I'm not/wasn't a member of the Servo team, but have collaborated with them, and if you get the opportunity to work with them I cannot recommend it highly enough.
They have the kind of deep technical knowledge and ability to solve challenging problems you'd expect from a research group, coupled with the skills to make pragmatic tradeoffs and fix the complex real world problems needed to ship software. More than that, they are one of the most welcoming and friendly teams I ever worked with. The culture they created allowed them to take inexperienced new contributors and quickly ramp them up to a place where they were confident to solve challenging problems. Working in that environment and seeing what's possible has really raised my bar for workplace culture and mentorship.
I don't want to detract from anyone's pain but I have been looking for a tech stack change, and if my main plan doesn't work out, my backup plan was to segue back into browser work via Rust. So I guess in addition to getting comfortable with the idea of having to change default browsers sometime in the next couple of years, I also need a plan C.
What absolute nonsense, Servo was the most important thing Mozilla was doing. If Mozilla isn’t making the most promising and competitive investments in its browser (e.g. parallel layout) what is it for? The Quantum project, which is tied to Servo, is the only reason Firefox is still competitive.
Eich was CEO from March 24 to April 3 of the same year. I highly doubt that was much of the problem.
Certainly losing his technical talent is likely to have contributed to the problems, but I suspect it's 100x more of Chrome's dominance and Mozilla's reliance on Google's search engine contracts for revenue.
After leaving Mozilla, he went to Brave, where they launched a privacy-focused browser which inserts affiliate codes when users visit certain websites, and which collects donations "on behalf of" content creators without actually giving the money to those content creators.
Brave does (did?) not allow creators to opt-out of donation collection and by default opts them in. This means you as a user may think you are donating to your favorite creator but in fact Brave is just holding on to the money.
> Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators.
No it really wasn't. Nobody except tech geeks care about Servo. What Mozilla needs to do is to provide a privacy aware browser that doesn't inform Google (and everyone else) about everything we do online. They can easily go the path Microsoft took and use Chromium as engine. Had they focused on that, I think they would be in a much better position than they are now (wasting millions on projects like Servo and Rust). Don't get me wrong... I love Servo and Rust, but from a business perspective it's suicide.
This is terrible advice. It would mean that Google, by controlling Chromium, has complete and unchallenged ownership of the Web. You are suggesting one of Google's last remaining competitors in the space just fold and go home. At that point, we might as well literally just unplug everything and call the Internet experiment over.
The internals of Chrome and Safari have diverged dramatically since the fork (which was 7 years ago).
Chrome has done multiple huge projects that changed how things work at a fundamental level like Oilpan (using a C++ garbage collector), LayoutNG (a full rewrite of the layout part of the engine from the ground up), Slimming Paint (a full rewrite of the compositing and painting system), and Site Isolation.
Blink and WebKit are pretty different engines with very different behavior, bugs, and performance characteristics.
This is short sighted. Browsers live and die on their performance benchmarks and security track records. Like it or don’t, “nobody but tech geeks” actually care about privacy.
The problem is that of understanding, and of finding cause and effect.
I know a few people who have been victims of identity theft. After hearing their stories, it was clear to me that it would not have happened if companies weren't tracking them and selling their personal data left and right.
But it's hard to make that connection. People seem to accept identity theft as "something that just happens sometimes", even though it makes them very angry, frustrated, anxious, and eats up a lot of time and sometimes money. I think they do this because it's hard to point to one culprit as the cause, and so it feels like an intractable problem.
If people could actually understand that their lack of privacy protections on the internet (and elsewhere) is one of the main factors in enabling things like identity theft, there would be more people who would affirmatively care about privacy.
I'm not sure how to get people to make that intuitive leap on a large enough scale for it to matter, though. You're very right that people mainly care about browser performance (I'd even argue they don't care about security that much, though certainly more than they care about privacy); I know several people who definitely know better and understand privacy issues on the internet, but still use Chrome because "Firefox is slow on macOS" or something.
> But it's hard to make that connection. People seem to accept identity theft as "something that just happens sometimes"
A little like the way people talk about "cyber warfare".
In real warfare, the enemy can attack your forces no matter what you do.
In cyber warfare, you can build impenetrable defences. The only way the enemy can attack you successfully is if you make a mistake.
This kind of thinking IMO is perpetuated by absurd tv shows where e.g McGee can hack into any computer system by tapping on his keyboard for a few seconds.
It's harmless on TV, but in the real world it leads to complacency about security. People saying"poor Equifax, they were attacked" instead of "Equifax's security was a joke, and they left their system wide open for anyone to plunder".
At first I, like everyone else, downvoted this comment, because "how dare you insult my Servo!", but then immediately took my vote back and then finally was forced to upvote that, because actually I agree. In fact, it's all somehow paradoxically backwards: I liked (I guess I can safely use the past tense now) Mozilla (the company) because of Servo, and Quantum, and Rust, and amazing technical people who made it all happen, not some PR-bullshitters and lawyer-CEO. But I use Firefox (the product), simply because it's only feasible non-Google alternative out there I know, not because it's cooler or even better from the technical perspective. I don't give a fuck what engine they use, Blink and V8 are as fast as it gets. In fact, there was a time before Quantum when Firefox was actually slower than Chromium (and I'm not even sure it's different now, I just don't use it), and I used Firefox anyway. Worse than that, the only place where I actually care about engine performance is mobile, and Chrome just destroys Firefox there. And even then, I opt to use Firefox half of the time (i.e. when I don't need to google smth quickly in the middle of the conversation while moving in the crowd). I guess it's hard to imagine how somebody could use Firefox because of engine at all. It's definitely not the main selling point, by a long shot.
Edit, to summarize: it's not that performance doesn't matter, it's just that currently it's hard enough to compete with Blink & V8. And, of course, Blink becomes better precisely because there is a competition they have to fight. (It will probably become worse when Gecko/Servo/Firefox dies.) But to be that competition without having shitload of money Google has is not fun right now. It's hardly a fight you can win. Easier just to ride on Google's back and to use Blink yourself.
>No it really wasn't. Nobody except tech geeks care about Servo. What Mozilla needs to do is to provide a privacy aware browser that doesn't inform Google
Nobody except geeks and politically minded people care about privacy that much (if they didn't they'd already use Firefox with DDG, or Brave or at least Safari).
People do care for faster, more conventient browser -- that's why we switched from Netscape to IE (when Mozilla bloated and a for a little while IE6 was faster/better), then to Firefox, and then to Chrome.
Lots of people care about privacy if the intrusions are bad enough to notice. People really don’t like it if they search for and buy a bicycle and keep getting ads for bicycles for weeks.
>Lots of people care about privacy if the intrusions are bad enough to notice.
Well, lots but still insignifcant to make a browser market share raise. Which is not "lots" in the sense that matters. Most People value speed, convenience, features, and security over privacy.
>People really don’t like it if they search for and buy a bicycle and keep getting ads for bicycles for weeks.
Most (as in over 80% of the people) don't even use an ad blocker and could not care less. Even if they are annoyed but keeping getting those ads, they don't care enough to do anything about it, much less switch broswers.
It's quite usable as-is. Not sure why it hasn't gotten much attention. It's more privacy oriented than Firefox and is faster than Firefox. I have been using it on desktop Linux for years. I tried Brave and Firefox, but they both have bloat and phone home to someone by default, unlike UG. For all the time it takes to argue back and forth about which browser should take over next, you could have installed UG and moved on with life.
Firefox has a lot of telemetry built into the default install. It has Pocket, everything you type into the search bar gets sent to Google by default, phones home to Mozilla by default, I could go on. Ungoogled Chromium doesn't do any of that. Firefox is also less secure than Chromium. If an actual malicious attacker can access my browser, that's a million times worse than any kind of concern about Google bulk collecting my data as far as I'm concerned.
Surely immediately after a layoff is one of the better times to get a glowing recommendation? Some recruiters (and certainly plenty of hiring managers) read HN :)
I led the Stylo project to integrate Servo's CSS engine into Firefox as part of project Quantum [1]. I have the utmost respect for the engineers on the Servo team, and am sad to see them go (though I am certain they will have no shortage of opportunities as to what to work on next).
Servo had two major roles within Mozilla - as an incubator for novel browser technology we wanted to ship in Firefox, and more recently, as a lighter-weight vehicle for Mixed Reality products. The latter has been the focus for the last three years, and those products now appear to be winding down. But the former was a huge success - both Servo's parallel CSS engine and its GPU-based graphics layer are now shipping in Firefox.
While it seems unlikely that Mozilla will continue to prototype things in Servo, we're still building lots of innovative technology (and writing lots of Rust code) directly in Firefox. A few of the teams have blogged recently about the work they're doing [2] [3], and I'd encourage anyone interested to check it out.
The Servo team accomplished a ton and left its ongoing mark on the Web. These changes are tough for everyone within Mozilla, but are not indicative of any change in strategy for Firefox. Gecko is alive and well, and there are no plans to switch to Blink.
My understanding is that everyone who knew how Layout 2020 worked was fired, and therefore the project to integrate it into Firefox is effectively dead, meaning Firefox has no plausible way to compete with LayoutNG. I am not trying to be provocative, but that is pretty hard to reconcile with your statement.
I tend to be more on your side of the fence and remain skeptical.
And something that may be used as evidence for my skepticism, is why instead of firing those people, where we know a lot of them are pretty good ones, they did not relocate them instead?
Even if we suppose, they decided to not invest in things that are not considered pragmatic, more to the core of Mozilla... Even if some of them were working coding in Rust for instance.. why dont they just shut down the projects that they considered 'fancy' and relocate those amazing engineers to work into core parts?
For me it smells like something is rot on the top level, and that in turn, will lead to more bad decisions in the coming years, unless something really radical happens (Microsoft did it, so theres hope).
Edit: one more evidence that the things are somehow rot, is that money going to pay for ads (and this is exactly the path taken by Yahoo)
I feel very similarly. This isn't just boneheaded project management, that would be simply killing great projects. Firing huge amounts of top tier talent is absolutely another story altogether.
Respectfully: The Firefox layout team did not have a plan to integrate Layout 2020 (we hadn't yet found a way to ship it incrementally), and doing so was never the basis of our strategy to compete with LayoutNG.
Then what is your strategy to compete with LayoutNG? A concrete roadmap would be a lot more useful than platitudes about how great the Servo team is, which everyone already knows. Nobody seems to know what the future of Firefox looks like, or at least I'm having a hard time finding that information. I don't know about other people, but I would find such a thing much more reassuring.
2 of the people working on Layout 2020 (out of 3 afaik) are French employees, so haven't been fired yet. They may or may not be depending on how the negotiations between the management and employee representatives go.
> we're still building lots of innovative technology (and writing lots of Rust code) directly in Firefox
If those are really long term high priority goals of Mozilla, it seems that keeping the team around that has probably the most experience doing this anywhere on the planet (building innovative browser functionality in Rust) would be a good idea, even if the Servo project as an incubator was no longer a priority.
Surely, their talent and team cohesion and the team’s collective expertise could have been put to use writing Rust features directly for Firefox.
> Gecko is alive and well, and there are no plans to switch to Blink.
Gecko seems to be tightly bound to Firefox. Are there any plans on decoupling that and making it easily embeddable for other projects? Even MDN doesn't seem to have up to date documentation on that [0].
I purport that allowing easy embedding will allow more people to play around with Gecko, discover wildly different classes of bugs, contribute code in order to add improvements and fix bugs that they discover while embedding the project.
Given a more visible and active community around Gecko, Microsoft might've even switched to Gecko, but that's just a wild guess.
Yep, I'm talking about the equivalent for non-mobile / the original Gecko. The "embedding Gecko" documentation I posted before says "original last update 2002". That's pretty bad.
As someone who has been following Servo since 2011, the stakeholders have always emphatically reiterated that the goal was not to outright replace Gecko.
Don't know how I missed that then. I remember building the early alpha versions and using servo to visit sites and I was surprised it worked that well for a fairly new rust project.
We made the decision several years ago to integrate Servo components individually rather than trying to replace the entire engine (for the reasons outpost in the blog post linked above).
We invest a lot in Gecko though, precisely because it's important to have a world-class independent engine.
It performs very poorly when there is a lot of DOM content and js manipulation (think a kibana search+visual) and FF is notorious about memory exploitation. I was hoping replacing everything with rust code would be a start. A rewritr of gecko in rust at least. I don't have any workload at all that works better on FF and many of the ones I need to work smoothly don't.
But I completely understand why you wouldn't want to "boil the ocean". That said, I hope you appreciate how much support FF has from users. Anyone of us left using are doing so by paying a price for it. Everything else mozilla does appears like distracting side-quests. I would not care much about donating for wikipedia but if Mozilla focused on their flagship product more I would be happy to contribute both financially and through bug reports and grunt work PR's.
I remember when Nokia decided to kill meego, or when Canonical stopped pushing DEs (and firing a bunch of people with it). The exactly same reaction happened back then: people tried to save things, push public projects more in the open, move ideas to other companies or create a community repo to sell the idea of an independent project. None of them really lasted or got traction.
It's sad, but the reality is that the fate of a project with only one major stakeholder is tied to that stakeholder's fate.
I'm pretty sure they will all get other jobs, but we have to face the fact that the project itself will probably die.
> Ubuntu Touch is still going, fairly strong too, though I think it's aim is to fill a niche rather than challenge Android and iOS anytime soon.
Do you consider getting no major OEM adoption in 5 years “fairly strong?” Mobile OSes depend on network effects of both users and developers. It’s no surprise it’s a duopoly.
In the world of Linux, 'no major OEM adoption' is the norm for most distros especially with no substantial corporate backing. UBports is definitely in the top 5, if not top 3, of (free/libre) mobile Linux distros. So yes, for people who are into the non-corporate Linux distros, UBports is going strong. But all that really means is actively maintained and has a reasonable (by open source standards) number of users.
Debian is still going strong after > 20 years with no major OEM adoption (except in the form of derivatives like Ubuntu), so I'm not sure how relevant OEM adoption is to FLOSS distributions.
Personally I think OEMs should not ship a default OS and should require a choice at the point of sale.
>Do you consider getting no major OEM adoption in 5 years “fairly strong?”
'No major OEM adoption' is partly the USP for manufacturers like Pine Phone[1], if they are able to build sustainable business then they would be fine(From the looks of it, it seem they know what they are doing).
NLnet was suggested in the discussion, and it would be a good fit culturally, but I wonder whether they have the resources to fund a project like Servo in any meaningful way.
I'd really like to financially support continued development of servo, so I hope something gets decided on quickly to centralize and organize funding of the servo devs. The longer this takes the more likely it is they just get another job. Sure you can find new talent but it will take them time to get up to speed with the project.
In a few weeks most of the developers on the Servo team will get another job. The project could be picked up by other people later but only with a significant loss of knowledge and momentum.
Now is the critical time for a another company to step in. Microsoft has better alignment with free web than Facebook or Google. This could be a chance for them to get a competitive independent browser again.
> Microsoft has better alignment with free web than Facebook or Google.
That would be precious: Microsoft taking Mozilla browser developers onboard, creating a browser, shipping it by default bundled with their OS, and being able to claim it's to prevent monopolies.
It would also be nice for those highly skilled developers who actually believed in the open web to be able to give the middle finger to those in middle and upper management for whom Mozilla is merely a stepping stone to some cozier job at a proprietary software house whilst running Mozilla into the ground.
I've used it for years before Windows Update pushed the new Chromium-based one. It worked well for me, was faster and consumed less memory than the new one.
Yeah - I'm not arguing against its technical merits. Dumping it was mostly a business reason - it made zero sense for MS to continue making their own browser engine.
Sure. At the same time, is it really smart for them to just completely abandon the idea of independence?
There's a lot that a browser can do for a company. Google has built GSuite and ChromeOS around Chrome - the integration with the browser is absurd and right up Microsoft's alley.
Microsoft could build Azure Active Directory, O365, Windows, etc, around a next gen browser and I think they'd be smart to do so.
> Sure. At the same time, is it really smart for them to just completely abandon the idea of independence?
It is. Chrome is so dominant at this point they're the de facto web standard. Other browsers have to put in significant effort just to play catch up and can't really offer any new renderer/js feature without Chrome's blessing.
Plus, we have a decade's worth of evidence that Chromium is just flat out better than the competition. Even if we set aside the problems with market share the Chromium team has consistently put out a faster engine than Firefox or IE.
Adopting Chromium allows you to (mostly) avoid putting effort into the rendering engine allowing you to focus on other features to differentiate yourself.
> Other browsers have to put in significant effort just to play catch up and can't really offer any new renderer/js feature without Chrome's blessing.
Microsoft still runs the dominant operating system! They have a huge opportunity here to complete. The same way Chrome advertises on Google.com, Microsoft can provide the default fucking browser that is HUGE.
> Plus, we have a decade's worth of evidence that Chromium
Chrome is 12 years old. It's been super popular for less than a decade.
Its multiprocess architecture, by far its most long term scalable feature, was behind Internet Explorer's (they started multiproc trend with, iirc, IE8).
> Even if we set aside the problems with market share the Chromium team has consistently put out a faster engine than Firefox or IE.
>Microsoft still runs the dominant operating system! They have a huge opportunity here to complete. The same way Chrome advertises on Google.com, Microsoft can provide the default fucking browser that is HUGE.
They've had that advantage since Chrome came out. Didn't stop them from losing almost all their market share.
>Its multiprocess architecture, by far its most long term scalable feature, was behind Internet Explorer's (they started multiproc trend with, iirc, IE8).
Chrome has been technologically ahead of IE since it came out.
>Acquire Servo, do better? That's my entire point.
So they developed Edge (pre-chromium) but still losing shares for some reason.
IMO previous Edge's engine(EdgeHTML) wasn't bad but GUI is bad. I remembered that D&D support was added to Edge after a few years from release.
Google monetizes the hell out of Chrome, the browser.
Google doesn't monetize developing Blink/Chromium. Since Edge only uses that part they don't really have to care about Google's monetization and do their own. If Google stops Chromium development or goes the wrong way at some point, which is inevitable, MS will have to step in, but until then it's free real estate.
They can build all that proprietary stuff with Chromium just as well, so why should they choose Firefox?
> Google doesn't monetize developing Blink/Chromium.
I disagree here. Of course they do. They could not monetize Chrome successfully without:
a) Having huge amounts of control over the direction of the web
b) Having a best-in-class browser that people want to use
If IE had every feature of Chrome with regards to management and monetization it would still not matter, people do not want IE. If IE were a drastically better browser than Chrome, they would.
Choosing Servo gives them an opportunity to leap ahead of Chrome in areas they care about.
Sure. Microsoft is a pretty unpredictable company these days. They are supporting all kinds of weird and wonderful things. I’m sure there is some ruthless business reason behind all of it but I don’t care if it helps the projects.
Are any of their langauges a good fit for something like Servo? I haven't used C# a huge amount but everytime I do I find myself being more productive than writing C++ but ultimately slightly worried about performance and correctness (the biggest thing that stood out is the absolutely awful immutability in C#)
They had a project called "Midori" which was a new operating system (I believe including browser?) written in a C# derivative. The blog posts on it are fascinating stuff, diving into some greenfield decisions for both language design and OS design. http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/
It's interesting to compare what we know of "Midori C#" to Rust.
Latest C# versions added a lot of language and library features allowing efficient writing of high performance code. And if you want to go a step further, unity has shown how (burst compiler)
When Google forked WebKit, while Google was landing more commits in WebKit than Apple, it wasn't an overwhelmingly huge gulf.
Today, in Chromium, Microsoft are a very small percentage of commits. Google still accounts for over 90%. If Microsoft wanted to fork Chromium, they'd need to vastly increase their investment if they wanted to keep up with Chromium.
Google and Facebook both have incentives to turn "browsing the web generally" into "interacting with their properties specifically", so that they can capture your eyeballs. They both continually extend into areas that seek to replace large swathes of the web with interactions within their walled gardens, so that they can then monetize those interactions.
(Amazon has this incentive too, but they're just kind of incompetent at the execution, so people don't worry as much about them. See: the Kindle Fire tablet.)
Meanwhile, Microsoft doesn't currently own any property that operates by trying to replace "eyeballs on the web generally" with "eyeballs on that property specifically" to then sell those eyeballs to advertisers. They have Bing, Cortana, GitHub, Skype, maybe TikTok soon. None of those things will really change that stance. They're not "against" the web.
Apple is in the middle on this spectrum. Apple doesn't make money off web eyeballs, but they do make money off native app eyeballs (iAds), and also off native-app sales generally. So they're motivated-enough in providing a decent web experience to be the main sponsors of the WebKit FOSS project; but they're also motivated to create APIs that allow their third-party devs to replace web experiences with native app experiences.
As experienced developers they will find new jobs somehow. But it won't be to work on Servo.
> Microsoft has better alignment with free web than Facebook or Google.
Microsoft gave up on browsers a long time ago.
If someone would want to use Servo outside of a hobby project, it would be Google to integrate it into Chrome. The chances of that happening is almost zero.
> In a few weeks most of the developers on the Servo team will get another job.
There's a pandemic, probably a global recession, massive tech layoffs everywhere, and tech interviewing is an absolute nightmare no matter how good you are. I'm not sure I'd be as confident unfortunately.
The hiring market for more senior roles seems fairly healthy, buts seems like more junior roles are tougher. The industry started the year with fairly more jobs than heads to fill them.
What's the current outlook of Servo following recent events at Mozilla? Did any significant contributions previously come from the OSS community or was it more or less just Mozillians?
To jump on this, what is the scope of Servo anymore? It was originally supposed to eventually replace Gecko, but last I heard they had shifted to simply moving the more stable parts into Firefox with Quantum. What is the end goal of the project now, even before the recent layoffs?
> It was originally supposed to eventually replace Gecko, but last I heard they had shifted to simply moving the more stable parts into Firefox with Quantum.
