, and putting forward his own money to do so. That's the behavior of a genuinely not so nice guy.
Lots of successful people are not nice guys. Steve Jobs wasn't a nice guy either. He was still good at his job.
Personally I have nothing against gay rights but I'm sick of hearing about it at least 4 times a day, every day, for about 10 years now. Everything on TV, in every paper, every radio program is gay rights, gay rights, and more gay rights. One person isn't pro-gay rights and huge numbers of people start publicly moaning about it. Gay rights are not the make or break defining personality trait of successful CEOs.
He is entitled to his opinion. You are entitled to yours.
Mine is that gay rights are blown up as some mega-issue when there are in fact many more important things people should be worrying about.
B4 Boycotting or resigning, why not have a public dialog on the medical safety of Sodomy, gay and straight, and ask these two simple medical questions?
That is, Doesn't the medical community recommend that you, "Wash your hands after you go to the bathroom."?
Yet, now there are some in the medical community that now say it's OK to "Sleep with the waste that gets flushed down in the toilet?" and that it's possible to live a perfectly normal life.
Twitter Handle: AhContraire