The appointment of the new Mozilla CEO, Brendan Eich has caused a stink after it was revealed that he gave money to the homophobic, proposition 8.
Since Eich was appointed CEO, three board members have already quit in protest and now the online dating site OkCupid has urged it’s customers to stop using the Firefox web browser.
This publicity for Eich has definitely not been a welcome start however, despite the controversy, Eich claims, “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.”
Most of the negative publicity for Eich is coming from the popular dating site, OkCupid and if you log onto their web page using the Firefox browser the following statement will appear:
“Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid. Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last 10 years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8 percent of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it’s professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.”
It is not yet clear how Mozilla plans to address the controversy but it is very likely that Eich may have to step down if things don’t improve.