Those don't sound like incompatible approaches. The monolith Gecko would be difficult to replace whole hog, a modular surgical approach seems more realistic.
I've heard from people close to the team that Servo was never intended to replace Gecko wholesale, but was intended to be an exploratory research project where new browser engine innovations could happen and eventually trickle down to Gecko piecemeal.
They had detected the most profitable improvements and moved them over to Firefox.
So I'm not really surprised about them not continuing servo, even though it had been grate.
I'm more worried about some of the other layoff.
Further it feels a bit like they got in a place where they financially couldn't go on like before and fanned out to get more revenue streams but if that fails we might be down to chrome + safari, which would be horrible, tbh.
If it really comes to that we might even want to try to push the EU to get financially involved or something.
A parallel layout engine would be a hugely important change for the web. Would mean the possibility of changing or animating layout relevant properties (which is almost all of them) without recalculating the entire page. This is the most important limitation for web UIs.
>if that fails we might be down to chrome + safari
Safari isn't available on Windows, and Google doesn't want a situation where they are the only significant browser on the most popular desktop operating system. Google is scared of antitrust action, getting another monopoly is the last thing they want.
This is the problem with the low hanging fruit strategy.
Everyone gets behind the 20% improvement. Almost nobody gets behind the 1% improvement. Those only happen by force of will (some developer doing it despite being told not to).
In the end you are 80% of the way to the goal and the last 20% is politically insurmountable. This is, IME, a primary driver for the Lava Flow Antipattern.
If they don't invest in a new engine, and given that the old engine is not much to compare with Blink or even Webkit, what's left for them? Pocket and some BS VPN service?
> The old engine compares quite favorably with Chrome
The provided links only compare API coverage, while other domains (performance, security...) are important. Even so, Firefox is clearly trailing Chrome, its main desktop competitor. It's not surprising since I've heard that the latter has much more man-power. And the gap will increase.
I've looked at CanIUse, ignoring the features which are implemented but disabled by default. Chromes lacks 5 features the Firefox has. The biggest two are MathML and VirtualReality, which were both available as experimental features in past Chrome versions but were removed for lack of interest in publishing or maintaining them.
On the other side, Firefox lacks 25-30 features that Chrome has. A few of them are minor, but most of them seem complex.
Right on the heels of Mozilla's announcement to shutdown research on a promising potential next gen browser engine. Hm. I wonder if the renewal deal had an impact on which programs Mozilla cut besides raw funding.
Likely the other way around. They didn’t get as much as they wanted so they reprioritized and made cuts. Deals don’t happen and end in a press release the next day.
According to this[1], they got about the same annual amount.
"our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year."
So on the basis of "earning" $1.6 billion(!) Mozilla is "refocusing" on a bookmarking service, a VPN and a weird sorta "social VR" (whatever the fuck that is).
What the hell are they doing with the rest of the money? It should be "paid back" to the shareholder (the foundation) as tax free dividends that are kept in a fund for the purposes of that foundation.
Google needs Mozilla as much as Microsoft needed Apple and will be happy to fund them one way or another if only to look good in the eyes of the regulators. And it's pocket change to Google.
My first post on HN using Servo. GitHub seems to work too. Pretty fast. Build was fast and easy too but huge (6GB including the .git) I sure hope this project surives.
Actually a lot of things are usable even if they are askew. Like the Google logo on search is way to the left rather than center. On the other hand, Facebook is complete chaos and totally unusable, for example.
Don't worry about size, rust projects for some reason get huge. 500 line actix project for me was 1gb no kidding. In fact 6gb sounds amazing by that standards
Are there any existing projects looking to build a new browser based around Servo? Assuming that it's partially dead at Mozilla it would be interesting to see alternatives to the current big browsers cropping up that use it.
I don't understand something about many of the comments I've seen on HN regarding Firefox, Edge, Chrome, etc....
Why does it matter if there is one source tree for all browsers? [0]
Is it really a bad thing if Chromium is the base, and then Google, Microsoft, etc push out forks of it?
Isn't that what we do in the linux world already with the kernel? Redhat, Ubuntu, Mint, etc all take a stock kernel from the git tree and then tweak it for their uses, yet we don't complain about that.
[0] - Yes, I know people lost their jobs, and that sucks, especially in this economy. But my question isn't about the jobs, it's about having multiple browsers and why some people vehemently believe that multiple browsers without shared source code is critical to our future. THAT is what I don't understand.
The difference is that the Linux Foundation doesn't have a side business getting a cut from every install of Apache Server or something. They do not have a strong stake in how people end up using Linux.
Google has a strong interest in how people end up using the web and they have a particular vision for it, a vision that many on here disagree with.
Imagine if IBM ran the Linux kernel. We would be hearing many of the same concerns.
If there's a bug between the specifications and Chrome, what incentive is there for Chrome to change? How do you check/verify the specifications if there is only one implementation?
Given a single implementation, what incentive is there to develop open standards?
How do you innovate (in standards, JavaScript performance, rendering, etc.) if there is only one group working on them?
Case in point: Firefox is the only major browser to provide MathML support. Where is the incentive to get that implemented in the other browsers, especially given MathJax?
Where is the competition to innovate in things like web tools (layout analysis -- esp. for flexbox, etc., accessibility property (WCAG, WAI-ARIA) navigation/investigation) given a single implementation?
This doesn't address the full scope of your point, but it is worth mentioning that Chromium/Blink engineers contribute to and rely on https://web-platform-tests.org/ in order to ensure some level of conformance and interoperability.
In addition to what the other comments are saying, it's not at all clear that maintaining a suitable fork of Chromium would be less work than maintaining a completely different browser implementation. Google is clearly trying to drive the web into an unsavoury direction so the divergence burden of such a fork might increase with time.
Also, it's never a bad idea to implement the same thing twice, from scratch. Working with an existing codebase necessarily puts you into a certain mindset with its own trade-offs and constraints where moving in a certain direction might be much harder than if you are starting from scratch. Would we ever see innovations that Servo brought forth if all we had were Chromium forks? It's hard to say, but it's definitely not obvious.
W3C would cease to be necessary if there were just one browser. That'd be it, end of history, the WWW would now be a Google product served over a Google developed binary protocol (QUIC).
If Linux were the only operating system out there, and incidentally was completely controlled by a company that only kept it open source for its own amusement, would you still be singing this tune? I doubt it.
The problem is that it's not just a base utility layer being shared. It's the entire web-standards stack. Which means that Google would now have pretty much free reign to push the standards wherever they wanted, because if it's in Chrome it's in everything except iOS.
When it comes to Mozilla, "community project" is often equivalent to dead project. There are exceptions - Thunderbird appears to be doing OK - but my experience with Mozilla is that community is an afterthought - a place to hopefully get some free labour.
That said, Servo did seem to be one of the more lively places, so perhaps it will continue.
Not only Mozilla, that is the outcome of pretty much most FOSS projects when one doesn't have a solid income, only a selected few get to live from donations and patreon.
Rust seems to have a strong community of voluntary contributors, and could probably be run without company backing. Similar stories if you look at major FOSS projects such as KDE and Gnome - primarily dependent on a wide base of volunteers.
Then there are projects with a mix: plenty of volunteers, along with many commercial contributors - the commercial contributors tend to be more significant (certainly they add more code - but then they're the ones pushing new features for their customers) - but then there are enough volunteer contributions that the projects aren't dependent on the commercial entities. Linux Kernel, LibreOffice, Kubernetes, VSCode, come to mind. And with multiple commercial entities, it's not a tragedy if one drops out.
Then there are those projects with a single commercial backer, and fewer volunteers. Those are the ones that die off when the company drops out. The question is - is Servo in this category?
All the projects you listed get regular brief cases full of money, one just needs to have a look at their sponsor listings, which come down to the selected few I was mentioning.
Even the Linux kernel would never had taken off beyond an hobby project had not been for contributions from Oracle, Compaq, IBM, Intel engineers during the early days.
So yeah will Servo find such a benefactor, very difficult to say, but Samsung used to contribute, if I remember correctly.
> Similar stories if you look at major FOSS projects such as KDE and Gnome
I am not too up to date on KDE, but Gnome is mainly pushed forward by Red Hat, and recently by Canonical. Unpaid volunteers certainly make a decent amount of contributions but the vast amount of progress comes from corporations, not volunteers.
Note that some of the Rust volunteers still get temporary contracts with Mozilla to realize big features. So not everything that was contributed by non-Mozilla employees was done so without Mozilla money.
I hope so too. But it's sad that, in practice, there're few successful big open-source projects without receiving support from commercial corporations.
Their announcement said that Mozilla is killing off a lot of development on "internal tools." I thought that meant things like Bugzilla or MDN. No reason to slave away on MDN when others have so much resources.
But I had no idea they'd kill something so core to their future browser development. I strongly disagree with this decision. They might as well kill gecko too, if there's no exciting future anymore.
Samsung had invested in the past, so hopefully they or someone else will pick up where Mozilla left off.
I do think that Mozilla should slowly try to reduce the amount of unique processes that they have. Part of what made servo so successful is that they did all the development on GitHub.
Mozilla should have a top level corporate policy to transition away from all their nonstandard internal tools. Get rid of Mach, Bugzilla, Mercurial, etc.
They should use GitLab or GitHub, switch to cmake, and some standard third party build service, and be done with it. Their productivity would increase, their community contributions would increase, and their overhead would decrease.
But they should not have cut their DevTools, and should have actually beefed up the developer-friendliness. Compete with Electron. Compete with PhantomJS. Improve the experience of Progressive Web Apps on mobile.
The focus on new products makes sense. I think Lockwise, Monitor, and their VPN service were all good efforts. Firefox Sync should ideally expand more into a whole suite of integrated services stop their zero-knowledge privacy-first architecture. Storage, backups, OwnCloud integration, etc.
Maybe they should even acquire OwnCloud or NextCloud.
Right at the moment when Firefox have regained reasonable performance, added and polished more things (including the new ecosystem of extensions matured) and became the best browser again, on all the platforms.
I've just switched back to it (after using Chrome for years because of Firefox's slowness) and feel like I'm going to use it for quite a long anyway. I just hope somebody is going to keep making vulnerability patches.
If Servo is dead, what could possibly be the future of Firefox?
I don't want to browse the web with a Blink-based browser. Total browser homogeneity is the end of the free and open web. I don't want to use a non-free non-open web.
Mozilla should have ousted the executives, Cxx's and secretarial stuff -- not their sole chance of ever making their browser engine better...
What's the deal anyway, is Mozzila a non profit for the development of the Firefox browser and an open FOSS web standards based web engine, or a sandbox for business types to play with and implement various BS ideas (ads, VPN, mobile OS, etc)?
Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a for-profit business. It just so happens that 100% of its shares are owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit.
The sooner the profit corp dies off and eats humble pie then, the better.
An actual community project should rise from this state of affairs, with tanginble, browser-oriented goals, not something dependent on Google's money...
Here's the person who announced the firings... Nothing to do with development or FOSS, some laywer ex-Netscape employee:
Winifred Mitchell Baker (born 1959) is the Executive Chairwoman and CEO of the Mozilla Foundation and of Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Baker was trained as a lawyer. She coordinates business and policy issues and sits on both the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors.
It's like the leeches that hang on to NGOs for a salaried office career, and don't do activism themselves...
For all his faults, at least Brendan Eich was an actual developer, and with important contributions to the web and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.
> An actual community project should rise from this state of affairs
This is just so naive view ... it's always the abstract "community" which should step in and save the day. Recently it was LibreOffice too where people got all mad due to proposed branding and again "community" superhero was expected to step in, fork it and carry on the whole development.
In reality these projects are far too huge to be purely community projects. They require full time paid developers and not few of them. They won't be able to survive without corporate sponsorship (and thus influence).
>In reality these projects are far too huge to be purely community projects.
Mozilla is far too huge to not have money. Just 200M from those 600 million per year it took from Google, put in the bank, could pay for 50 developers/graphic designers/ $200K per year to work on it for 20 years. That would have taken care of the engine for 2 decades...
Instead they burnt money in BS ventures, Cxx salaries, events, and so on...
That is way too low to be anything more than maintenance mode. By my estimation [1], you'd want somewhere around 250 full-time equivalents to be able to declare the project in a healthy state.
[1] Take the number I'd estimate for Thunderbird, multiply by 10 for Firefox-scale, then add another 20% to account for the operations that Thunderbird gets "for free" (e.g., maintaining server infrastructure) and accounting for the fact that email standards are far slower in innovation than browser standards.
So? 20 years ago Netscape still had a much larger team, Microsoft too, and Webkit with its small team still beat them in their own game.
Small teams can build whole OSes, browsers, compilers, and whatever they put their mind too. Given good devs/experts, they can do so even better/faster than bigger teams.
P.S. 1 Not that a 50-strong team is small.
P.S. 2 Plus, way of missing the point. The team-of-50, 200K, 20 years = 200M was just an example. 200M is 1/3rd of what Mozilla made in a year for decades. And even those 200M would just be the raw money spent, not invested or anything. They could afford to support a 300-strong team of 20 years with 2 years of their revenue un-invested. And that's with a $200K/year salary, which doesn't have to be...
Kinda wonder what happened after the yahoo buyout. Supposedly Mozilla could have kept all the cash from yahoo's search deal, but still solicited revenue from google by making them the default instead. Where did that money go, and why not just earmark it for Firefox?
Not only did I not know that a non-profit could wholly own a for-profit, not only did I not know that they could share executive leadership, I certainly did not know this was the case for Mozilla.
Note that a for-profit owned by a non-for-profit is really a not-for-profit. Because the only things that the for-profit company can do with it's profit are reinvest it, or give it to the non-for-profit.
That is, based on what you said, it sounds like there is no meaningful difference between having a non-profit do all the work, and a for-profit doing work on behalf of the non-profit that owns it. But if that was the case, why would anyone bother with the extra layers? I'm inclined to assume there is some reason for the extra layers, and I have difficulty believing those differences are in society's best interest.
By the looks of it, Servo is a project that failed to deliver a new browser engine after years of work. If there were a chance that the project could be turned around to result in usable software, I'm sure Moz wouldn't have killed it. Is it worth the effort to pickup the project rather than starting from scratch? I don't know, and would appreciate if contributors share their opinion, or come up with a roadmap. By the reaction of some devs here on HN ("don't worry, Rust is safe; no really!") unfortunately I got the impression that the project was treated more as a showcase for Rust rather than a serious attempt at a new browser engine (please don't take it personally; I know this attitude from the "100% Javs" days and consider it a junior dev trait). Also, the "rise from ashes"/Phoenix metapher is no stranger to Mozilla, only that Moz picked the remains from Netscape; the effort to code a browser from scratch (in Java) had failed as well; it resulted in the Rhino JavaScript engine which is still heavily used.
Servo wasn't intended to build a full engine to replace Gecko, just to prove out components (Stylo, WebRender, etc) that could be integrated back into Gecko proper, built in a way that takes full advantage of Rusts strengths, and it's been pretty successful by that measure, IMO.
There was plenty more work to do (other commenters have mentioned a new layout engine), and I'm disappointed to see Mozilla abandoning such a core next-gen R&D project that has already brought substantial improvements to their main product.
Parts of Servo succeeded, like the webrender GPU stack and the CSS selector engine.
The parallel layout engine failed. It just kept running into corner cases that didn't handle parallel layout well. If you look in the layout_2020 folder in the source repository, you can see an in-progress pivot to a new approach that would hopefully have less problems, but now we'll never know.
This isn't a surprise. It was supposed to be a research project; if parts of it didn't fail, that would be a surprise.
Oh come on, let's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially around he salary. You need a CEO, and Bay Area salaries are high.
Just to illustrate the numbers: a fresh graduate with no experience will easily get more than 100k (even at Mozilla, who IME pay a bit less). A plain manager of a 10-person team at a big bay area company will be earning close to 500k (and most of their direct reports will also be in the 300k-500k range). Then you get your principal and distinguished engineers who can easily make 1M per year. 2.5M for someone leading a 1000 person company isn't expensive, and you do need someone to lead that company - to make tose strategic decisions.
You can quibble around whether or not a specific person made the right decisions (Mozilla aren't doing great, but they're also in a tough environment - maybe their CEO could be making better decisions that would boost usage - or maybe usage is entirely out of their control.) But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.
And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.
I think this reasoning is not straightforward for Mozilla as it would be for a traditional company.
Normally, the shareholders own the company. They appoint the CEO, or a board of directors or whatever management structure, and they decide how much to pay them. It's the shareholders' company, it's the shareholders' right to decide whether to keep the C-suite and how much to pay them. Things can get a bit muddled with large public companies with many shareholders, or when there are dual class shares, which can partially insulate the management from the owners control, but it more or less works this way.
In the case of Mozilla Foundation, AFAICS, this does not hold. The board of directors is completely self managing; they coopt board members and appoint the CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
I might be very wrong about this, but since Baker is both the chairman of the foundation and the CEO of the corporation, it looks to me like she doesn't basically answer to anyone. It's a bit like she owns the company, except she didn't have to buy it. That's a pretty sweet deal.
>Oh come on, let's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially around he salary. You need a CEO
Citation needed.
>But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.
I don't even need / want a company. I want the non-profit organization I was promised, with community leading, and perhaps 1-2 BDFLs to make the final decisions.
AFAIK a non-profit can't make the kind of search engine deal that generates the vast majority of Mozilla's income, and currently funds Gecko development.
> And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.
If I can take a literal potato, stick it in a pot, put that pot in an expensive chair in an expensive well-lit CEO office, have the potato's PA water it every day, and at the end of the year can claim more growth and sustainability, then "how well it's being done" kind of starts to matter.
That presumes that a CEO should be making more than a distinguished engineer. The truth is that CEO salaries are completely public so there's much deeper competition for the highest-paid ones (the ones getting paid the most, not necessarily the best at the job) in an ever expanding bubble the increases the salaries from those making less ("this is what it takes to run an organization of this size"). If we had an actual way to measure value on the job things would be better (something like points above replacement) but no one has figured this out for large organizations that require cooperation (+ different kinds of value).
Those numbers are only true of a handful of household name tech companies that are very competitive to get into. I guarantee you that most line level people at most companies are not making 300-500k.
I think any big company who does not like Google's dominance on the web would want to do that. The reason they all switch to a chromium engine is not that they don't care, it's because it was too hard/expensive to develop their own engine. If Servo has any potential in that sense, I don't see why a company like Microsoft would not want to contribute to that.
I think MS thinks very differently. Some months ago, one of their PMs said:
"It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really 'cared' about the web, they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than five percent?" [1]
Ask yourself, why are "web standards" or "standards bodies" good? Why should they have "power"? The W3C held back the web platforms for years.
What's the point of having an extremely complex standard that nobody else will ever implement anyway? Remember, it would take billions of dollars to implement a competitive browser and then you have to give it away for free.
If even a trillion dollar company like Microsoft thinks it's better to team up with a competitor rather than implement HTML all by themselves, it really should make you think.
Consider, there's only one Linux kernel, there's no "Linux standard", just one kernel - and the world runs on it. I don't see people running around complaining about how that's a threat, even though it's much harder to switch operating systems than browsers. Sure, there's POSIX, but that's a tiny subset of Linux features.
I wouldn't call POSIX a tiny subset of Linux features. POSIX makes up the vast majority of the kernel interfaces that applications actually use. Stuff like epoll and io_uring are the exception, not the rule.
Not thinking about this too deeply, would Chromium become like Linux in this situation? Linux has heavily won the server market but many different flavors of Linux are being deployed still without a single, overwhelming winner. Maybe contributions like Stylo to Chromium could improve the web for a larger audience of people than Firefox could reach in its current state.
Microsoft has made two working browser engines: Trident and EdgeHTML. They've killed both in favor of Chromium; I don't see how it would cost them less to develop Servo than to have kept working on EdgeHTML.
I said at the time that Microsoft should have stepped into to sponsor Firefox, and make a firefox-based IE. Surely between the two of them Chrome could get some better competition.
How many other companies with the capital to fund such development have a need for a new browser engine and would be willing to fund a team of engineers to work on such an engine vs just using chromium?
Samsung, LG, many Chinese TV and mobile phone manufacturers etc. Samsung was a contributor to the Servo project, but I'm not sure to what extent they were helping.
LG holds the remainder of the Palm WebOS assets, and has been doing decent things with them. So there's at least partially a history of them doing this kind of thing. Maybe there's a slight chance they might have an interest.
Microsoft might have done. Picking Chromium as the basis for their new Edge a couple of years ago, instead of Mozilla/Servo, was a disappointment at the time and I suspect will look even worse in future retrospectives.
MS also seem to have a lot more interest in Rust than Google do.
Yes, picking something that was useable 3 years ago to build a product released 2 years ago instead of an alternative that isn't close to being done NOW was surely a massive strategic miscalculation.
By "Mozilla/Servo" I meant "the Mozilla Firefox codebase along with Servo as its research testbed", not just Servo itself (which AFAIK was never intended to be a generally-shippable browser). Could have been clearer, yes.
It's always been a dumb idea to make yet another rendering engine. For the same reason that Firefox is sliding slowly but surely into obscurity: the web works best in Chrome, like it or not.
I'm sure the team working on it are talented but I can't imagine any commercial company picking this up for any reason.
One blocker to picking up Firefox as a community project is that Mozilla still holds all relevant trademarks. So we may need a singular, well-branded, well-communicated fork to rally around. If everyone makes their own fork, all of them will fade off into obscurity.
There are several well-known forks already. But what we need is a community focal-point, where everyone who thinks to themselves, "it's a shame what Mozilla did, I want to help", ends up directing that energy into the same place.
Everyone seems to be blaming the "bad" (relatively, I personally don't believe that) performance of FF on Gecko. But is that the case? Isn't it mostly because of many websites relying heavily on JS while V8 is much faster than SpiderMonkey? I have been following Phoronix benchmarks for years and where Chrome shines seems to always be on JS benchmarks.
