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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...
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.
He's now the Head Eich of Mozilla. (I can't believe I wrote that...)
Ezekiel 23:20
"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.
I hope that this won't be the case here, but with this new CEO such a possibility is raised.
Well, presumably he has great decision making abilities and is a fantastic manager, since he's going from T to E.
That's gold shirt to red shirt (or the converse if you're old school) so ... while I don't know it for a fact, I think we can trust (hope?) that Mozilla isn't putting a dorkus nerd in charge of the company.
If he's a great manager and a great engineer, then he'll make a really great CEO.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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!
(I can't believe I wrote that...)
Richard Stallman would call puns on other people's names onomastication, since it incites the response of "Oh No!"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
He had nine days to invent the language. I doubt there are more than a handful of computer scientists in the world that could invent a good language that fast.
And the reason C++ became so popular is the migration path from pure C code and the migration path for pure C developers. The reason Java became so popular is marketing and the syntactical similarities with C and C++. Javascript piggybacked on that, and now it's everywhere. We will never be rid of it, your dream of a superior replacement will never take off because there's no practical migration path from Javascript to wherever it is you want the world to go.
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.
... of prototypical, and not class, inheritance. Which is not to say Brendan doesn't have class, in fact he is a prototypical classy guy.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
That's the pro-gay rights crowd for you, no alternative opinion is valid. They remind me of the anti-Nazi league, they have little knowledge of what they are actually against but they have fanatical dedication to their cause.
Gay rights discussions are an overblown distraction from more serious news. Gay people can live together if they choose, end of issue.