Given that Gecko is probably not the bottleneck, I would consider the decision of halting the project not a bad one. Servo delivered tons of amazing things already, it is a clear success. Maybe Mozilla should consider using V8? After all, losing SpiderMonkey might not be that bad, there is enough "competitors".
Browser (shall I say the browser?), from "thin client on top of OS" became "web client on top of thin OS that just needed to run the thing".
And indeed, zipped Chromium sources are of 1.4 Gb and Linux kernel is of 0.2 Gb - 7 times less.
Volume of features that "we" (or rather "they") want to see in browsers and so complexity of browsers reached point of no return I think. From now and on only state actors will be able to finance development of another new browser.
I do not think that any private pure product company now is able to develop modern browser sustainably. Either we (users) shall pay to the company for it or the company shall sell telemetry, user's data, influence user choice, etc. to get money for that from FAANG & Co. And that is exactly what happens now with Mozilla.
What to do?
The solution could be in drastically limiting the scope of browser. Indeed, 95% of sites and users just need basic HTML/CSS/JS features. The only thing that needs to be added is what I name as WebVM - virtual machine a la JavaVM or .NET "VM" with DOM and CSSOM exposed in it as primitives. So if you want to add new CSS, HTML feature or to support new script language then you can provide corresponding loadable .class (bytecodes) file.
I mean: compact base (bootstrap) implementation + VM/runtime to extend this thing.
All other features can be developed independently by teams who need them for their users and cases.
All those WebGL, WebAsm, rarely used CSS effects and HTML features ... 95% of us do not need them - why do we need to pay the price for these features? If someone will need them - fine, design and load them into WebVM.
As an example, I (+ 3more devs) can transform my Sciter (https://sciter.com, 0.02 Gb zipped sources) into such bootstrap browser in 6-9 months. And so can do other teams.
Sigh.
10 years ago we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater when we disabled ActiveX, Java, etc.
Instead we should actually develop WebVM and so to move web tech development out of big companies and Central Comity of the Web.
How long before there is a major commercially-backed fork of Firefox? As a huge Firefox fan, I'm incredibly dismayed at the priorities expressed in these layoffs, and I know it is gonna bleed through to browser performance and security sooner or later. I don't want to stick around and find out the hard way when it happens.
Ecosystem diversity, interest in servo, refusal to let “chrome win”, privacy support baked in, etc. Why would you fork Chromium if you’re interested in Firefox?
The large number of Chromium forks vs the comparatively tiny number of Firefox forks shows that there is barely interest in forking Firefox. Especially when you look at which forks have users you'll see that it's almost exclusively Chromium forks.
Sure, ecosystem diversity and so on is great but the current forkers don't see a way to make money from that, otherwise they'd have done it.
This still doesn’t answer the question. If building Firefox is unprofitable what about Chromium based browser is profitable? Cutting out its base layer development doesn’t change its business viability. Clearly the engine development is not the problem.
Maintaining your own browser engine costs a lot of money. Using the one someone else maintains costs a lot less. It's that simple, plus the network effect, compatibility ...
Okay you've eliminated your browser engine building cost by switching Firefox to Chromium. Now how do you make profit off of Chromium?
My point is that there was no profit model around Firefox so switching engines is negligible. The cost of building said engine is also going to be negligible to the profit returned from the browser. In Google's case this is true. In Mozilla's case they have no model and never had one to subsidize that cost (other than Google search money). Changing base engines turns Firefox into a hobby project managed by a FOSS rather than a serious competing project in the browser-verse.
Hmm. Most browsers use the webkit rendering engine internally. The problem is that browser engines are huge and require a lot of developers to maintain. I think the worst thing that could happen here is to have Firefox die, and we'd be that much closer to a webkit monoculture.
Even if Blink and Webkit are separate (and they are still clearly closer than Gecko), we're getting to a Blink monoculture except for the iOS holdout (which is still only ~5% of all traffic, but generally high value and you're prevented from telling them to use another browser).
It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too (with their strategic changes).
> It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too (with their strategic changes).
I'm not sure about that. WebKit is lagging slightly behind Blink (and Gecko to lesser degree), but I don't think it bothers Apple. Budget to develop WebKit is for Apple hardly a problem as well.
Having independent browser engine gives them quite a lot of strategic power given their exclusive market share. Look no further than how they managed to single-handedly kill PWAs few months ago since it does not fit into their strategic goals (all apps must go through app store).
They did not managed to kill anything, there are plenty of markets where iOS is not a presence we care about and keep doing mobile Web applications, business as usual.
I think it depends if a lot of pages start breaking. Right now it's not happening at scale, but I don't see them having any reason not to refork Blink if more "only tested on Chrome" sites start breaking on Safari.
I'd expect them to maintain all strategic decisions if they did refork, including disabling PWA features; there's nothing that says they have to enable PWAs just because they fork from Blink.
I was absolutely gutted to hear about Mozilla's "reductions" (I hate such euphemisms), perhaps even worse for the Web is abandoning Servo... Which I wanted to find out whether that's the case.
Just make a browser that supports the bare minimum. DRM, web USB, all that bullshit. Leave it to Google. Yes, people will use flock to Chrome for Netflix, but don't confuse Netflix with The (open) Internet.
I hope a few people from firefox drop their technical roles and take up leadership in a new foundation whose sole goal is n oss firefox fork. If linux is there without any company, surely firefox can be too?
Good luck Rust Retards. Rewrite gone wrong. Downvote as you wish. Propaganda Machine would die. Don't dare to replace C++ but you might well replace ugly C
I bet that spidermonkey cost more than Servo and yet manage to be a net negative utility to firefox the product.
Servo has improved the state of the art of layout / css / rendering performance for gecko, even outperforming blink on some cases.
Spidermonkey is consistently inferior to v8 and slow down ecmascript adoption.
Therefore it would be much wiser for mozilla to switch to v8 like everybody else and to reallocate the money either towards resurrecting servo OR towards improving V8 and making it faster, which here would bring actual value to humans.
Why do software engineers feel the need to name abstract software after tangeable things, conflating search results? E.g., "Servo", "Containers", etc.
Can we not find a simple naming convention that is less ambiguous and confusing to the rest of the world that uses both software and hardware? E.g. ServoSW, ContainerSW, or stick with names that have no hardware corollary?
I wonder how much of this, has too do with social justice going to far in the harassment of Brendan Eich.
I mean, maybe someone with his background in charge would know why its important for Mozilla to keep this kind of projects even if it looks they are not going anywhere, because this is what gives Mozilla meaning in the end.
Im not a mozillian, so i might be totally wrong, but maybe
this is a case of the MBA's taking over and trying to focus into what they have learned to do.. look at the profit margins and think they are spending too much in research projects.
There are a lot of examples of other companies losing their engineering culture, starting to think more in terms of cash and profit, and finally vanishing its purpose and meaning.
IBM(lost in the 80's), Microsoft almost loosing it in the Ballmer era, Sun, and the most proeminent case: Yahoo.
Just to make it clear: Tech companies as any other company must have a good financial health and this is very important, but they cannot afford to loose their soul.
Once their engineering and innovation culture is gone, they become void and suffer from a slow bleeding til the death.
We must face it, our economical systems of incentives, the economical game generally speaking, its broken.
And tech and arts are proeminent endeavors that tend to get trojan horsed by this yuppie mentality turning things that once had meaning, into meaningful cash cows that work for the few people that cash out from the corrupted source.
(Apparently, it works a little better for industrial-level enterprises).
My hope is that, with time, this will become more evident, and research find innovative ways to make a better economical game so that creative, art and engineering culture kind of companies can have a much larger life span.
By the way, they had a pretty good leverage on Rust (and Rust was a really risk bet that ended doing great). The fact that they fired the people with this background just shows that they have no clue of what they are really doing.
* Edit: just being clear about people with conservative views.. I dont like and even despise what he did politically speaking, but as long as he were a good fit for the job, and never forced his political and social views into the company, i dont agree with the outcome.. and the reason is starting to show up now.. Much more important things are starting to fall out, and in the end even people with progressive views and good engineering background ended fired in the long term.
Agree with their positions or not, they are definitely alienating to some. Even if just delivering a great browser and getting people to use it is not their primary mission (and it's not directly if you've ever read the Mozilla Manifesto), it is the means by which they retain the ability pursue those goals.
Recall Michael Jordan's reason for staying away from politics, "Republicans buy sneakers too".
She went a little far in what she said publically, but she wasn't wrong. I knew Gerv from very early on. He was a convert to christianity and as most converts, was vehement in it's absolute correctness to the detriment of his relationships. But, when you think you have an absolute truth of life after death on your side, people become a secondary concern.
> * Promoting BLM and anti-racism content via Pocket and their homepage
So, I will admit that I don't see there being any valid stance besides being against racism, and for treating all human life with value.
If somebody is toxic enough that you'd criticize them in an obituary, you should not allow them to keep working for your organization. It's really that simple.
BML started as a twitter hashtag. A couple hangers-on started an organization with the same name. BLM is a movement, there is an organization too, but the vast majority of people are part of the movement that has no official organization behind it.
I'm going to repeat what I said about Eich in another thread:
Mozilla built a brand around openness and the idea of "putting people first" and making them feel "empowered, safe and independent." (Those quotes are from at least one version of their mission statement.) Eich's backing of the anti-gay-marriage initiative was a PR problem for them in a way that it might not have been for many other companies. Also, he violated the first rule of holes (i.e., when you're in one, stop digging); it's possible they might have been able to do effective damage control without booting him if his initial response hadn't been, in so many words, "it's my money and I can do what I want with it."
And, sure: it is, and he can. The CEO of a nonprofit Catholic hospital chain could also use their money to donate to Planned Parenthood. But, if they did, we can be reasonably sure the hospital's boards of directors would have words with them about it.
As for the others, well:
> Baker calling a former conservative employee's views "traumatic and damaging" in their obituary
It sounds like he was not merely conservative, but extremely strident and pushy about certain things. Also, you're giving that obituary a super reductive reading, given all the nice things Baker also says about the guy despite their obvious disagreements over those views.
> The removal of "meritocracy" from the governance document in the name of D&I
Some might argue that this kind of nitpicky language monitoring is an awfully unimportant tiny hill to die on. Maybe so, but it's hard not to see "I must take a stand in defense of phrasing changes I probably wouldn't have noticed if this blog post hadn't made a point of calling them out" as, well, an even smaller and less important hill, isn't it?
> Promoting BLM and anti-racism content
If someone is truly offended by "anti-racism content," I'm gonna have questions about them.
> Recall Michael Jordan's reason for staying away from politics, "Republicans buy sneakers too".
Just for the record: he's donating $100 million to Black Lives Matter.
It doesn't matter which way their politics lean, does it? The point is that a software company can't put politics over technology.
Unless it's specifically software politics and relevant to the organization's purpose, like the FSF. But if Mozilla had a political stance expressed through software (e.g. openness, user empowerment?) it has been somewhat muddled for quite some time now.
there’s no such thing though-
all organizations are political. You can pretend that libertarian technocrat capitalist is neutral, but that says more about your politics than anything else
> I wonder how much of this has to do with social justice going too far?
Zero, and with all respect, "could it be... SOCIAL JUSTICE?" was an awfully silly way to open an otherwise reasonable comment. (One that I'm about to go on to disagree with, granted, but still.)
Mozilla is not being run by "the MBAs"; it's being run by Mitchell Baker, who was actually CEO before Eich and has been there since before Mozilla was a separate corporation. She wrote the Mozilla Public License. She may not be the technologist Eich is, but it's awfully hard to fault her historical commitment to open source, the open web, and Mozilla. There's a lot of conspiratorial thinking about how Mozilla's moves over the past week or so are being driven by some kind of ruthless corporate greed, but a less nefarious explanation seems more likely.
90% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google's contract to be Firefox's default search provider, that contract is up this year, and according to news reports, the contract hasn't been renewed. these moves are being driven by a desperate desire not to go under when their income stream drops by orders of magnitude. They aren't becoming more commercial because of a "yuppie mentality"; they're becoming more commercial because they see no alternative.
You should pardon me if in your linguistic-cultural background some wording i pick might sound more sensitive than im aware of, as its not my mother language, so i might miss some nuances.
As you can see reading further the core of the point i was trying to make is; we are all imperfect, thats a fact of life.
Than we have fitness, and as more sophisticated things get, fitness is harder to achieve.
To be fair, i dont know how much Eich was a good fit as a CEO for Mozilla, all i can deal with is that he was booted not because of performance, but a political stuff that got uncovered and that was against the image Mozilla was known to defend. Fair enough.. is it serious? Yes, because it damages the image of Mozilla even if its not the fault of the corporation, because it sounds like an endorsement..
Ok, but its all a matter of weighting, but not only looking for the short term, but the long term.. maybe there was someone in Mozilla that had the technical baggage and also the socio-political views
Again, i dont know how well the person picked to be the next CEO can evaluate and weight decisions in the deepest level not only of policy but also engineering.
But i´ve seen the external movements of the chess board, and this last one, made it more clear where Mozilla is heading and how they are evaluating their decisions.
Mozilla did bold movements that did not worked out, but they were not tottally misguided, as they could actually succeed, so they were not maded by a totally unaware person. Its just that its super hard to do everything right and have luck at the same time.
But i think, the real problems were not in those bold movements (and right now when you look at them in the rear window, they look just like cash burned) but in the innability to follow and keep their core projects moving.
For instance, the browser took too much time to keep up with the multi-process architecture in Chrome. It took like 4 years if im not mistaken..
Meanwhile there were a lot heat being dispersed in moonshots.. again, is not that the moonshots were wrong per-se, but as long as the most of the energy were being
expended in keeping up in the core of what make mozilla matter today.
But hey, the moonshots maybe were misguided somehow, but here, there this one or two that we invested in the past that is starting to bear fruits.. we were lucky.. so why now shutdown the projects that might actually be the ones that can save mozilla in the future?
If it was just a matter of closing the offices elsewhere in the world(like the one in Berlin), but we know that part of the engineering not only now, but in the beggining of the year were booted of the company, and some of them in things that should be strategic for Mozilla in the comming years.
The pressure is hard, but the good CEO´s will make a stand and defend the things that might not look very good now, but that will be key in the future..
And i wonder, how much a CEO or boarding that could go deeper in the engineering rabbit hole could have helped into making the right decisions.
Again, i dont know very well the CEO or the board, all i see is the chess pieces moving from here.. and from what i can see, joining the pieces of the pass movements, i have a sour taste in my mouth that what was once one of the greateast, shiny companies of high technology, a role model to me and to many people, are starting to repeat the misguided steps of companies like Yahoo.
Sorry for "the MBA´s", as i dont want to offend anyone, but what i meant is the pattern in the moves, it looks a lot like things Ballmer would do, not Gates. And the difference lies in how much they are informed to take the good decisions they need to make.
And tech people often lack the philosophical, social and political baggage to make the good decisions on those kind of matters, so in my opinion they must be helped not chased. Because in the end this might be important to the survival of the entity, that might look good on the paper and in its image, but might be lost in its direction.
It sounded like a rant, and i think it was harsh on my part, but its because i care and really like Mozilla.
Its when the times are rough that the good decisions are really needed. so i just wonderered.. and i would love to be proved wrong, really.
Would you feel the same way about, say, a CEO donating to NAMBLA? I mean, if they have a good technical background, does it really matter if the public face of the company is out there advocating for relationships between adults and young boys? It's just politics, after all.
One is a proposal, which at the time, was mainstream enough to gain the support of a majority of California voters. (And, even today, although I don't think it would get a majority any more, it probably still would get a significant minority of California voters supporting it.)
The other is an extremely fringe view which has only ever been supported by a tiny percentage of the population.
I also don't think Eich was "out there advocating" for something. He made a private donation, which was not a significant amount in the grand scheme of things ($1,000 either way was not going to make any difference to the outcome). The law required that fact to be made publicly available, and then others publicised it; he didn't voluntarily choose to publicise his donation. When people publicly asked him about his beliefs on the topic, he avoided answering the question.
So, hi. I'm gay. My partner of 4 years is from a different country. Because of that, one of the only ways we can live together is to get married and get one of us citizenship in the other's country that way. To say nothing of other rights related to marriage.
Just so you know that. Again: Brendan Eich spent $1,000 to hurt people like me. If gay marriage was not legal, my life would be significantly worse today.
I didn't do anything when Eich was made CEO. I probably should have. Let's say I did. Would you say I'd be in the wrong for telling Mozilla that I disagree with their choice of CEO, because he directly hurt people like me and avoids answering questions about whether he's likely to do it again?
Suppose Eich donated, say, $500 to strengthen the DMCA. Let's say be advocated for harsher punishments for anybody reverse-engineering a DRM scheme, even for interoperability or other non-piracy purposes. Then suppose he gave another $500 to lobby against net neutrality.
When asked about these donations, let's say he refuses to answer or talk about them.
Would you be comfortable with him leading Mozilla? Kinda seems like his values might be deeply in conflict with those of the organization, making him a poor choice for CEO. But also ... That's just politics, after all. Has nothing to do with his leadership or technical skill.
> I also don't think Eich was "out there advocating" for something.
You're right- he was paying other people to go out there advocating for it. Hardly better!
I would be absolutely comfortable with him leading Mozilla. No, I don't hate you, no, I don't hate gays, no, I'm not sorry you feel like Eich has insulted you, I completely don't give a fuck. What I give a fuck about, though, is having a good browser, and since making good browsers has zero relationship to being either pro or anti same-sex marriage, I wouldn't be less comfortable because of the fact the organisation that makes a browser and other web-stuff is controlled by a guy that has a polar position on that matter to what I have. Heck, let me be blunt: if you cannot have a strong mutual disagreement (or even rivalry) with someone, but cooperate with him on the unrelated topic if it is mutually beneficial, it means you are a child and your opinion shouldn't be listened to anyway (let's ignore the fact that behaving like a child turns out to be good for your political career today).
As a side-note, pretty much unrelated to the point of that post, I don't see anything wrong with being opposed to same-sex marriage and promoting this opinion. As a matter of fact, I don't see why would anybody be opposed to that, but, hey, that's probably more the reason why somebody who is opposed to that should get a better PR so they could explain me their position. That is what constitutes healthy political climate, which is an opposite of calling a witch-hunt on anybody who has been caught supporting or even having a non-conventional political beliefs (which, ironically, today equals to having so called "conservative" beliefs).
Having said all of that, I actually have no idea if Eich would have been a good CEO. I don't know how much in common this job has to what he has previously done, and if he would be good at it. I don't like the current leadership of Mozilla, but there's no proof that Eich would be any better, I simply have no information that would allow me to say "things would be different if only Eich was the CEO".
> Heck, let me be blunt: if you cannot have a strong mutual disagreement (or even rivalry) with someone, but cooperate with him on the unrelated topic if it is mutually beneficial, it means you are a child and your opinion shouldn't be listened to anyway
As another gay person, this is such a damaging view that cis het people take. My humanity isn't the basis for a "disagreement or rivalry". I don't owe anything to people who don't believe I should have rights. It's not an interesting topic to argue about at the bar, it's my fucking life.
> It's not an interesting topic to argue about at the bar, it's my fucking life.
You see, the problem is that pretty much every political topic is someone's life. It hardly would be worth discussing otherwise. Thinking that the topic that concerns you personally is somehow universally special among the others is despicable arrogance.
Now, I suppose that you are thinking that it is easy for me to say all that stuff about same-sex marriage, because I don't care. And you are kinda right. But let me assure you that there are topics in which I am pretty heavily emotionally invested and have a very strong opinion on (I won't specify what it is to not escalate this even further). And that some people I work with, and even have pretty good friendly relationships with have not only argued against, but outright have hobbies that go directly against to what I think is right. So I'd rather wish some of these hobbies to be banned (or, let's rather say "legally restricted"), and I said that to these people on more than one occasion. We both are fine about that. People cannot agree on everything.
(There is also stuff that is currently banned that I want to be legal. Just to make it more symmetric, so that you don't think it's something about wanting things to be banned that is special.)
> Thinking that the topic that concerns you personally is somehow universally special among the others is despicable arrogance.
You can disagree about political issues if you have an alternative position - if I think we should have a robust social safety net and you think we should eliminate welfare because everyone should work, at least you've articulated an alternate position where people can still survive. You can want to privatize the post office and mail still gets delivered. The issue with arguing about people's human rights is that there is no alternative. You're just saying some class of people should have less than others with no remedy
> You see, the problem is that pretty much every political topic is someone's life. It hardly would be worth discussing otherwise. Thinking that the topic that concerns you personally is somehow universally special among the others is despicable arrogance.
I'm sorry, but no. Fuck. That.
You listen to multiple people describe to you how a certain political stance directly harms them on a fundamental human level and your response is "I don't care, and you're arrogant to think I should care"? No, fuck that.
It's good that we don't work together because I would absolutely have a problem with that attitude.
Perhaps they wouldn’t mind working with you, even though you might have a problem working with them. For what it’s worth, the point made was not “you’re arrogant to care about an issue that’s important to you”, but “you’re arrogant to think that particular issue is more special than other issues, and you likely hold views that are essentially the same from another viewpoint on another issue”.
>and you likely hold views that are essentially the same from another viewpoint on another issue
Such as? I'm pretty sure I don't oppose anyone's fundamental human rights.
Would you say the same thing about racism? I.e., I should be prepared to work with a racist coworker because I myself probably hold equally despicable views on some other topic.
I would actually say the same thing about pretty much any topic, I think, provided that it passes the test of “if I didn’t know anything about what this person does outside of work, would I think this person was a bad coworker?” I can’t speak for you of course ;)
And it’s hard to come up with something specific to you without really knowing much about you, but I’ll try my hand by randomly picking something which I haven’t made up my mind about yet (so ideally I can be more likely to come up with case for either side) and perhaps you might fall on one side and see how either way you’re infringing on some kind of human right: it’s the “right to be forgotten” topic. On one side, if you let people deleting things about them online, it’s a way to censor discussion about them, you could probably abuse this to get everything negative about you removed, and it would generally lead to an erosion of freedom of speech if people could come after you for what you said and force you to delete it. On the other hand, you have a right to privacy, it’s difficult to consent to sharing once something goes online, there’s already been huge problems with doxxing and people being permanently unemployable because of something that ended up on the Internet about them that was no longer relevant or true and they are haunted by it forever.
I think the issue probably affects fewer people than say racism might, but it’s a clear example of how you could take a viewpoint and have entirely reasonable people claim you are infringing in their rights with your opinion.
I don't follow what you are saying about the right to be forgotten, so I'll skip that part.
It seems to me that you are now defending a logically tenable position: that people who say arbitrarily awful things in public ought to be able to keep their jobs regardless of the extent to which their views are deeply offensive to their coworkers and society at large, and inconsistent with the mission of the company. But if that is where you end up, I take that as a reductio.
> people who say arbitrarily awful things in public ought to be able to keep their jobs regardless of the extent to which their views are deeply offensive to their coworkers and society at large, and inconsistent with the mission of the company
I should note that the donations here were meant to be private, I believe, but were found through some transparency law or the other; not an active public endorsement or anything, especially one officially sanctioned by putting Mozilla clout on it. But yes, to be logically consistent, I am saying that I think you should be able to keep your job even if you grab a loudspeaker the moment you step out of work and proclaim that you think we should drown babies (I am even willing to entertain this if you actually drown babies, though I believe this to be a very unpopular view). I as your coworker will certainly have some very strong opinions about your character, some of which will likely leak into my interactions with you as personal bias, but ideally if you are a normal, well-adjusted person while at work I think you should be able to remain employed.
The issue is not just the donations but the subsequent refusal to make any public statement, which for a CEO effectively constitutes a public statement in itself.
The rest of your comment confirms that you are indeed advocating an extremist position, which I don't think it would be productive to discuss further.
I'm very sorry if I'm misinterpreting your first paragraph, but, to be clear- would you agree with the following statement?
"I don't care if you aren't able to marry your partner, as long as it means there's maybe a better web browser."
Because maybe I'm reading too much into it, but that seems to be what's implied. And - if that's the choice you make, well, fine. But it'd be nice to confirm that.
I would say you are not "misinterpreting" but rather "completely missing the point". Let's dissect your statement, "I don't care about {1}, as long as {2}"
As I said in the second paragraph, I don't really see why would anybody be opposed to {1}. So it just so happens that I am pro-by-default, i.e. "pro, because why not", but I might have as well been strongly pro or strongly anti. I very well suspect there is a very good argument for anti-{1}, it's just that I've never heard of it, nor did I do much research on that topic. And if I do, I may end up falling into both strongly pro-{1} or strongly anti-{1} categories.
The point is, that {1} is completely unrelated to {2}, so I can work on {2} together with somebody who has a polar beliefs to those I have on {1}, i.e. in both cases:
- if I am strongly pro-{1} and he is strongly anti-{1}
- if I am strongly anti-{1} and he is strongly pro-{1}
By your own admission, then, you don't know much about this topic. It's frustrating for gay people to have these discussions with people who just don't take homophobia seriously as a problem. Imagine if you had written all of this vague non-commital verbiage about support/opposition for interracial marriage. "I mean, I don't care if a white person and a black person get married, but maybe there is a great argument against it that I just haven't heard because I don't give a fuck."
I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here. But I just want to put it out there that reading this thread as a gay man in 2020 is massively dispiriting. It's clear that only a tiny minority of straight people, even on HN, have any real concern whatever for gay rights.
Okay- that makes more sense, gotcha. So you'd be OK working with somebody on a project, regardless of their actions outside that project?
I don't think I would. For example, if somebody liked to spend their time skinning small animals alive and posting the videos on YouTube, I don't think I'd accept a job at their company. That's just a bit too far for me!
But if it's not for you- well, guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one.
I'd like to start slowly wrapping it up, but, ok, I'll answer this one too.
I won't argue about fairness of comparing {not allowing same-sex marriage} to {skinning small animals alive}, but even in that case your analogy should be about "someone who was arguing back in 2008 for keeping skinning small animals alive legal" while you voted to make it illegal (note, that votes split almost 50/50 back then, BTW, so that's a lot of people you choose to never work with).
And, since you asked, yes, I know for a fact that some people I work with (including both superiors and subordinates) have wildly different political opinions on some topics than I have. With some we never discuss it, with others I'm comfortable enough to argue about that and even laugh them off sometimes. More than that, even some of my friends have strong opinions on which we differ. And with some we may go into mountains, and tie into the same rope (which, if you are not familiar, kinda means "trusting our lives to each other", quite literally), and not hate each other 100% of the time, because of some of our political beliefs don't match.
And if all of that is a problem to you, yeah, I totally can agree to disagree with you, I can even respect that, as long as your disagreement doesn't mean hunting people down, because their opinion doesn't match yours. Now with that I kinda have to disagree.
Do either your superiors or subordinates have disagreements on whether or not you should have human rights?
I have no problem working professionally with somebody who says taxes should be lower, or who argues that renewable energy is a waste of money, or who supports charter schools or school vouchers, or all sorts of conservative ideas. I'd disagree strongly with them, mind you, but...
I guess that's sort of a core part of it, ultimately. These are not dry political questions for me- they have a very real, immediate impact on my day-to-day life.
> And if all of that is a problem to you, yeah, I totally can agree to disagree with you, I can even respect that, as long as your disagreement doesn't mean hunting people down, because their opinion doesn't match yours. Now with that I kinda have to disagree.
I would also agree- although what do you mean "hunting people down?" Presumably not, uh, with bow and arrow. I would not hunt Brendan Eich for sport.
I will, however, criticize people vocally- not for their opinions, but for their actions.
Suppose I sent a letter to Mozilla's board - "I'm a queer person who uses Firefox and who contributes to other Mozilla products. The choice of Brendan Eich, who has contributed to find opposition to my human rights, as CEO makes me feel uncomfortable contributing further to Mozilla as an organization, and because of this I won't be giving my money or time to Mozilla while Eich is in charge of it. I urge you to reconsider your choice of leadership. Sincerely, (me)."
Could you respect me after sending that letter? Is that valid criticism, speaking out? Is that free speech? Or am I just another woke bully?
Let me give an alternate perspective. I'm gay and polyamorous which means I can't get married to my partners. The vast majority of people are currently opposed to changing the definition of marriage to include my chosen family. Should I take the position that I am being deprived of my human rights and thus anyone not on my side is doing me harm?
The problem is, when you frame this in terms of self defence, practically any action is justifiable.
I'm a believer that we need to change hearts and minds to make progress; social change isn't a war that can be won by force.
I don't see that the OP is framing anything in terms of self defence, or advocating for the use of force.
> Should I take the position that I am being deprived of my human rights
I think this reduces to the question of whether or not you think you are being deprived of your human rights. Do you? I think at present there is no generally accepted plan for how polyamorous marriage would work in detail. This is in contrast to gay marriage. At the same time, there is also not much concerted opposition to polyamorous marriage. (E.g., no-one is trying to pass constitutional amendments to rule it out.)
Trying to rally a mob against someone in the hope of getting them fired is _absolutely_ a use of force. It was being justified as an act of self-defence (my words) because the OP felt they were being harmed.
As for poly marriage, yes, there's no attempts to make it even more illegal because it's taboo to the point that nobody brings it up except when conservatives make slippery slope arguments (which gives you an idea of how unpopular it is). Kind of like there was no DOMA in the 1970's; gay marriage was unthinkable.
I don't see how that is a use of force. We must use different dictionaries.
I feel that you're sidestepping the main question about poly marriage. How would it work in detail? Do you support a specific version of it? In fact, do you actually support it at all, in a real non-rhetorical way?
As I mentioned before, Australian law treats married couples and unmarried couples in long-term/serious relationships (de facto couples) mostly identically, including in matters like tax, social security, property division and child custody upon relationship breakdown, deceased estates, etc.
And while Australian law bans polygamy for married couples, it accepts a person can be in multiple concurrent de facto relationships at once [1]. A (rather small) minority of the Australian Muslim community actively practices polygamy; at most the first wife is recognised as a legal marriage (sometimes even the first marriage is not legally recognised – you can religiously marry without legally marrying, by choosing not to register the religious marriage with the government) – but second and subsequent wives are legally recognised as de facto relationships, and hence have the vast majority (if not all) of the legal rights that they'd have if they were legally married.
It also sometimes happens that a wealthy businessman dies leaving behind a wife and one or more mistresses, and the mistresses then claim in court that they were his de factos, and hence are each entitled to a portion of his estate [2].
This all has the potential to make various legal proceedings more complex than they would have been in the monogamous/monoamorous case. But the complexity is something that Australia's courts and government agencies are already dealing with. I don't think allowing polygamous/polyamorous relationships to have the legal status of "marriage", as opposed to de facto, would actually make any great difference in practice.
It may not. I am not opposed to the legalisation of poly marriage, but I'm struck by the fact that no-one who claims to support it ever points to detailed proposals. There are rather obviously many different ways it would work.
Well, here is my proposal for how polygamous marriage should work in Australia:
1) Multiple concurrent legal marriages should be treated in exactly the same way that Australian law currently treats multiple concurrent de facto relationships
2) If you are married under Australian law (and that marriage is legally undissolved), you will be able to concurrently validly marry a subsequent person, provided that (a) you have the written consent of all the people to whom you already have undissolved marriages (b) the person you are marrying has seen those written consents and acknowledges in writing having seen them
3) Foreign polygamous legal marriages will be legally recognised as marriages in Australia (provided they meet all the other legal requirements, like consent, not being incestuous, minimum age requirements, etc); however, if the foreign legal system does not impose consent to polygamy requirements equivalent to (2) above, and an existing spouse did not consent (or a new spouse was unaware of the polygamous nature of the marriage), then they will have the right to void the marriage. (This would represent a reintroduction into the Australian legal system of the concept of a "voidable marriage" – that concept used to exist in Australian law until 1975; it was inherited from English law, and still exists in English law until this day.)
Is there any problem with the above proposal? What is it missing? I think most of the meat is actually in (1); the only non-obvious element in (2) is requiring informed consent from both the existing spouse(s) and the new spouse for a polygamous marriage. Multiple concurrent de facto relationships don't require such informed consent – a man with a legal wife can have a concurrent de facto girlfriend, and keep the wife and the girlfriend secret from each other – that's morally quite reprehensible, but doesn't make the de facto relationship legally any less a valid de facto relationship. I think morally, legally recognised polygamy shouldn't be possible without informed consent of everyone involved; and politically, it would be impossible to legalise it without giving such a guarantee.
The complexity in (3) is how to deal with the fact that some foreign legal systems allow polygamy without knowledge and/or consent – for example, some Islamic countries allow a man to take a second wife without his first wife's permission. I think the best solution, is if a person did not consent to a foreign polygamous marriage, they have the right to annul it under Australian law (but, if they are happy/accepting of it, they don't have to use that right, and it can remain valid.) I wouldn’t make it automatically invalid, because there may be cases where everyone involved knew about and consented to the polygamy, even if that consent wasn’t legally required under that foreign country’s laws, but the lack of a formal requirement for consent means there are no written records to prove it exists even when it actually does
Yes, I do support it. I don't see the issue of changing the definition and legal framework to include multiple partners, which may be added or divorced over time.
I obviously can't summarize the all changes to family law and I'm not a lawyer, but here are a few ideas:
- When 2 or more people get married, a new legal entity of the marriage is created. It has members, property and an estate. It pays taxes
- Divorce is from the perspective of a person leaving the marriage and leaves with 1/n of the marital property
- Reform child legitimacy laws (legitimacy doesn't matter, the state advocates for the well-being of the child)
- Rights normally reserved for a spouse are extended to all spouses (such as hospital visitation)
- Mandate that policies that extend to a spouse (such as life insurance) get changed to cover all spouses
And a bunch more stuff I'm sure I haven't thought about. Here's the thing though; I know I'm so incredibly unlikely to see it happen in my lifetime that it feels like a waste of time to get into the details of changing the law. Instead I spend my time on is making my relationships work and giving support to others about how to have happy and healthy non-monogamous relationships.
Right, what I'm asking for is an existing proposal with broad support in the poly community that could plausibly be implemented given public support. If no such thing exists, then I don't think you can really claim just now that anyone's fundamental rights are being violated. You have to at least be clear about what you are asking for. If the poly community can put forward a concrete proposal and get some kind of a consensus behind it then great - you have my support.
Well, yeah, kinda? Otherwise what are we supposed to do to fix it? Indeed, it took the gay rights movement some time to converge on gay marriage as a goal. (Although they don't see it this way, gay marriage is actually a huge policy win for social conservatives! The traditional nuclear family survives with a minor modification.)
I'm not saying all this just to be difficult. There are genuinely so many ways poly relationships could be legally recognized. For example, would merely removing the prohibition on bigamy be sufficient? Or do we need group marriages rather than some combination of pairwise marriages between members of the group? How does divorce work? If A, B, C and D are in a poly marriage and A and B want to remove C, but D doesn't, how is that resolved?
I'm not in any way saying that there could not be answers to these questions, or that no-one has yet suggested answers. I just expect any serious advocacy for poly marriage to demonstrate a consensus across a wide range of the community on what the correct answers are. In the case of gay marriage this was much easier to achieve. Once gay rights advocates agreed on gay marriage as a goal, it was almost immediately clear how gay marriage would work. This simply isn't the case for poly marriage.
Given polygamous marriages have existed for thousands of years, and remain legally recognised in over 50 countries today – mostly Muslim majority states, although some countries without a Muslim majority legally recognise it for their Muslim minority only, e.g. India and Singapore, and some African countries, e.g. South Africa, allow it for people of any religion (although South Africa limits it only to members of indigenous ethnic groups which have a cultural tradition of polygamy) – I don't see what's so hard about legalising polygamy in Western countries. This is not some radical new idea, it is something very common in human history, and even legally allowed in roughly a quarter of the countries in the world today.
Western countries would want to make the institution non-discriminatory, which would mean: (1) allow women to have multiple husbands, as well as allowing men to have multiple wives; (2) allow same-sex polygamy, so a woman could have multiple wives or a man multiple husbands; (3) require knowledge and consent, so a person cannot marry a new spouse without consent of their existing spouse(s), and the new spouse must be aware of those existing spouse(s); (4) open to people of all religions and none, instead of being for Muslims only, or being for members of certain ethnic groups only
(3) actually already exists in some countries – for example, Singapore requires consent of existing spouse to contract a valid polygamous marriage – so that element isn't new. (Although some other countries allow a husband to take a second wife without the first wife's consent.)
(4) isn't historically novel either – although in recent times, Islam has been the only major religion to commonly allow polygamy, it has been widespread in human history and has never been unique to Islam. Indeed, polygamy for non-Muslims is legal in a number of African countries, for example South Africa – former South African President Jacob Zuma legally has four wives, and he isn't Muslim, he follows Pentecostal Christianity
Nor is (1) historically novel – a number of traditional cultures have polyandry, although in the contemporary world no country legally recognises it. (Well, apparently, polyandry is theoretically legal in Gabon, but unknown in practice.)
The only element of the above that's truly historically novel is (2), allowing same-sex polygamy. But, I don't see how that historical novelty is an issue. There's nothing special about same-sex polygamy which makes it somehow more complex than opposite-sex polygamy is.
> For example, would merely removing the prohibition on bigamy be sufficient? Or do we need group marriages rather than some combination of pairwise marriages between members of the group?
Compared to multiple concurrent two-person marriages, group marriage is historically very rare, and isn't legally recognised in any country today. Given that, I think it would be most logical to start with pairwise marriage only. If people really want group marriage, they can campaign for that separately. Given a group marriage can be simulated by a collection of pairwise marriages between the group members, does the lack of group marriage – in a society which allows polygamous pairwise marriage – really pose any issue?
> Once gay rights advocates agreed on gay marriage as a goal, it was almost immediately clear how gay marriage would work. This simply isn't the case for poly marriage.
That really isn't true. Given over 50 countries worldwide already have poly marriage, we can just do what they do, minus the discriminatory parts, none of which are essential to the concept.
You’re taking an uncharitable interpretation of the comments you’re responding to, and I suspect that this might be part of the reason why the author of those bowed out of the conversation. And because of this, I think you haven’t really done your position justice at all, because you think they’re attacking your freedom of speech but really their argument is not that.
I think perhaps it might make a bit more sense if you replace “marriage rights” with something such as “right to life”, which might be easier to relate to. And to make it more even, let us replace Brendan Eich with one of those two-faced comic book serial killers who is a functioning successful part of society in the workplace but outside of it likes killing people. Nobody in particular, just people in general.
Now the question posed is, if you had no idea if they were a serial killer, would you work with them? The answer to that is “of course”: you know no reason not to. However, this issue is slightly different, because by some means it has been revealed that he is in fact a serial killer, but somehow this isn’t strictly illegal or anything so he’s coming in to work anyways. At work he’s great but once you leave work you are concerned (in general, not because he’s going to target you in particular) that he may be waiting in your bedroom to kill you.
Now we have a curious question of what we should do with this person. From a logical perspective, which is the one made in the comments you’re responding to, nothing should be done: removing him from his position doesn’t stop him from killing people, and if we do fire him we lose out on him entirely. I hope you can understand why someone might hold that position. And from that perspective, I think that they would likely respond to your letter with “you have every right to voice your criticisms, but I think you are being irrational because I cannot see how your letter asking Brendan Eich to be removed from his position helps your case because he can still privately donate all he wants regardless” (unless you in fact believe that he should not be able to hold employment at all and thus be unable to donate money because he is penniless.)
On your side, I think the argument is now fairly obvious: in the situation I described, I know very many people who would be hesitant to work with such an individual. We’re human, we associate qualities of a person and color all their actions through that lens. While you say you would be happy working with people of the opinions you mentioned that supposedly don’t directly affect you, I would strongly suspect it would affect how you thought of them at least subconsciously. Really, I think the opposition you have against working with someone who does not support LGBT rights is just this except amplified to the point where you can no longer try to correct your biases for that person because of it affecting you personally. And I think there is probably a very real negative effect of people working with others who privately hold views they don’t agree with, because that subconscious tension is always there even though if you look at it “rationally” it should have nothing to do with your work. And really, in many cases we seem to consider it OK to get rid of people who make everyone around them feel or perform worse.
Now, is that a valid reason to terminate someone? That’s exactly the argument here. Personally I tend to lean more towards “no” than most people would, I think. I am fortunate enough to not have anyone try to restrict my freedom of marriage or association to my knowledge, but I have worked with people who have never personally done anything to me but I have found out (usually after the fact, to be honest) that they hold fairly string views that I not only disagree with but I could consider attacking a category I might fit into (“people who defend freedom of speech of the alt-right should be punched”, “brown people are all H1Bs that take our jobs and we should send them back to their own country”). Notably, it was never an issue that I think I could measure impacting our working relationship, in many cases which I think I could prove for a fact because I didn’t know they held such views and they weren’t aware that I fit into the categories that they were talking about. And quite often I think we actually even did pretty well when we both were aware of this because it would just not come up in a working relationship. Would I work with them again? I think I would. I’ve come to realize that I personally have to separate people from their private (or private until solicited) opinions, because more often than not when I think I meet someone who shares my views on human rights they actually don’t and I’m just completely unaware. So for my own sanity I just have to separate them.
> For example, if somebody liked to spend their time skinning small animals alive and posting the videos on YouTube, I don't think I'd accept a job at their company. That's just a bit too far for me!
Skinning animals alive for fun is a criminal offence in many jurisdictions (animal cruelty), and recognised as a symptom of mental illness (it is in the DSM-5 criteria for conduct disorder, and maybe other disorders too).
By contrast, donating to a mainstream political campaign is not a crime, and is not recognised as a symptom of mental illness
So I think the analogy you are trying to make here is a poor one
> I don't see anything wrong with being opposed to same-sex marriage
Assuming you're not opposed to the idea of marriage altogether, try to imagine different-sex marriages being illegal. Do you see now? (Just trying to help.)
No, I don't. If marriage would be a millenia-old tradition of status of same-sex pairs, that propagated into the legal system, and in the year 2020 there would be a petition to make the same status apply to different-sex pairs, and I would be a vocal proponent of that petition, I would still not see what's wrong with being opposed to that petition. That's his opinion, he has all the rights to defend it. And I would still despise anybody who has trouble understanding how active rivalry on one topic may co-exist with active cooperation on some other topic.
Your argument that we must make the effort to tolerate opposing views in order to cooperate on other issues isn't helped by stating as a side-note that this requires no effort for you personally because you're not actually opposed to that view.
Anyway, back on the political question, on one side you have real people being affected and on the other you have vague and abstract claims of tradition. This sure makes it feel wrong to those people affected.
Edit: Perhaps the real problem is with the framing of the question. Some people just want the right to a legally recognized partnership. Some people see marriage as having religious implications. In any case it's a complicated issue that we're not going to solve here.
> Assuming you're not opposed to the idea of marriage altogether,
I tend to think that the state shouldn't be in the business of marriage at all. If private clubs / religions want to recognise a special ceremony between whatever groupings make sense for their club (someone suggested polyamorous families above) then they should go ahead.
The state should have nothing to do with it, not recognising relationships that have had such a ceremony as different to relationships without. Now I know that is not currently the case, but I'd be more in favour of removing state recognition of any marriage than changing who the state lets get married.
Places where it is genuinely useful to make the distinction should be replaced with thought-out duck-typing rather than nominative typing - if you've been living with someone as a partner for a certain amount of time, or are clearly trying to bring up children together then you should get the presumptive 'next of kin' status that the law finds helpful regardless of your ceremonial status. Or perhaps people should just have the right to add others to 'next of kin' status at will.
People have all sorts of private opinions. I hate the DMCA and think it represents an extremely dangerous precedent that completely misrepresents why laws like copyright were created in the first place. The idea is almost more dangerous than the implementation. That said, I think I would be ok with the Mozilla CEO donating to the DMCA as long as he did not take action on that opinion at work. I would be cynical and watching the corporate behaviour like a hawk. I would give little benefit of the doubt in assuming the worst of any official behaviour, policy, or stance that seemed inappropriate. I would be unsympathetic about any consequences that resulted from inappropriately projecting personal values into corporate action. I cannot say that I agree that it is appropriate to take corporate action against somebody for the opinions they hold as a private citizen.
A pharmacist needs to provide birth control even if they personally object to it for religious reasons—-because it is the law. If they don’t, there should be consequences ( perhaps losing their license ). However, it does not follow for me that they should be penalized for stating their opinion privately, at a rally, via donation, or even in the local paper. He has the right to stop his own daughter but not to stop mine. What he does with his family is not a good reason for me to go after his business. Now, I might not support his business. That is my personal decision. I might even suggest that others don’t support him either. I sure hope that this would not lead me to lose my job though. That would not seem at all fair to me. In fact, I would consider shutting down my freedom of speech and action like that to be quite unethical.
"I cannot say that I agree that it is appropriate to take corporate action against somebody for the opinions they hold as a private citizen."
This is definitely valid! I thiiink I'd still disagree- in a public-facing leadership role, it's just not that easy to separate personal actions from business-related ones- but it's definitely a view I have some sympathy for. I do get where you're coming from.
That said- Eich resigned. He wasn't fired. And so far I've seen no real evidence that this wasn't just his decision- that he realized he wasn't the best candidate for CEO because of his past actions. Perhaps he really was just pushed out... If you have anything backing that up, I'd like to see it.
Because from what I've read- and that's not too much, so if there's any info I'm missing please fill me in- if I say "I don't like the CEO, I won't donate anymore while he's in charge, and you shouldn't either"...am I in the wrong?
The only reason I can find that he gave was "I resigned because I could not be an effective leader under the circumstances"; I don't know what unrelated reasons you think he gave, although if you want to share a link, that'd be great. Mozilla's own blog post about his resignation was "Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard, and this past week, we didn't live up to it." It's super hard not to read all that as him being asked to resign, and CNET's rather long autopsy article on it says that the board wanted to offer him another position but he chose to quit everything. (That article also says that there was a lot of doubt about whether he'd make a good CEO for reasons entirely unrelated to this; he was known for, as a Mozilla Foundation director put it, having an "inability to connect and empathize with people.")
The Board didn't defend him publicly. I think, when a Board fails to publicly support their choice of CEO in face of a controversy, for a CEO that's basically a form of constructive dismissal.
Yes, exactly. That’s what I was trying to get across by quoting Baker not defending him, and what “asked to resign” means. I generally don’t complain about HN downvotes, but it’s more puzzling to me than usual — do people think I was saying Eich wasn’t fired? [shrug emoji]
So, here in Australia we had a plebiscite on legalising same-sex marriage, and I voted in favour of it. If I were a Californian, I would have voted against Prop 8.
You say the only reason your partner could immigrate is due to being allowed to marry, but it is actually also due to US immigration laws not recognising civil partnerships or de facto relationships. If they did, your partner could have immigrated even if you weren’t allowed to marry. I don’t know what Eich’s views on immigration laws are (or were), but for all we know he might support such a change to US immigration laws. I think it is very likely that some people who voted for Prop 8 would have supported such a change (I can’t say whether that “some” would have been few or many.) Personally, I think immigration laws should be marriage-neutral, and treat married and unmarried relationships the same.
I think it is an important cultural norm that employees be allowed to engage in small-scale, mainstream, private political activity outside of work without getting in trouble at work for doing so. We need this norm to apply at CEO level as well, because the norm at the top flows downhill to the rest of the company. (“Mainstream” means it doesn’t apply to fringe groups like neo-Nazis; “small-scale” means it no longer applies if employee wants to run for public office, lead an activist group, etc)
(There is possibly an exception for CEOs supporting policies which directly contradict the core business interests of the company; I don’t think marriage laws relate to the core business interests of a browser vendor; DMCA laws are possibly somewhat closer to those core business interests, but even then probably not close enough - if Mozilla’s product was a content platform in its own right, as opposed to being a tool used to access other people’s content platforms, then DMCA would have been directly relevant to their core business.)
I think the biggest blame here lies, not with people who called for Eich’s sacking, but with the failure of the Board to publicly come to his defence. A CEO can weather any amount of public criticism so long as the Board still publicly supports them.
If Eich had explained himself, maybe even said, hey, I have these views about the definition of "marriage" as a word and as an institution, but I support treating civil partnerships as equivalent to man/woman "marriage"- I don't think I'd have as much of an issue with him being CEO.
Or, heck, for all I know the donation was a complete accident. Maybe he just slipped and his checkbook fell out of his pocket onto a pen in juuust such a way that it signed a check to that organization. Somebody could have even stolen his identity to make the donation!
But when he refused to explain that donation, it's a lot harder to assume good faith, that he totally supports my rights but just has a problem with calling it "marriage", or that it was just a tragic checkbook-related trip-and-fall accident. Maybe he made public statements explaining his views that I haven't seen- links appreciated.
I myself wish he’d explained his views in more detail. However, I am not sure if his doing so would have helped much. Whatever he said, some people likely would have tried to twist his words in to making them sound as unreasonable as possible, and it would not surprise me if his PR team were advising him that explaining and defending his views in detail would only add fuel to the fire. Also, if one views it in terms of the principle that employees (CEOs included) should be allowed to privately express their political views by donation, then demanding a public explanation is undermining that principle and turning private views into public ones. It is possible that respect for that principle is one of the reasons behind Eich’s refusal to publicly elaborate his views on the issue.
It's very different to defend one's beliefs vs. one's right to their beliefs. As Voltaire's biographer said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
I do, particularly when expressed politely, and then I disagree politely. If they can express their beliefs, and I can express mine, then we can try to communicate the truth. But any widespread belief that gets suppressed will fester and spread underground.
And again, I am not defending the belief itself, but the expression thereof.
Maybe we're reading different comments, but I don't see his beliefs being defended as much as his right to have those beliefs. Can you tell the difference? If you can, don't play cancel culture and put words in other people's mouths. If you can't, slow down and think about it. You don't win White Knight points for demanding that positions be polarized and pretending that such childishness is a reasoned defense.
Every political position hurts someone. (Heck, the mainstream leftist view is that you have to vote to make it easier to kill babies, and if you don't then you must be an evil person who hates women). If you vote against tax breaks for oil drillers, you're voting to hurt oil drillers. I don't think that's a productive way to frame political disagreement (and I say that as someone who lost most of my life's savings due to a shift in the law).
No doubt there are thousands of people from your partner's country who would like US citizenship and can't get it. You're demanding a special privilege for your partner and then talking as though it were a natural right. (My country doesn't give citizenship for any kind of marriage, FWIW).
> You're arguing in very bad faith here. That's a huge misrepresentation of what pro-choice advocates want.
It's the same kind of misrepresentation as saying Eich spent $1000 to hurt people like the poster. That's my point. No-one in these debates is actually setting out to hurt other people, yet from the other side that's how it's experienced.
How is it a misrepresentation to say that donating to the cause of opposing gay rights harms gay people? There’s a direct cause and effect, linked by exactly that issue - the Prop 8 supporters weren’t even trying to hide it, either. They very explicitly wanted to take a right away from other people, even though they suffered no plausible harm from those people exercising that right.
There's a thing called ethical beliefs and people tend to feel quite strongly about them, even though they're not consistent or reasonable in many cases. Like most of the people in my country are pro gay marriage, however most of them are also against marriages of more than two partners or between close relatives. None of those type of marriages harms anyone else, and yet people don't support it, just because it feels wrong to them or because they want to draw the line at one point to not make marriage arbitrary.
I'm also pretty sure that you draw the line somewhere and I'd be surprised if you were fine with siblings being allowed to marry each other, even when they're deeply in love, they take care of each other like other couples and them being together doesn't harm you or anyone else the slightest.
Edit: My take on this is: Even though I'm married myself, I don't think marriage should be part of the legal system or the concern of the state. If the state wants to support people who take care of each other, it should state specific requirements and everyone who fulfils them gets the benefits, no matter who they are. And if people want to get married they can do that as part of a private ceremony, provided by the church or whatever, and if they can't live without the consequences of being married today, they can sign a private contract to their liking. No reason to involve the state in this private matter.
> Even though I'm married myself, I don't think marriage should be part of the legal system or the concern of the state.
This is a valid position but the Prop 8 people showed no sign of believing it. They were, reserving marriage for themselves, not working to change the laws first, and this was very directly stated both in the language of the proposition and their advocacy for it.
Remember, gay marriage was legal at the time. They could have de-privileged marriage as a legal construct with no unfair impact but put no effort whatsoever into that. It was entirely focused on removing access to those benefits from gay people.
I lived in a relatively conservative part of California at the time, was canvassed a bit, a fair chunk of my family are Orange County Republicans, etc. The language was uniformly an argument on religious principles, and if you suggested reforming the laws which privilege marriage they were profoundly uninterested in those options.
>No reason to involve the state in this private matter.
You won't be singing the same tune when they take away the tax breaks, your right to visit your partner in hospital, your right to live in the same country as your partner should you be of different nationalities, etc. etc.
I'm so sick of straight people who essentially say "well if gay people can get married then I guess marriage shouldn't be a real thing any more". In 100% of cases these people turn out not to have even minimally thought through the implications of this. But maybe suddenly stripping straight people of their right to get married would be the only effective way to stop the endless stream of heartless and hurtful comments on threads like this.
> You won't be singing the same tune when they take away the tax breaks, your right to visit your partner in hospital, your right to live in the same country as your partner should you be of different nationalities, etc. etc.
I don't see how any of that should depend on people being married? All but one of those things are already possible where I come from without being married, and the last example could be easily fixed.
> I'm so sick of straight people who essentially say "well if gay people can get married then I guess marriage shouldn't be a real thing any more". In 100% of cases these people turn out not to have even minimally thought through the implications of this.
If have thought this through pretty thoroughly. So before we continue, answer the one simple question: where do you draw the lines, that exclude certain types of partnerships from getting married? If you draw it then you're doing the same thing opponents of gay-marriage do, and if you don't draw it marriage becomes a stupid concept within the legal system.
> But maybe suddenly stripping straight people of their right to get married would be the only effective way to stop the endless stream of heartless and hurtful comments on threads like this.
That is exactly what I was saying: Get rid of marriage as a concept within the legal system of a state.
The funny thing is that people who want to get rid of marriage as a legal concept seem to pipe up almost exclusively in discussions about gay marriage.
Why do you think this idea is relevant here? It's only relevant if you want to argue that gay marriages shouldn't be legally recognized because no marriages should be legally recognized.
You mention that you're married yourself. If you really wanted the state not to be involved, you could just have conducted a non-legally-recognized marriage ceremony. So why didn't you? My guess is that you (a) didn't actually feel strongly about this issue at all and (b) wanted the many benefits conferred by a legally-recognized marriage. As to (b), gay people want these benefits too.
> The funny thing is that people who want to get rid of marriage as a legal concept seem to pipe up almost exclusively in discussions about gay marriage.
If Eich had donated money towards an organization that opposes marriages of more than two people, so this discussion had been about those types of relationships instead, I would have brought forward the same arguments. But I have the feeling that Eich wouldn't had lost its job in that case in the first place.
> Why do you think this idea is relevant here? It's only relevant if you want to argue that gay marriages shouldn't be legally recognized because no marriages should be legally recognized
No my take is: Either make all relationships legal (of course as long as none of the participants are exploited), if you insist on keeping marriages as a legal concept. Or, preferably, get rid of marriages altogether from the states point of view, since this is much more efficient and practical.
It seems to me you are just introducing lots of distractions and hypotheticals to avoid saying anything specific about gay marriage. I'm married to another man. Do you think my marriage should be legally recognized or not?
Like I said, I'm fine with any partnership being able to enter a legally recognized marriage, if its 7 men, two siblings, man and woman, three man and three women, ... if the state provides marriage within its legal system. So yes, if a man and woman can get a legally recognized marriage in your country then your marriage should be legalized as well. But I'd much rather prefer it for the state not to have such a stupid system in the first place, so marriage becomes a purely private matter.
I think you're saying that you're ok with gay marriage if gay marriage is legal, which kind of doges the main question of whether or not it should be legal.
I'd find your opposition to the legal recognition of any marriages more credible if you divorced your wife in solidarity :)
> I think you're saying that you're ok with gay marriage if gay marriage is legal, which kind of doges the main question of whether or not it should be legal.
No, again: If opposite-sex marriage is legal, then I think any other type of partnership should be allowed to become married as well, whether its same-sex with two men, 20 women, a whole family, ...
> I'd find your opposition to the legal recognition of any marriages more credible if you divorced your wife in solidarity :)
Why do you assume I'm married to a woman? I'm married because we get the most benefits out of it and my partner is kind of sentimental and has a different opinion about that topic, so I'm doing them a favor as well.
Like with every other human being, my views and actions aren't always consistent. For example I also don't like child labour, but here I am typing this on a machine that likely made quite a few children suffer.
I assume you're married to a woman (or a man, if you're a woman) because you responded negatively to a comment that said voting for prop 8 wasn't an action that was harmful to gay people. If you are in fact in a same sex relationship, then shame on you.
> I assume you're married to a woman (or a man, if you're a woman) because you responded negatively to a comment that said voting for prop 8 wasn't an action that was harmful to gay people.
I didn't respond negatively to that comment. I provided an explanation, that those people who object to the idea of gay marriage do the same thing as almost everyone else, even many who are in favor of gay marriage: They have a certain image or ideal in their head, of how a marriage has to look like, and everything that doesn't fit that image feels wrong to them and shouldn't be legal. Hence almost everyone wants to exclude certain types of relationships from getting married.
I explicitly focused on that argument:
> They very explicitly wanted to take a right away from other people, even though they suffered no plausible harm from those people exercising that right.
from the comment, which IMHO is a misleading argument, since I don't believe that many gay marriage supporters take it seriously. So you should finally answer my question, so I know where you stand: Do you believe that that argument is valid, i.e. are you also fine with a mother (50) marrying her son (30) or 12 people getting married? According to that argument it should be legal as well, since they don't harm anyone, but I have a strong feeling that even most gay marriage proponents wouldn't support such a type of marriage. So they're line would just be somewhere else.
Oh man, it's 2020, a gay marriage thread...do we still have to talk about incest, polygamous marriage, owners marrying their dogs, and what ever other red herrings your imagination can supply? We can, if you really want to, but that line of argument has been debunked so many times that I'd have to question the sincerity of anyone who brings it up nowadays.
The paper already starts of with multiple premises that don't apply to any of my arguments.
1. I never put forward an argument against gay marriage, yet the paper is all about debunking arguments against gay marriage.
2. I don't consider it a bad effect if other types relationships were allowed to get married, it's the opposite, I'd consider it a huge improvement to what we have right now. Yet the paper assumes someone said: "If we allow gay marriage, we will also have to allow [policy X], which would unquestionably be bad."
Hence I must assume, that you either didn't read or understand anything I wrote, or you didn't read the paper.
Your argument was that everyone believes that marriage should be restricted in some ways, so that believing it should be restricted to opposite sex couples is no worse than believing it should be restricted in any other way. If you read it, the paper addresses that kind of slippery slope argument. It explains that it is not at all difficult to find good reasons for expanding marriage to include same sex couples without expanding it in every other conceivable way. Hence, there is no prima facie case to be made that every other still-existing restriction is a violation of anyone's rights.
> Your argument was that everyone believes that marriage should be restricted in some ways, so that believing it should be restricted to opposite sex couples is no worse than believing it should be restricted in any other way.
No, my point is that if someone brings forward the argument that same-sex marriage is fine because it doesn't harm anyone, but they then oppose other types of marriages that don't harm anyone, they obviously don't take their own argument seriously. Hence they shouldn't be surprised if others don't take it seriously as well, but they actually criticize them for doing so.
> It explains that it is not at all difficult to find good reasons for expanding marriage to include same sex couples without expanding it in every other conceivable way.
Which is completely irrelevant to this discussion, because the reason that was brought forward for expanding marriage was "it's fine if it does no harm to anyone", not some other reasons which prevent a slippery slope.
You're basically saying, that if the other user had brought up a better argument, my critique wouldn't apply.
Edit: But just out of curiosity, what argument would logically allow a same-sex marriage of men or women, who aren't closely related to each other, but exclude two brothers or sisters from marrying each other?
What the OP actually said is the following: "They [prop 8 supporters] very explicitly wanted to take a right away from other people, even though they suffered no plausible harm from those people exercising that right."
This isn't presented as an argument for the legality of gay marriage; rather, it already presupposes that gay couples have the legal right to get married (as indeed they did in California before proposition 8 passed). It's uncharitable and implausible to assume that the OP would be able to present no argument for the legalisation of gay marriage other than "it wouldn't harm anyone". It certainly doesn't advance the discussion to attribute to them a weak argument that they didn't even make.
>But just out of curiosity, what argument would logically allow a same-sex marriage of men or women, who aren't closely related to each other, but exclude two brothers or sisters from marrying each other?
What argument would logically allow an opposite sex marriage of a man and a woman who aren't clearly related to each other but exclude brothers or sisters from marrying each other? Unless you think that there's some kind of analogy between same sex relationships and incest, then same sex marriage is totally irrelevant here. Can't think of a reason to ban incestuous marriages? Then the slippery slope starts from opposite sex marriage, not from same sex marriage.
> What argument would logically allow an opposite sex marriage of a man and a woman who aren't clearly related to each other but exclude brothers or sisters from marrying each other?
I can't think of one, which is why I never claimed there are good reasons to not allow such type of marriages, unlike you. I said multiple times that I'm completely fine with all types of marriages and relationships that don't exploit or harm people.
> Can't think of a reason to ban incestuous marriages? Then the slippery slope starts from opposite sex marriage, not from same sex marriage.
Yes, which is why I'd allow such type marriages. You however claimed there are good reasons that the slippery slope either stops after same-sex marriage or doesn't even start in the first place. So would you just answer my question and give me one of those good reasons, why for example sibling marriages are bad and normal same sex marriages are fine?
As far as I can tell, you want to make some kind of false equivalence between gay people who are opposed to incestuous marriages and straight people who are opposed to gay marriage.
I hesitate to engage because anyone who does this is unlikely to be interested in having a serious discussion. But here's a point you might have missed. Over the past hundred years or so, there has been a huge shift in the perception of the rigidity of gender roles. The expansion of the legal definition of marriage to include same gender couples is a logical continuation of this trend. If men and women are fundamentally equal, it's hard to justify gender restrictions on marriage. In contrast, attitudes to incest have not shifted much at all. Indeed, if anything, cousin marriages are less socially acceptable than they were previously. Why is this? I think the answer is obvious. People have seen many examples of normal, successful, non-abusive long term gay relationships. But they have not seen similar evidence in the case of incestuous relationships.
This being said, I think you'll find that most people don't actually care very much whether incestuous marriages are legal. And indeed, around the world, the extent to which incest is legally prohibited varies greatly. Do you even have any evidence that most supporters of gay marriage are opposed to the legalisation of incestuous marriages (in jurisdictions where they are not already legal)? Or indeed, can you point to any concrete evidence of gay rights advocates campaigning to impose additional restrictions on incestuous relationships?
> You won't be singing the same tune when they take away the tax breaks, your right to visit your partner in hospital, your right to live in the same country as your partner should you be of different nationalities, etc. etc.
Here in Australia, the government has decided that unmarried couples in long-term marriage-like relationships (with characteristics like intentions of permanence, sharing of finances and mutual financial support, living together, raising children together, etc) should be treated equivalently to married couples, and receive the same rights and entitlements as married couples do – those long-term marriage-like unmarried relationships are called de facto relationships. This has been enshrined in law, and is now mostly true (modulo some obscure legal technicalities, and the fact that some government agencies at times fail to adhere to the spirit or even letter of the law – although to my knowledge immigration is the main and maybe even only offender). So, in Australia, there are no special tax breaks for being married – unmarried people in de facto relationships can claim the same tax breaks. Family law courts, etc, treat long-term de facto couples as if they were married for issues like property settlements and child custody. This gave a somewhat different character to the same-sex marriage debate in Australia – unmarried couples, both opposite-sex and same-sex, already had pretty much the same rights as opposite-sex married couples, and extending the right of marriage was primarily a symbolic statement of equality rather than a change in people's real world rights and entitlements.
I think other countries, including the US, should do the same thing as Australia has – extend long-term/serious unmarried couples the same legal rights and entitlements as married couples.
And once you've done that, there really is no obstacle to abolishing marriage as a secular legal institution. People who want to participate in it, either as a cultural institution or as a religious institution (or both) are free to do so, but there really is no compelling reason for the government to get involved.
Yeah, if you actually do your research, you will find that not everything works this way. So e.g. it is almost always much easier to get visas for married partners than for unmarried partners. And in general, marriage is strong objective evidence of a real relationship. Without the certificate, you're at the mercy of a homophobic government official's judgment call about whether your relationship counts.
This impractical pie in the sky stuff about abolishing marriage as a legal institution is almost always just a lame excuse for opposing same sex marriage. I'm not sure why you're bringing it up or why you think it's relevant to Brendan Eich.
> Yeah, if you actually do your research, you will find that not everything works this way. So e.g. it is almost always much easier to get visas for married partners than for unmarried partners.
I already said that, for the case of immigration/visas, it wasn't working that way in Australia; but, that is the only case in Australia in which I know about. But, that's a problem with the Australian immigration system that could be fixed with sufficient political will; it isn't a problem with the principle that serious/long-term unmarried couples should have the exact same rights as married couples, it is just a correctable failure to fully and correctly implement that principle in practice.
For many years I was in an opposite-sex living-together relationship, including having a child together, without being married. (We did eventually get married.) I know people in my extended family who have lived together (in opposite-sex relationships) for 30 years, had kids, never got married, never experienced themselves as being disadvantaged in any way compared to legally married couples. So my lived experience in Australia tells me that unmarried couples rarely or never experience any discrimination on the basis of their marital status, outside of the immigration system. (And maybe some religious institutions, but that has nothing to do with the government or legal system.)
> People usually used this impractical pie in the sky stuff about abolishing marriage as a legal institution as a lame excuse for opposing same sex marriage
When did I say I oppose same-sex marriage? I support same-sex marriage, but I also support abolishing marriage. The two positions are not mutually exclusive – so long as the state is in the business of recognising marriage, it should treat same-sex and opposite-sex couples equally – but, it should get out of that business altogether.
> I'm not sure why you're bringing it up
I didn't bring it up; someone else did. But since it has become part of the conversation, why shouldn't I share my view on it?
Marriage also isn't technically required to get a visa for your partner in the UK, but it makes it vastly easier in practice, and is a barrier to capricious discrimination against gay couples by immigration officials.
The idea of removing marriage as a legal institution and "fixing" 101 other rules that used to depend on marriage is, as I said, pie in the sky stuff. This silly idea is great cover for homophobes. It's harmless to discuss it in the abstract, but not so much in the context of the question of whether gay people should have fundamental rights.
If the law says that married and unmarried couples are to be treated equally (including in immigration/visa matters), and if that law is enforced, then immigration officials will treat married and unmarried couples equally.
If immigration officials are not treating married and unmarried couples equally, that's a problem with either the law or its enforcement in practice – both of which are fixable with sufficient political will – not a problem with the principle that married and unmarried couples ought to receive identical treatment.
If the principle of equal treatment were legislated, and if that legislation were consistently enforced, what then would be the problem with abolishing state recognition of marriage (for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples equally)? I can't see how there could be any.
> You "support" gay marriage in rather a quiet and ineffective way, I'd say.
In 2017, Australia had a national postal plebiscite on the question "Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?". (Technically called the "Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey", since by calling it a "survey" the government was able to carry it out without the permission of Parliament.) I voted "Yes". I told my friends and family I was voting "Yes". I even posted a photo of my "Yes" ballot paper on Facebook (I covered up the barcode so that I didn't spoil my vote by doing so). Over 60% of my fellow Australians voted the same way. Within a month of the result being announced, Australia's Marriage Act was changed to reflect the result of that vote. So how exactly was my support ineffective?
>If the law says that married and unmarried couples are to be treated equally...then immigration officials will treat married and unmarried couples equally.
In your pie in the sky world, I'm sure they will. In reality, not so much.
I deleted my point about your support being "quiet and ineffective", as I didn't have a justification for that - sorry. But I do think you are very naive in thinking that undermining the importance of marriage as a legal institution is a good way to advance rights for gay couples.
>>If the law says that married and unmarried couples are to be treated equally (including in immigration/visa matters), and if that law is enforced, then immigration officials will treat married and unmarried couples equally.
Right. Because government agents and agencies never systematically violate equal treatment mandates.
In the long-run, they never do when (1) those equal treatment mandates are firmly enshrined in law, and (2) there is an effective judicial remedy for violations of that law. Cases where they do it in an ongoing manner are cases where either (1) or (2) are missing.
In the case of immigration/visas, a big problem is that (in many legal systems) most immigration/visa decisions are not judicially reviewable. (There are often exceptions for certain areas of immigration law, such as refugee status determinations and deportation proceedings, but if you are refused a visa from outside the country you usually have no legal recourse.) This means that, even if you believe you have been discriminated against on a legally prohibited ground, no court will even hear your claim.
I think that's wrong, and that should be changed. And it impacts all kinds of people; I'm sure some people get discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality when seeking visas and have no legal recourse, but plenty of people get discriminated against on other grounds – or even just get visas denied for completely inscrutable reasons (e.g. Daniel Stenberg's continual denial of a US visa) – and have no recourse either. But this is a problem which could be fixed with sufficient political will; the law could be amended to grant rights of judicial review in all visa/immigration matters.
Another point: you can say "even if the law says that married and unmarried couples should be treated equally, immigration officials will ignore/violate that law", but you can equally say "even if the law says that same-sex and opposite-sex married couples should be treated equally, immigration officials will ignore/violate that law". I don't understand how, the risk that some immigration official might discriminate against a same-sex couple is a good argument for retaining the legal recognition of marriage, since immigration officials can discriminate against same-sex couples whether marriage is a legally recognised institution or not.
> Heck, the mainstream leftist view is that you have to vote to make it easier to kill babies
This is how right-wing activists frame it but it’s thoroughly dishonest, not to mention unscientific. A baby is a human child which has been born. The contraception options those people oppose affect what is at that point a few cells. Abortion is always well before the point of viability and increasingly rare the later it gets – you’re talking cases with severe health risks and a long way from being developed enough to have any chance of surviving in a NICU.
> This is how right-wing activists frame it but it’s thoroughly dishonest, not to mention unscientific.
The key issue in the abortion debate is – "at which point in the development of an individual human does it gain the moral status of a person". Some say at conception, some say at birth, some say at some point in between the two. The natural sciences (including the biological and medical sciences) can't directly answer that question. It depends on what are the correct criteria for an entity to have the moral status of a person, and that is a question for morality/ethics/moral philosophy, not a question for the natural sciences. At best, if we have agreed on moral principles to determine the answer to that question, then the natural sciences can provide factual information which can be combined with those moral principles to reach a moral conclusion; but, in this case, the different sides don't agree on what are the right moral principles to apply, which is a question beyond the proper scope of the natural sciences. Hence, I don't think either side's position is inherently "unscientific", although people on both sides of the debate are fairly called that when they wrongly present the debate as something which science can settle.
> A baby is a human child which has been born
"Baby" is a term of everyday language; I don't know if it has a formal scientific definition, but even if it does, you can't presume someone using the word outside of explicitly scientific contexts means the word in some technical scientific sense. In everyday language, "baby" is the correct term to use for an unborn child (at least one which is sufficiently far along); I know when my wife was pregnant, she had a baby in her womb, and when she was pregnant with our daughter, we told her big brother that "there's a baby inside mummy's tummy".
Is "baby" the right word for a newly conceived embryo? Not in many people's usage; in my own usage, an embryo isn't a baby yet, but it is going to become one at some ill-defined point in the future, yet prior to birth. However, maybe in some people's usage, a newly conceived embryo is properly called a "baby". Different people use language in different ways. And how the term "baby" is or should be defined in everyday language is another question which is outside the proper scope of the biological and medical sciences.
> Abortion is always well before the point of viability and increasingly rare the later it gets
So, a friend of mine who identifies as "pro-life" told me about a case in the state of Victoria, Australia, in the year 2011, in which a termination of pregnancy was performed at >= 37 weeks gestation for a "maternal psychosocial indication" (i.e. no confirmed or suspected congenital abnormality). I didn't believe him at first, but it is in the official statistics (see Table 6.20b, page 141 of [1]).
I don't support a complete ban on abortion (possibly my "pro-life" friend does). But I do think there is something wrong with a state's abortion laws if healthy babies can be legally aborted at >=37 weeks for a maternal psychosocial indication. I don't see how that morally differs from performing infant euthanasia post-birth for a maternal psychosocial indication.
> The key issue in the abortion debate is – "at which point in the development of an individual human does it gain the moral status of a person".
Its sometimes framed that way, but since the situation is sui generis in other ways (no one ever has entitlement to another human's body the way necessary for compulsory continuation of pregnancy in any other circumstance) there are other valid framings; particularly, its equally valid to frame it as "what is the extent of the right of bodily autonomy against intrusions by other humans".
In truth, there is no single key issue, and there is a fair degree of correlation between the differences on those issues, so its often difficult to even pull one out as decisive for any individual, much less for the general debate.
I agree that’s another relevant framing, although once again it is a moral question, and hence not within the proper scope of the natural sciences to answer.
But, even if one were to agree that a woman has a right to bodily autonomy which outweighs the right of her unborn child to life, how does that apply to a case like the one I referred to, of a termination at >= 37 weeks for a maternal psychosocial indication? If the mother didn’t want the child, why not permit it to be born alive, then put it up for adoption? It seems clear that particular line of argument, whether or not it is correct, is insufficient to justify the law and practice of the state of Victoria, Australia (and the same may possibly be true of some other jurisdictions as well.)
> Hence, I don't think either side's position is inherently "unscientific", although people on both sides of the debate are fairly called that when they wrongly present the debate as something which science can settle.
You could start with the first case I mentioned: opposition to contraception, which is something American right-wingers are increasingly trying to class as abortion even though there are nothing more than unimplanted cells at that point.
Most dictionaries define baby as starting at birth. Medical science has been able to push the point of viability back earlier (fortunate for the prematurely born children we know) but that’s nowhere near the first 8-9 weeks when the vast majority of abortions occur. Where science comes into this is answering questions about development: when the brain is a handful of cells, without the major developments which start on the path to cognition it’s not what almost anyone would call a “baby”. (Yes, politics means that more people will now claim otherwise then did before this was turned into a major political recruiting issue in the 1970s. We don’t need to let bad faith arguments redefine common words.)
My personal benchmark: when would you have a funeral? Somewhere between a third and half of the fertilized embryos spontaneously abort. If you wouldn’t have a funeral or a forensic investigation, it’s something else.
As for the case you mentioned, I can see that’s a favorite talking point of Australian anti-abortion groups who are trying to portray it as common. Given that it’s a single record for common medical procedure my first thought would be that we don’t have enough information to know that it wasn’t a data entry or classification error. The narratives portraying these situations as doctors happily killing viable babies have a long history of turning out to be gross misrepresentations of very painful medical situations.
Ask yourself how likely it is that this would happen and NOBODY would say a word - no horrified nurse going to the police, no clerk calling the news, etc. - and ask whether that would happen in the situation as portrayed by abortion opponents? You keep using this data point in your comments rather than an extremely rare outlier so it’s really important to your argument to establish that it’s a real and valid case since you have exactly one data point.
> You could start with the first case I mentioned: opposition to contraception, which is something American right-wingers are increasingly trying to class as abortion even though there are nothing more than unimplanted cells at that point.
Which forms of contraception are you talking about? Which "American right-wingers"? (And why pick on Americans? You seem to be at least partially talking about the moral views of conservative Roman Catholics, whose views are largely the same everywhere and have nothing to do with whether they are Americans or not.)
Some people believe that the moral status of an individual human being begins at conception. Some forms of contraception may prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg. If you believe a fertilized egg has the moral status of a person – a belief which is neither "scientific" nor "unscientific", but rather beyond the scope of the natural sciences to judge – then forms of contraception which prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg are plausibly immoral. Everyone can choose which moral beliefs they want to accept and which they want to reject, but either way moral beliefs are outside the proper domain of the natural sciences.
There is some controversy over whether particular forms of emergency contraception do indeed prevent implanatation or not. Some people have taken positions in that controversy which may not be supported by the scientific evidence, and so on that limited issue may be "unscientific", although I don't think anyone can fairly deny that it is at least possible that some forms of emergency contraception do sometimes prevent implantation. Similarly, although for IUDs the primary method of action happens pre-fertilization, my understanding of the scientific evidence is that IUDs do sometimes prevent implantation.
Quite separately, some religious people – in particular conservative Roman Catholics – believe methods of contraception which only act prior to conception, such as condoms, to be immoral. That's a moral belief, so (like all other moral beliefs) I can't see how it can be "scientific" or "unscientific"; and that moral belief is a separate topic from abortion. (Nobody claims condoms are a form of abortion, not even conservative Catholics who believe that condom use is immoral.)
> Most dictionaries define baby as starting at birth.
I don't agree. Which dictionaries are you talking about?
I've always considered the OED to be the most prestigious English dictionary, and it currently defines "baby" as "An unborn or newly born human being; a fetus, an infant" (sense I.1.a). That definition clearly includes the unborn in its scope, although possibly not the embryo. (And indeed, I myself would not call an embryo a "baby", although it is important to note that dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive, so if somebody else does call an embryo a "baby", you can't argue they are wrong simply on the basis of a dictionary.)
> Where science comes into this is answering questions about development: when the brain is a handful of cells, without the major developments which start on the path to cognition it’s not what almost anyone would call a “baby”
It is not the job of the biological sciences to determine the meaning of the word "baby" in everyday use.
It is not the job of the biological sciences to answer moral questions, such as when does an individual gain the moral status of a person.
Embryology tells us that, at the point of implantation, the embryo contains around 200-300 cells, which are still largely undifferentiated. Nobody disputes that.
The question of whether those 200-300 cells constitute a "baby" (when that word is meant as a term of everyday language) or whether they have the moral status of a person, is not a question within the proper scope of the science of embryology to answer.
> As for the case you mentioned, I can see that’s a favorite talking point of Australian anti-abortion groups who are trying to portray it as common.
I've never heard anyone try to portray it as common. Everyone I've heard talking about it has presented it as a single case (out of around 14,000 abortions performed in Victoria in that year). (And, as far as I know, has not been repeated since.) The argument, however, is that whatever you think about those 14,000 as a whole (of which a mere 378 were performed post 20 weeks), surely you can agree there is something wrong with this particular case, and with laws which legally allow it. I think a lot of people who have no problem at all with abortion early in pregnancy – something which I personally support being legally readily available – think abortion of a healthy baby at 37 weeks should not be legal (and yet, under Victoria's laws, it is).
> Given that it’s a single record for common medical procedure my first thought would be that we don’t have enough information to know that it wasn’t a data entry or classification error.
So, it is in an official government report, prepared by a committee, whose members include specialist obstetricians, paediatricians, professors of midwifery, etc. Don't you think they would have noticed an outlier like this, and investigate it? The committee that prepared the report has access to the identifying details of the case (name of hospital, full name of patient, patient's date of birth, date of procedure, medical record numbers, etc). They certainly have the ability to inquire with their colleagues at the hospital where it was performed (we don't know that detail, but they do) and double check it is correct (Australian medical privacy laws have an exception for collection of government statistics, so that would not have been issue). Furthermore, there was enough controversy about it after the report's release, they surely would have investigated that data point afterwards if they hadn't already done so beforehand. If it was something as simple as a data entry error, I'm sure they would have been happy to publicly announce that. Given all of this, I think your suggestion is unlikely.
> The narratives portraying these situations as doctors happily killing viable babies have a long history of turning out to be gross misrepresentations of very painful medical situations.
I'm sure there is some very painful story behind it. My own guess is it is probably something like a young teenager (such as a 13 year old) pregnant due to rape/incest and who is actively suicidal. Obviously that's a very horrible situation, but even if my guess is right, I don't think it should be permissible to kill a healthy >=37 week baby, whether pre-birth or post-birth, even in such a horrible situation.
I think they really should have released more details about it – of course they can't publicly release any personally identifying details, but a few extra details might put the data point in greater context.
Huh. So, here in the UK, one of the most prominent and important politicians within one of our main two parties actually outright lobbied on behalf of the Pedophile Information Exchange (roughly equivalent to NAMBLA) early on in her career, and there's a strong argument this helped get her the position she has today - the PIE-affiliated activist group she was working for had and still has close ties to that party, and a lot of people from it got prominent political roles. Despite this revelation, she has the full backing of the party and it doesn't seem to have hurt her career in the slightest.
Whilst the UK obviously isn't exactly the same politically as the US (though they have a huge amount of political cross-polination) I get the distinct impression that pedo advocacy by people of the right tribe is treated as far less of an offence than holding views that are actually widespread but go against the woke consensus.
That sounds pretty shit! I probably would complain to the party's leadership about that, a bunch, asking them to stop working with her- well, at the VERY least unless she publically repudiates the group she lobbied for and says she doesn't support their views. I think that's an absolutely fair response to the situation.
I'm not naming them because it's not terribly important, it's absolutely trivial to figure out who I'm referencing if you do care, and it'd probably be an absolute pain to explain to Americans why they're so important anyway since our political system is structured so differently.
Are you talking about Harriet Harman? She's not even in the shadow cabinet. And I'm not American, so you don't have to explain it to me. Quit with the lame excuses :)
Of course it's Harman - who else? And as for the contents of the shadow cabinet... as I'm sure you know that varies a lot, she spent most of her career in either the cabinet or shadow cabinet, and right now I'm not sure I could really describe any of its current members as either prominent or influential. No doubt the fact that the actual current Leader of the Opposition was almost infinitely more obscure a figure than someone like Harman until less than a year ago plays a role in this. (Apparently, she's currently Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, one of a few big-name former Labour cabinet members with non-cabinet roles like this.)
Anyway, we're now way off topic, which is why I didn't want to go into this kind of detail in the first place.
It is dishonest to describe Harman as one of the most prominent and important politicians in our two main parties. You should edit or delete your comment.
There's no need to appeal by lowering the bar so i can relate/understand. I have a politically progressive point of view, that goes totally against what we are referring here.
But lets not mix things up here. People that are conservatives and even homophobic in my experience have more to do with the cultural views of a giving period that they were raised and i think that in some cases, we must not take things lightly, but also give some time for them to rethink their values.
And im pretty sure that kicking these people on the teeth wont help them to get integrated at all. The only thing they will learn in to lie better and be a better hypocrite.
Here public/private boundaries are very important. So if the guy is tweeting about this point of view and damaging the image of the company, of course, this would be a good motive to fire him.
But if he believe this in private, dont force others in the company to follow his socio-political views and is good in what hes doing, even if you dont like his political views, we should not fire anyone because of this.
Pedophiles on the other way are people with very harsh psychological problems that may lead them to commit a very serious crime. You dont need to resort to this sort of rethorical trick to make me understand, as i already did before (you already have my empathy here as im on your side).
Really, with time we learn that we are all handicapped here and there, and by becoming more humble about that, we learn that we need to accept and work with people with a lot of different views, backgrounds and actions or else we are all getting cancelled.
We need to be more careful about social sidelining people, because we will just turn some people that were mildly into something to become real radicals and also at the same time losing good hands that would otherwise help us into build a better future.
What make the most harm to the society: A guy contributing in private, financially, to entities that lobby for policies that goes against gay people or a CEO and board with impeccable and fair social and political views but that end doing actions that harm the core of a company that is best know for their engineering culture, good products, open source and freedom values?
Because Mozilla will be vaporized in the coming years.. does it really worth it?
Why do you even want to know, or judge, anyone's donations ? Do you ask store clerks who did they donate today ? Their manager ? Private life and personal decisions should be left personal.
I think once you get to people in leadership roles they start having to set a good example for subordinates and a positive image for the company. Donor lists are also often public, especially at higher amounts.
Not sure at what level within a company that becomes a relevant question. It's not for store clerks and store managers. It is for the CEO.
They have the kind of deep technical knowledge and ability to solve challenging problems you'd expect from a research group, coupled with the skills to make pragmatic tradeoffs and fix the complex real world problems needed to ship software. More than that, they are one of the most welcoming and friendly teams I ever worked with. The culture they created allowed them to take inexperienced new contributors and quickly ramp them up to a place where they were confident to solve challenging problems. Working in that environment and seeing what's possible has really raised my bar for workplace culture and mentorship.
Certainly losing his technical talent is likely to have contributed to the problems, but I suspect it's 100x more of Chrome's dominance and Mozilla's reliance on Google's search engine contracts for revenue.
Maybe he's just not a great guy all around.
https://nulltx.com/brave-browser-draws-criticism-over-lack-o...
> Publishers must verify ownership of their properties with Brave in order to receive contributions from Brave users. If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. The browser routinely updates an internal list of all verified publishers to determine whether a property can receive contributions. At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators.
https://brave.com/faq/
Do. Not. Use. Chromium.
Chrome has done multiple huge projects that changed how things work at a fundamental level like Oilpan (using a C++ garbage collector), LayoutNG (a full rewrite of the layout part of the engine from the ground up), Slimming Paint (a full rewrite of the compositing and painting system), and Site Isolation.
Blink and WebKit are pretty different engines with very different behavior, bugs, and performance characteristics.
https://pywebview.flowrl.com/
I know a few people who have been victims of identity theft. After hearing their stories, it was clear to me that it would not have happened if companies weren't tracking them and selling their personal data left and right.
But it's hard to make that connection. People seem to accept identity theft as "something that just happens sometimes", even though it makes them very angry, frustrated, anxious, and eats up a lot of time and sometimes money. I think they do this because it's hard to point to one culprit as the cause, and so it feels like an intractable problem.
If people could actually understand that their lack of privacy protections on the internet (and elsewhere) is one of the main factors in enabling things like identity theft, there would be more people who would affirmatively care about privacy.
I'm not sure how to get people to make that intuitive leap on a large enough scale for it to matter, though. You're very right that people mainly care about browser performance (I'd even argue they don't care about security that much, though certainly more than they care about privacy); I know several people who definitely know better and understand privacy issues on the internet, but still use Chrome because "Firefox is slow on macOS" or something.
A little like the way people talk about "cyber warfare".
In real warfare, the enemy can attack your forces no matter what you do.
In cyber warfare, you can build impenetrable defences. The only way the enemy can attack you successfully is if you make a mistake.
This kind of thinking IMO is perpetuated by absurd tv shows where e.g McGee can hack into any computer system by tapping on his keyboard for a few seconds.
It's harmless on TV, but in the real world it leads to complacency about security. People saying"poor Equifax, they were attacked" instead of "Equifax's security was a joke, and they left their system wide open for anyone to plunder".
Now we just need to find a piece of software that doesn't have any mistakes in it.
Edit, to summarize: it's not that performance doesn't matter, it's just that currently it's hard enough to compete with Blink & V8. And, of course, Blink becomes better precisely because there is a competition they have to fight. (It will probably become worse when Gecko/Servo/Firefox dies.) But to be that competition without having shitload of money Google has is not fun right now. It's hardly a fight you can win. Easier just to ride on Google's back and to use Blink yourself.
Nobody except geeks and politically minded people care about privacy that much (if they didn't they'd already use Firefox with DDG, or Brave or at least Safari).
People do care for faster, more conventient browser -- that's why we switched from Netscape to IE (when Mozilla bloated and a for a little while IE6 was faster/better), then to Firefox, and then to Chrome.
Well, lots but still insignifcant to make a browser market share raise. Which is not "lots" in the sense that matters. Most People value speed, convenience, features, and security over privacy.
>People really don’t like it if they search for and buy a bicycle and keep getting ads for bicycles for weeks.
Most (as in over 80% of the people) don't even use an ad blocker and could not care less. Even if they are annoyed but keeping getting those ads, they don't care enough to do anything about it, much less switch broswers.
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
> Nobody except tech geeks care about Servo.
This is a good point unless there actually non tech people that care about Servo.
Servo had two major roles within Mozilla - as an incubator for novel browser technology we wanted to ship in Firefox, and more recently, as a lighter-weight vehicle for Mixed Reality products. The latter has been the focus for the last three years, and those products now appear to be winding down. But the former was a huge success - both Servo's parallel CSS engine and its GPU-based graphics layer are now shipping in Firefox.
While it seems unlikely that Mozilla will continue to prototype things in Servo, we're still building lots of innovative technology (and writing lots of Rust code) directly in Firefox. A few of the teams have blogged recently about the work they're doing [2] [3], and I'd encourage anyone interested to check it out.
The Servo team accomplished a ton and left its ongoing mark on the Web. These changes are tough for everyone within Mozilla, but are not indicative of any change in strategy for Firefox. Gecko is alive and well, and there are no plans to switch to Blink.
[1] https://bholley.net/blog/2017/stylo.html [2] https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/ [3] https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/
And something that may be used as evidence for my skepticism, is why instead of firing those people, where we know a lot of them are pretty good ones, they did not relocate them instead?
Even if we suppose, they decided to not invest in things that are not considered pragmatic, more to the core of Mozilla... Even if some of them were working coding in Rust for instance.. why dont they just shut down the projects that they considered 'fancy' and relocate those amazing engineers to work into core parts?
For me it smells like something is rot on the top level, and that in turn, will lead to more bad decisions in the coming years, unless something really radical happens (Microsoft did it, so theres hope).
Edit: one more evidence that the things are somehow rot, is that money going to pay for ads (and this is exactly the path taken by Yahoo)
If those are really long term high priority goals of Mozilla, it seems that keeping the team around that has probably the most experience doing this anywhere on the planet (building innovative browser functionality in Rust) would be a good idea, even if the Servo project as an incubator was no longer a priority.
Surely, their talent and team cohesion and the team’s collective expertise could have been put to use writing Rust features directly for Firefox.
Gecko seems to be tightly bound to Firefox. Are there any plans on decoupling that and making it easily embeddable for other projects? Even MDN doesn't seem to have up to date documentation on that [0].
I purport that allowing easy embedding will allow more people to play around with Gecko, discover wildly different classes of bugs, contribute code in order to add improvements and fix bugs that they discover while embedding the project.
Given a more visible and active community around Gecko, Microsoft might've even switched to Gecko, but that's just a wild guess.
0: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Gecko...
https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/
It’s also pretty huge though. And Apple won’t let you embed it in an iOS app. So there are limits.
Seems to me the strategy is now to survive, more than anything else. So it did change, didn't it?
We invest a lot in Gecko though, precisely because it's important to have a world-class independent engine.
But I completely understand why you wouldn't want to "boil the ocean". That said, I hope you appreciate how much support FF has from users. Anyone of us left using are doing so by paying a price for it. Everything else mozilla does appears like distracting side-quests. I would not care much about donating for wikipedia but if Mozilla focused on their flagship product more I would be happy to contribute both financially and through bug reports and grunt work PR's.
We live on the ocean and browsers are our ship.
It's sad, but the reality is that the fate of a project with only one major stakeholder is tied to that stakeholder's fate.
I'm pretty sure they will all get other jobs, but we have to face the fact that the project itself will probably die.
https://ubports.com/
Do you consider getting no major OEM adoption in 5 years “fairly strong?” Mobile OSes depend on network effects of both users and developers. It’s no surprise it’s a duopoly.
Personally I think OEMs should not ship a default OS and should require a choice at the point of sale.
'No major OEM adoption' is partly the USP for manufacturers like Pine Phone[1], if they are able to build sustainable business then they would be fine(From the looks of it, it seem they know what they are doing).
[1]https://store.pine64.org/
https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/27575
It's a very sad situation, I hope Samsung or another organisation steps in to hire the team.
+title changed from "Servo Parallel Browser Engine Project"
Now is the critical time for a another company to step in. Microsoft has better alignment with free web than Facebook or Google. This could be a chance for them to get a competitive independent browser again.
That would be precious: Microsoft taking Mozilla browser developers onboard, creating a browser, shipping it by default bundled with their OS, and being able to claim it's to prevent monopolies.
It would also be nice for those highly skilled developers who actually believed in the open web to be able to give the middle finger to those in middle and upper management for whom Mozilla is merely a stepping stone to some cozier job at a proprietary software house whilst running Mozilla into the ground.
I don't see Microsoft ever adopting a strategy like this. It'd be nice, but given the disaster that Edge turned out to be — it's highly unlikely.
The only problem with EdgeHTML was google abusing their monopoly, read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
But thanks, will do on a laptop where I have less stuff to migrate, slower CPU with less memory, and sometimes care about power consumption.
To anyone interested, here’s the manual: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-s...
There's a lot that a browser can do for a company. Google has built GSuite and ChromeOS around Chrome - the integration with the browser is absurd and right up Microsoft's alley.
Microsoft could build Azure Active Directory, O365, Windows, etc, around a next gen browser and I think they'd be smart to do so.
It is. Chrome is so dominant at this point they're the de facto web standard. Other browsers have to put in significant effort just to play catch up and can't really offer any new renderer/js feature without Chrome's blessing.
Plus, we have a decade's worth of evidence that Chromium is just flat out better than the competition. Even if we set aside the problems with market share the Chromium team has consistently put out a faster engine than Firefox or IE.
Adopting Chromium allows you to (mostly) avoid putting effort into the rendering engine allowing you to focus on other features to differentiate yourself.
Microsoft still runs the dominant operating system! They have a huge opportunity here to complete. The same way Chrome advertises on Google.com, Microsoft can provide the default fucking browser that is HUGE.
> Plus, we have a decade's worth of evidence that Chromium
Chrome is 12 years old. It's been super popular for less than a decade.
Its multiprocess architecture, by far its most long term scalable feature, was behind Internet Explorer's (they started multiproc trend with, iirc, IE8).
> Even if we set aside the problems with market share the Chromium team has consistently put out a faster engine than Firefox or IE.
Acquire Servo, do better? That's my entire point.
They've had that advantage since Chrome came out. Didn't stop them from losing almost all their market share.
>Its multiprocess architecture, by far its most long term scalable feature, was behind Internet Explorer's (they started multiproc trend with, iirc, IE8).
Chrome has been technologically ahead of IE since it came out.
>Acquire Servo, do better? That's my entire point.
Why do we think Servo will be better?
Absolutely. But it certainly is a huge benefit to them.
> Chrome has been technologically ahead of IE since it came out.
No doubt, in a number of ways that's certainly true. IE needs to compete on tech.
> Why do we think Servo will be better?
Because it solves real problems for browsers - security and performance, in a more than incremental way.
And they already do, with a Chromium based browser.
> They have a huge opportunity here to complete
With what? Maintaining the other browser engine is not that monetizable.
Google absolutely monetizes the hell out of Chrome, in areas they compete with MS (O365? GSuite?).
Google doesn't monetize developing Blink/Chromium. Since Edge only uses that part they don't really have to care about Google's monetization and do their own. If Google stops Chromium development or goes the wrong way at some point, which is inevitable, MS will have to step in, but until then it's free real estate.
They can build all that proprietary stuff with Chromium just as well, so why should they choose Firefox?
I disagree here. Of course they do. They could not monetize Chrome successfully without:
a) Having huge amounts of control over the direction of the web
b) Having a best-in-class browser that people want to use
If IE had every feature of Chrome with regards to management and monetization it would still not matter, people do not want IE. If IE were a drastically better browser than Chrome, they would.
Choosing Servo gives them an opportunity to leap ahead of Chrome in areas they care about.
It's interesting to compare what we know of "Midori C#" to Rust.
The point would be the technology and independence from Google, not the market share.
Never underestimate Microsoft's ability to constantly change its mind.
On a predictable schedule, too! Cf. their annual reorg, which leaves everyone confused for a good 3-4 months per year.
Of course google could be forced to by governments' actions.
Today, in Chromium, Microsoft are a very small percentage of commits. Google still accounts for over 90%. If Microsoft wanted to fork Chromium, they'd need to vastly increase their investment if they wanted to keep up with Chromium.
Why? They’re more supportive of open source than they were in 2001, yes. But Google and Facebook are also big in this area.
And MS business still relays a lot on vendor lock in to a great extent
(Amazon has this incentive too, but they're just kind of incompetent at the execution, so people don't worry as much about them. See: the Kindle Fire tablet.)
Meanwhile, Microsoft doesn't currently own any property that operates by trying to replace "eyeballs on the web generally" with "eyeballs on that property specifically" to then sell those eyeballs to advertisers. They have Bing, Cortana, GitHub, Skype, maybe TikTok soon. None of those things will really change that stance. They're not "against" the web.
Apple is in the middle on this spectrum. Apple doesn't make money off web eyeballs, but they do make money off native app eyeballs (iAds), and also off native-app sales generally. So they're motivated-enough in providing a decent web experience to be the main sponsors of the WebKit FOSS project; but they're also motivated to create APIs that allow their third-party devs to replace web experiences with native app experiences.
Apple shutdown iAd in 2016 https://developer.apple.com/support/iad/
> Microsoft has better alignment with free web than Facebook or Google.
Microsoft gave up on browsers a long time ago.
If someone would want to use Servo outside of a hobby project, it would be Google to integrate it into Chrome. The chances of that happening is almost zero.
There's a pandemic, probably a global recession, massive tech layoffs everywhere, and tech interviewing is an absolute nightmare no matter how good you are. I'm not sure I'd be as confident unfortunately.
Those don't sound like incompatible approaches. The monolith Gecko would be difficult to replace whole hog, a modular surgical approach seems more realistic.
They had detected the most profitable improvements and moved them over to Firefox.
So I'm not really surprised about them not continuing servo, even though it had been grate.
I'm more worried about some of the other layoff.
Further it feels a bit like they got in a place where they financially couldn't go on like before and fanned out to get more revenue streams but if that fails we might be down to chrome + safari, which would be horrible, tbh.
If it really comes to that we might even want to try to push the EU to get financially involved or something.
Safari isn't available on Windows, and Google doesn't want a situation where they are the only significant browser on the most popular desktop operating system. Google is scared of antitrust action, getting another monopoly is the last thing they want.
In the end you are 80% of the way to the goal and the last 20% is politically insurmountable. This is, IME, a primary driver for the Lava Flow Antipattern.
If they don't invest in a new engine, and given that the old engine is not much to compare with Blink or even Webkit, what's left for them? Pocket and some BS VPN service?
Do you have a citation supporting that? The old engine compares quite favorably with Chrome and Mobile Safari.
https://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+79,chrome+84,safari+13....
https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/
The provided links only compare API coverage, while other domains (performance, security...) are important. Even so, Firefox is clearly trailing Chrome, its main desktop competitor. It's not surprising since I've heard that the latter has much more man-power. And the gap will increase.
I've looked at CanIUse, ignoring the features which are implemented but disabled by default. Chromes lacks 5 features the Firefox has. The biggest two are MathML and VirtualReality, which were both available as experimental features in past Chrome versions but were removed for lack of interest in publishing or maintaining them.
On the other side, Firefox lacks 25-30 features that Chrome has. A few of them are minor, but most of them seem complex.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozilla...
"our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year."
[1]https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...
What the hell are they doing with the rest of the money? It should be "paid back" to the shareholder (the foundation) as tax free dividends that are kept in a fund for the purposes of that foundation.
Not that I expect him to have any actual motivation at this point given Servo is basically toast either way.
https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1293198502642749440
https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1293999583903780864
Chromium's folder with build and .git takes 40GB.
Why does it matter if there is one source tree for all browsers? [0]
Is it really a bad thing if Chromium is the base, and then Google, Microsoft, etc push out forks of it?
Isn't that what we do in the linux world already with the kernel? Redhat, Ubuntu, Mint, etc all take a stock kernel from the git tree and then tweak it for their uses, yet we don't complain about that.
[0] - Yes, I know people lost their jobs, and that sucks, especially in this economy. But my question isn't about the jobs, it's about having multiple browsers and why some people vehemently believe that multiple browsers without shared source code is critical to our future. THAT is what I don't understand.
Google has a strong interest in how people end up using the web and they have a particular vision for it, a vision that many on here disagree with.
Imagine if IBM ran the Linux kernel. We would be hearing many of the same concerns.
Why is that a bad thing?
And why would Firefox being a contributor make it worse? It’s open source.
That should be a good thing.
Given a single implementation, what incentive is there to develop open standards?
How do you innovate (in standards, JavaScript performance, rendering, etc.) if there is only one group working on them?
Case in point: Firefox is the only major browser to provide MathML support. Where is the incentive to get that implemented in the other browsers, especially given MathJax?
Where is the competition to innovate in things like web tools (layout analysis -- esp. for flexbox, etc., accessibility property (WCAG, WAI-ARIA) navigation/investigation) given a single implementation?
Also, it's never a bad idea to implement the same thing twice, from scratch. Working with an existing codebase necessarily puts you into a certain mindset with its own trade-offs and constraints where moving in a certain direction might be much harder than if you are starting from scratch. Would we ever see innovations that Servo brought forth if all we had were Chromium forks? It's hard to say, but it's definitely not obvious.
Would W3C apply the same rule if there was only Chromium?
If Firefox were as well, would that be bad?
Seems like it’s a community project now.
That said, Servo did seem to be one of the more lively places, so perhaps it will continue.
Rust seems to have a strong community of voluntary contributors, and could probably be run without company backing. Similar stories if you look at major FOSS projects such as KDE and Gnome - primarily dependent on a wide base of volunteers.
Then there are projects with a mix: plenty of volunteers, along with many commercial contributors - the commercial contributors tend to be more significant (certainly they add more code - but then they're the ones pushing new features for their customers) - but then there are enough volunteer contributions that the projects aren't dependent on the commercial entities. Linux Kernel, LibreOffice, Kubernetes, VSCode, come to mind. And with multiple commercial entities, it's not a tragedy if one drops out.
Then there are those projects with a single commercial backer, and fewer volunteers. Those are the ones that die off when the company drops out. The question is - is Servo in this category?
Even the Linux kernel would never had taken off beyond an hobby project had not been for contributions from Oracle, Compaq, IBM, Intel engineers during the early days.
So yeah will Servo find such a benefactor, very difficult to say, but Samsung used to contribute, if I remember correctly.
I am not too up to date on KDE, but Gnome is mainly pushed forward by Red Hat, and recently by Canonical. Unpaid volunteers certainly make a decent amount of contributions but the vast amount of progress comes from corporations, not volunteers.
But I had no idea they'd kill something so core to their future browser development. I strongly disagree with this decision. They might as well kill gecko too, if there's no exciting future anymore.
Samsung had invested in the past, so hopefully they or someone else will pick up where Mozilla left off.
I do think that Mozilla should slowly try to reduce the amount of unique processes that they have. Part of what made servo so successful is that they did all the development on GitHub.
Mozilla should have a top level corporate policy to transition away from all their nonstandard internal tools. Get rid of Mach, Bugzilla, Mercurial, etc.
They should use GitLab or GitHub, switch to cmake, and some standard third party build service, and be done with it. Their productivity would increase, their community contributions would increase, and their overhead would decrease.
But they should not have cut their DevTools, and should have actually beefed up the developer-friendliness. Compete with Electron. Compete with PhantomJS. Improve the experience of Progressive Web Apps on mobile.
The focus on new products makes sense. I think Lockwise, Monitor, and their VPN service were all good efforts. Firefox Sync should ideally expand more into a whole suite of integrated services stop their zero-knowledge privacy-first architecture. Storage, backups, OwnCloud integration, etc.
Maybe they should even acquire OwnCloud or NextCloud.
I've just switched back to it (after using Chrome for years because of Firefox's slowness) and feel like I'm going to use it for quite a long anyway. I just hope somebody is going to keep making vulnerability patches.
I don't want to browse the web with a Blink-based browser. Total browser homogeneity is the end of the free and open web. I don't want to use a non-free non-open web.
Is the web dead to me?
What's the deal anyway, is Mozzila a non profit for the development of the Firefox browser and an open FOSS web standards based web engine, or a sandbox for business types to play with and implement various BS ideas (ads, VPN, mobile OS, etc)?
An actual community project should rise from this state of affairs, with tanginble, browser-oriented goals, not something dependent on Google's money...
Here's the person who announced the firings... Nothing to do with development or FOSS, some laywer ex-Netscape employee:
Winifred Mitchell Baker (born 1959) is the Executive Chairwoman and CEO of the Mozilla Foundation and of Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Baker was trained as a lawyer. She coordinates business and policy issues and sits on both the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors.
It's like the leeches that hang on to NGOs for a salaried office career, and don't do activism themselves...
For all his faults, at least Brendan Eich was an actual developer, and with important contributions to the web and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.
This is just so naive view ... it's always the abstract "community" which should step in and save the day. Recently it was LibreOffice too where people got all mad due to proposed branding and again "community" superhero was expected to step in, fork it and carry on the whole development.
In reality these projects are far too huge to be purely community projects. They require full time paid developers and not few of them. They won't be able to survive without corporate sponsorship (and thus influence).
Mozilla is far too huge to not have money. Just 200M from those 600 million per year it took from Google, put in the bank, could pay for 50 developers/graphic designers/ $200K per year to work on it for 20 years. That would have taken care of the engine for 2 decades...
Instead they burnt money in BS ventures, Cxx salaries, events, and so on...
That is way too low to be anything more than maintenance mode. By my estimation [1], you'd want somewhere around 250 full-time equivalents to be able to declare the project in a healthy state.
[1] Take the number I'd estimate for Thunderbird, multiply by 10 for Firefox-scale, then add another 20% to account for the operations that Thunderbird gets "for free" (e.g., maintaining server infrastructure) and accounting for the fact that email standards are far slower in innovation than browser standards.
KHTML was done by a tiny KDE team.
After Apple adopted it, Webkit/Safari only had a small team of people working on it.
A good team of 12-20 devs is better than some BS team of 250 with politics, communication overhead, lack of coherence etc that comes with scale...
Yes, 20 years ago.
Fortunately, web technology did not evolve and grow at all since so it should be doable now too, right?
So? 20 years ago Netscape still had a much larger team, Microsoft too, and Webkit with its small team still beat them in their own game.
Small teams can build whole OSes, browsers, compilers, and whatever they put their mind too. Given good devs/experts, they can do so even better/faster than bigger teams.
P.S. 1 Not that a 50-strong team is small.
P.S. 2 Plus, way of missing the point. The team-of-50, 200K, 20 years = 200M was just an example. 200M is 1/3rd of what Mozilla made in a year for decades. And even those 200M would just be the raw money spent, not invested or anything. They could afford to support a 300-strong team of 20 years with 2 years of their revenue un-invested. And that's with a $200K/year salary, which doesn't have to be...
https://gizmodo.com/yahoo-s-insanely-bad-deal-to-pay-mozilla...
I have not heard about this in a very long time (note this article is from December 2017), but also, litigation takes a very long time.
Not exactly nothing to do with FOSS. She wrote the MPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker
Having said that, I do think these recent layoffs reflect badly on her if she is indeed responsible for them.
It can also pay it's Cxx's nice salaries and hefty golden parachutes, which makes it a for profit for them...
That is, based on what you said, it sounds like there is no meaningful difference between having a non-profit do all the work, and a for-profit doing work on behalf of the non-profit that owns it. But if that was the case, why would anyone bother with the extra layers? I'm inclined to assume there is some reason for the extra layers, and I have difficulty believing those differences are in society's best interest.
By the looks of it, Servo is a project that failed to deliver a new browser engine after years of work. If there were a chance that the project could be turned around to result in usable software, I'm sure Moz wouldn't have killed it. Is it worth the effort to pickup the project rather than starting from scratch? I don't know, and would appreciate if contributors share their opinion, or come up with a roadmap. By the reaction of some devs here on HN ("don't worry, Rust is safe; no really!") unfortunately I got the impression that the project was treated more as a showcase for Rust rather than a serious attempt at a new browser engine (please don't take it personally; I know this attitude from the "100% Javs" days and consider it a junior dev trait). Also, the "rise from ashes"/Phoenix metapher is no stranger to Mozilla, only that Moz picked the remains from Netscape; the effort to code a browser from scratch (in Java) had failed as well; it resulted in the Rhino JavaScript engine which is still heavily used.
There was plenty more work to do (other commenters have mentioned a new layout engine), and I'm disappointed to see Mozilla abandoning such a core next-gen R&D project that has already brought substantial improvements to their main product.
That's really not a true reflection of prior communications about Servo's goals.
The parallel layout engine failed. It just kept running into corner cases that didn't handle parallel layout well. If you look in the layout_2020 folder in the source repository, you can see an in-progress pivot to a new approach that would hopefully have less problems, but now we'll never know.
This isn't a surprise. It was supposed to be a research project; if parts of it didn't fail, that would be a surprise.
Just to illustrate the numbers: a fresh graduate with no experience will easily get more than 100k (even at Mozilla, who IME pay a bit less). A plain manager of a 10-person team at a big bay area company will be earning close to 500k (and most of their direct reports will also be in the 300k-500k range). Then you get your principal and distinguished engineers who can easily make 1M per year. 2.5M for someone leading a 1000 person company isn't expensive, and you do need someone to lead that company - to make tose strategic decisions.
You can quibble around whether or not a specific person made the right decisions (Mozilla aren't doing great, but they're also in a tough environment - maybe their CEO could be making better decisions that would boost usage - or maybe usage is entirely out of their control.) But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.
And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.
Normally, the shareholders own the company. They appoint the CEO, or a board of directors or whatever management structure, and they decide how much to pay them. It's the shareholders' company, it's the shareholders' right to decide whether to keep the C-suite and how much to pay them. Things can get a bit muddled with large public companies with many shareholders, or when there are dual class shares, which can partially insulate the management from the owners control, but it more or less works this way.
In the case of Mozilla Foundation, AFAICS, this does not hold. The board of directors is completely self managing; they coopt board members and appoint the CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
I might be very wrong about this, but since Baker is both the chairman of the foundation and the CEO of the corporation, it looks to me like she doesn't basically answer to anyone. It's a bit like she owns the company, except she didn't have to buy it. That's a pretty sweet deal.
Citation needed.
>But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.
I don't even need / want a company. I want the non-profit organization I was promised, with community leading, and perhaps 1-2 BDFLs to make the final decisions.
Linux did well without a CEO...
If I can take a literal potato, stick it in a pot, put that pot in an expensive chair in an expensive well-lit CEO office, have the potato's PA water it every day, and at the end of the year can claim more growth and sustainability, then "how well it's being done" kind of starts to matter.
That's quite a drastic statement. Maybe the devs find another company that sponsors the development of servo?
"It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really 'cared' about the web, they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than five percent?" [1]
[1] : https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-guy-mozilla-should-g...
Standards bodies are powerless if there's only one implementation.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=62rAjp5Nr9g
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/02/21/google-wa...
Ways to mess with Chromium Edge. It's not like it's a company full of smart, engineers, capable of skirting around the law.
What's the point of having an extremely complex standard that nobody else will ever implement anyway? Remember, it would take billions of dollars to implement a competitive browser and then you have to give it away for free.
If even a trillion dollar company like Microsoft thinks it's better to team up with a competitor rather than implement HTML all by themselves, it really should make you think.
Consider, there's only one Linux kernel, there's no "Linux standard", just one kernel - and the world runs on it. I don't see people running around complaining about how that's a threat, even though it's much harder to switch operating systems than browsers. Sure, there's POSIX, but that's a tiny subset of Linux features.
(Much longer ago, they were also responsible for Tasman.)
MS also seem to have a lot more interest in Rust than Google do.
I'm sure the team working on it are talented but I can't imagine any commercial company picking this up for any reason.
Servo is not the engine used in Firefox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)#Relationship_...
Given that Gecko is probably not the bottleneck, I would consider the decision of halting the project not a bad one. Servo delivered tons of amazing things already, it is a clear success. Maybe Mozilla should consider using V8? After all, losing SpiderMonkey might not be that bad, there is enough "competitors".
And indeed, zipped Chromium sources are of 1.4 Gb and Linux kernel is of 0.2 Gb - 7 times less.
Volume of features that "we" (or rather "they") want to see in browsers and so complexity of browsers reached point of no return I think. From now and on only state actors will be able to finance development of another new browser.
I do not think that any private pure product company now is able to develop modern browser sustainably. Either we (users) shall pay to the company for it or the company shall sell telemetry, user's data, influence user choice, etc. to get money for that from FAANG & Co. And that is exactly what happens now with Mozilla.
What to do?
The solution could be in drastically limiting the scope of browser. Indeed, 95% of sites and users just need basic HTML/CSS/JS features. The only thing that needs to be added is what I name as WebVM - virtual machine a la JavaVM or .NET "VM" with DOM and CSSOM exposed in it as primitives. So if you want to add new CSS, HTML feature or to support new script language then you can provide corresponding loadable .class (bytecodes) file.
I mean: compact base (bootstrap) implementation + VM/runtime to extend this thing. All other features can be developed independently by teams who need them for their users and cases.
All those WebGL, WebAsm, rarely used CSS effects and HTML features ... 95% of us do not need them - why do we need to pay the price for these features? If someone will need them - fine, design and load them into WebVM.
As an example, I (+ 3more devs) can transform my Sciter (https://sciter.com, 0.02 Gb zipped sources) into such bootstrap browser in 6-9 months. And so can do other teams.
Sigh.
10 years ago we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater when we disabled ActiveX, Java, etc. Instead we should actually develop WebVM and so to move web tech development out of big companies and Central Comity of the Web.
Sure, ecosystem diversity and so on is great but the current forkers don't see a way to make money from that, otherwise they'd have done it.
Barely worth any money.
> Why would you fork Chromium if you’re interested in Firefox?
Free maintenance (worth a lot of money).
My point is that there was no profit model around Firefox so switching engines is negligible. The cost of building said engine is also going to be negligible to the profit returned from the browser. In Google's case this is true. In Mozilla's case they have no model and never had one to subsidize that cost (other than Google search money). Changing base engines turns Firefox into a hobby project managed by a FOSS rather than a serious competing project in the browser-verse.
In reality Blink diverged significantly from WebKit and it doesn't make any sense to call Blink WebKit.
It seems like if things keep going this way, Safari also would inevitably end up rebasing Safari onto Blink too (with their strategic changes).
I'm not sure about that. WebKit is lagging slightly behind Blink (and Gecko to lesser degree), but I don't think it bothers Apple. Budget to develop WebKit is for Apple hardly a problem as well.
Having independent browser engine gives them quite a lot of strategic power given their exclusive market share. Look no further than how they managed to single-handedly kill PWAs few months ago since it does not fit into their strategic goals (all apps must go through app store).
I'd expect them to maintain all strategic decisions if they did refork, including disabling PWA features; there's nothing that says they have to enable PWAs just because they fork from Blink.
Because I was scanning around to get a lay of the browser engine landscape and there seems to be tons of Safari traffic out there.
I was absolutely gutted to hear about Mozilla's "reductions" (I hate such euphemisms), perhaps even worse for the Web is abandoning Servo... Which I wanted to find out whether that's the case.
I've made the replies top-level comments since the thread scope is now at this level.
Therefore it would be much wiser for mozilla to switch to v8 like everybody else and to reallocate the money either towards resurrecting servo OR towards improving V8 and making it faster, which here would bring actual value to humans.
Can we not find a simple naming convention that is less ambiguous and confusing to the rest of the world that uses both software and hardware? E.g. ServoSW, ContainerSW, or stick with names that have no hardware corollary?
I mean, maybe someone with his background in charge would know why its important for Mozilla to keep this kind of projects even if it looks they are not going anywhere, because this is what gives Mozilla meaning in the end.
Im not a mozillian, so i might be totally wrong, but maybe this is a case of the MBA's taking over and trying to focus into what they have learned to do.. look at the profit margins and think they are spending too much in research projects.
There are a lot of examples of other companies losing their engineering culture, starting to think more in terms of cash and profit, and finally vanishing its purpose and meaning.
IBM(lost in the 80's), Microsoft almost loosing it in the Ballmer era, Sun, and the most proeminent case: Yahoo.
Just to make it clear: Tech companies as any other company must have a good financial health and this is very important, but they cannot afford to loose their soul.
Once their engineering and innovation culture is gone, they become void and suffer from a slow bleeding til the death.
We must face it, our economical systems of incentives, the economical game generally speaking, its broken.
And tech and arts are proeminent endeavors that tend to get trojan horsed by this yuppie mentality turning things that once had meaning, into meaningful cash cows that work for the few people that cash out from the corrupted source.
(Apparently, it works a little better for industrial-level enterprises).
My hope is that, with time, this will become more evident, and research find innovative ways to make a better economical game so that creative, art and engineering culture kind of companies can have a much larger life span.
By the way, they had a pretty good leverage on Rust (and Rust was a really risk bet that ended doing great). The fact that they fired the people with this background just shows that they have no clue of what they are really doing.
* Edit: just being clear about people with conservative views.. I dont like and even despise what he did politically speaking, but as long as he were a good fit for the job, and never forced his political and social views into the company, i dont agree with the outcome.. and the reason is starting to show up now.. Much more important things are starting to fall out, and in the end even people with progressive views and good engineering background ended fired in the long term.
There have been quite a few instances over the past few years of Mozilla demonstrating its left leaning politics:
* The Brendan Eich situation where his private contribution to a conservative cause impacted his employment
* Baker calling a former conservative employee's views "traumatic and damaging" in their obituary - https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...
* The removal of "meritocracy" from the governance document in the name of D&I - https://blog.mozilla.org/careers/words-matter-moving-beyond-...
* Promoting BLM and anti-racism content via Pocket and their homepage
* Replacing "master password" with "primary password" - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/primary-password-replac...
Agree with their positions or not, they are definitely alienating to some. Even if just delivering a great browser and getting people to use it is not their primary mission (and it's not directly if you've ever read the Mozilla Manifesto), it is the means by which they retain the ability pursue those goals.
Recall Michael Jordan's reason for staying away from politics, "Republicans buy sneakers too".
She went a little far in what she said publically, but she wasn't wrong. I knew Gerv from very early on. He was a convert to christianity and as most converts, was vehement in it's absolute correctness to the detriment of his relationships. But, when you think you have an absolute truth of life after death on your side, people become a secondary concern.
> * Promoting BLM and anti-racism content via Pocket and their homepage
So, I will admit that I don't see there being any valid stance besides being against racism, and for treating all human life with value.
I'm going to repeat what I said about Eich in another thread:
Mozilla built a brand around openness and the idea of "putting people first" and making them feel "empowered, safe and independent." (Those quotes are from at least one version of their mission statement.) Eich's backing of the anti-gay-marriage initiative was a PR problem for them in a way that it might not have been for many other companies. Also, he violated the first rule of holes (i.e., when you're in one, stop digging); it's possible they might have been able to do effective damage control without booting him if his initial response hadn't been, in so many words, "it's my money and I can do what I want with it."
And, sure: it is, and he can. The CEO of a nonprofit Catholic hospital chain could also use their money to donate to Planned Parenthood. But, if they did, we can be reasonably sure the hospital's boards of directors would have words with them about it.
As for the others, well:
> Baker calling a former conservative employee's views "traumatic and damaging" in their obituary
It sounds like he was not merely conservative, but extremely strident and pushy about certain things. Also, you're giving that obituary a super reductive reading, given all the nice things Baker also says about the guy despite their obvious disagreements over those views.
> The removal of "meritocracy" from the governance document in the name of D&I
Some might argue that this kind of nitpicky language monitoring is an awfully unimportant tiny hill to die on. Maybe so, but it's hard not to see "I must take a stand in defense of phrasing changes I probably wouldn't have noticed if this blog post hadn't made a point of calling them out" as, well, an even smaller and less important hill, isn't it?
> Promoting BLM and anti-racism content
If someone is truly offended by "anti-racism content," I'm gonna have questions about them.
> Recall Michael Jordan's reason for staying away from politics, "Republicans buy sneakers too".
Just for the record: he's donating $100 million to Black Lives Matter.
It doesn't matter which way their politics lean, does it? The point is that a software company can't put politics over technology.
Unless it's specifically software politics and relevant to the organization's purpose, like the FSF. But if Mozilla had a political stance expressed through software (e.g. openness, user empowerment?) it has been somewhat muddled for quite some time now.
Zero, and with all respect, "could it be... SOCIAL JUSTICE?" was an awfully silly way to open an otherwise reasonable comment. (One that I'm about to go on to disagree with, granted, but still.)
Mozilla is not being run by "the MBAs"; it's being run by Mitchell Baker, who was actually CEO before Eich and has been there since before Mozilla was a separate corporation. She wrote the Mozilla Public License. She may not be the technologist Eich is, but it's awfully hard to fault her historical commitment to open source, the open web, and Mozilla. There's a lot of conspiratorial thinking about how Mozilla's moves over the past week or so are being driven by some kind of ruthless corporate greed, but a less nefarious explanation seems more likely.
90% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google's contract to be Firefox's default search provider, that contract is up this year, and according to news reports, the contract hasn't been renewed. these moves are being driven by a desperate desire not to go under when their income stream drops by orders of magnitude. They aren't becoming more commercial because of a "yuppie mentality"; they're becoming more commercial because they see no alternative.
As you can see reading further the core of the point i was trying to make is; we are all imperfect, thats a fact of life.
Than we have fitness, and as more sophisticated things get, fitness is harder to achieve.
To be fair, i dont know how much Eich was a good fit as a CEO for Mozilla, all i can deal with is that he was booted not because of performance, but a political stuff that got uncovered and that was against the image Mozilla was known to defend. Fair enough.. is it serious? Yes, because it damages the image of Mozilla even if its not the fault of the corporation, because it sounds like an endorsement..
Ok, but its all a matter of weighting, but not only looking for the short term, but the long term.. maybe there was someone in Mozilla that had the technical baggage and also the socio-political views
Again, i dont know how well the person picked to be the next CEO can evaluate and weight decisions in the deepest level not only of policy but also engineering.
But i´ve seen the external movements of the chess board, and this last one, made it more clear where Mozilla is heading and how they are evaluating their decisions.
Mozilla did bold movements that did not worked out, but they were not tottally misguided, as they could actually succeed, so they were not maded by a totally unaware person. Its just that its super hard to do everything right and have luck at the same time.
But i think, the real problems were not in those bold movements (and right now when you look at them in the rear window, they look just like cash burned) but in the innability to follow and keep their core projects moving.
For instance, the browser took too much time to keep up with the multi-process architecture in Chrome. It took like 4 years if im not mistaken..
Meanwhile there were a lot heat being dispersed in moonshots.. again, is not that the moonshots were wrong per-se, but as long as the most of the energy were being expended in keeping up in the core of what make mozilla matter today.
But hey, the moonshots maybe were misguided somehow, but here, there this one or two that we invested in the past that is starting to bear fruits.. we were lucky.. so why now shutdown the projects that might actually be the ones that can save mozilla in the future?
If it was just a matter of closing the offices elsewhere in the world(like the one in Berlin), but we know that part of the engineering not only now, but in the beggining of the year were booted of the company, and some of them in things that should be strategic for Mozilla in the comming years.
The pressure is hard, but the good CEO´s will make a stand and defend the things that might not look very good now, but that will be key in the future..
And i wonder, how much a CEO or boarding that could go deeper in the engineering rabbit hole could have helped into making the right decisions.
Again, i dont know very well the CEO or the board, all i see is the chess pieces moving from here.. and from what i can see, joining the pieces of the pass movements, i have a sour taste in my mouth that what was once one of the greateast, shiny companies of high technology, a role model to me and to many people, are starting to repeat the misguided steps of companies like Yahoo.
Sorry for "the MBA´s", as i dont want to offend anyone, but what i meant is the pattern in the moves, it looks a lot like things Ballmer would do, not Gates. And the difference lies in how much they are informed to take the good decisions they need to make.
And tech people often lack the philosophical, social and political baggage to make the good decisions on those kind of matters, so in my opinion they must be helped not chased. Because in the end this might be important to the survival of the entity, that might look good on the paper and in its image, but might be lost in its direction.
It sounded like a rant, and i think it was harsh on my part, but its because i care and really like Mozilla.
Its when the times are rough that the good decisions are really needed. so i just wonderered.. and i would love to be proved wrong, really.
The other is an extremely fringe view which has only ever been supported by a tiny percentage of the population.
I also don't think Eich was "out there advocating" for something. He made a private donation, which was not a significant amount in the grand scheme of things ($1,000 either way was not going to make any difference to the outcome). The law required that fact to be made publicly available, and then others publicised it; he didn't voluntarily choose to publicise his donation. When people publicly asked him about his beliefs on the topic, he avoided answering the question.
Just so you know that. Again: Brendan Eich spent $1,000 to hurt people like me. If gay marriage was not legal, my life would be significantly worse today.
I didn't do anything when Eich was made CEO. I probably should have. Let's say I did. Would you say I'd be in the wrong for telling Mozilla that I disagree with their choice of CEO, because he directly hurt people like me and avoids answering questions about whether he's likely to do it again?
Hm, here, try this. Instead of something provocative, let's try something else.
Suppose Eich donated, say, $500 to strengthen the DMCA. Let's say be advocated for harsher punishments for anybody reverse-engineering a DRM scheme, even for interoperability or other non-piracy purposes. Then suppose he gave another $500 to lobby against net neutrality.
When asked about these donations, let's say he refuses to answer or talk about them.
Would you be comfortable with him leading Mozilla? Kinda seems like his values might be deeply in conflict with those of the organization, making him a poor choice for CEO. But also ... That's just politics, after all. Has nothing to do with his leadership or technical skill.
> I also don't think Eich was "out there advocating" for something.
You're right- he was paying other people to go out there advocating for it. Hardly better!
As a side-note, pretty much unrelated to the point of that post, I don't see anything wrong with being opposed to same-sex marriage and promoting this opinion. As a matter of fact, I don't see why would anybody be opposed to that, but, hey, that's probably more the reason why somebody who is opposed to that should get a better PR so they could explain me their position. That is what constitutes healthy political climate, which is an opposite of calling a witch-hunt on anybody who has been caught supporting or even having a non-conventional political beliefs (which, ironically, today equals to having so called "conservative" beliefs).
Having said all of that, I actually have no idea if Eich would have been a good CEO. I don't know how much in common this job has to what he has previously done, and if he would be good at it. I don't like the current leadership of Mozilla, but there's no proof that Eich would be any better, I simply have no information that would allow me to say "things would be different if only Eich was the CEO".
Oh gee, thanks for not hating us. That's actually quite a low bar.
Imagine someone describing a "healthy political climate" where anti-racist and pro-racist views got an equal hearing.
It's so fucking depressing to see this stuff on HN.
As another gay person, this is such a damaging view that cis het people take. My humanity isn't the basis for a "disagreement or rivalry". I don't owe anything to people who don't believe I should have rights. It's not an interesting topic to argue about at the bar, it's my fucking life.
You see, the problem is that pretty much every political topic is someone's life. It hardly would be worth discussing otherwise. Thinking that the topic that concerns you personally is somehow universally special among the others is despicable arrogance.
Now, I suppose that you are thinking that it is easy for me to say all that stuff about same-sex marriage, because I don't care. And you are kinda right. But let me assure you that there are topics in which I am pretty heavily emotionally invested and have a very strong opinion on (I won't specify what it is to not escalate this even further). And that some people I work with, and even have pretty good friendly relationships with have not only argued against, but outright have hobbies that go directly against to what I think is right. So I'd rather wish some of these hobbies to be banned (or, let's rather say "legally restricted"), and I said that to these people on more than one occasion. We both are fine about that. People cannot agree on everything.
(There is also stuff that is currently banned that I want to be legal. Just to make it more symmetric, so that you don't think it's something about wanting things to be banned that is special.)
You can disagree about political issues if you have an alternative position - if I think we should have a robust social safety net and you think we should eliminate welfare because everyone should work, at least you've articulated an alternate position where people can still survive. You can want to privatize the post office and mail still gets delivered. The issue with arguing about people's human rights is that there is no alternative. You're just saying some class of people should have less than others with no remedy
I'm sorry, but no. Fuck. That.
You listen to multiple people describe to you how a certain political stance directly harms them on a fundamental human level and your response is "I don't care, and you're arrogant to think I should care"? No, fuck that.
It's good that we don't work together because I would absolutely have a problem with that attitude.
Such as? I'm pretty sure I don't oppose anyone's fundamental human rights.
Would you say the same thing about racism? I.e., I should be prepared to work with a racist coworker because I myself probably hold equally despicable views on some other topic.
And it’s hard to come up with something specific to you without really knowing much about you, but I’ll try my hand by randomly picking something which I haven’t made up my mind about yet (so ideally I can be more likely to come up with case for either side) and perhaps you might fall on one side and see how either way you’re infringing on some kind of human right: it’s the “right to be forgotten” topic. On one side, if you let people deleting things about them online, it’s a way to censor discussion about them, you could probably abuse this to get everything negative about you removed, and it would generally lead to an erosion of freedom of speech if people could come after you for what you said and force you to delete it. On the other hand, you have a right to privacy, it’s difficult to consent to sharing once something goes online, there’s already been huge problems with doxxing and people being permanently unemployable because of something that ended up on the Internet about them that was no longer relevant or true and they are haunted by it forever.
I think the issue probably affects fewer people than say racism might, but it’s a clear example of how you could take a viewpoint and have entirely reasonable people claim you are infringing in their rights with your opinion.
It seems to me that you are now defending a logically tenable position: that people who say arbitrarily awful things in public ought to be able to keep their jobs regardless of the extent to which their views are deeply offensive to their coworkers and society at large, and inconsistent with the mission of the company. But if that is where you end up, I take that as a reductio.
I should note that the donations here were meant to be private, I believe, but were found through some transparency law or the other; not an active public endorsement or anything, especially one officially sanctioned by putting Mozilla clout on it. But yes, to be logically consistent, I am saying that I think you should be able to keep your job even if you grab a loudspeaker the moment you step out of work and proclaim that you think we should drown babies (I am even willing to entertain this if you actually drown babies, though I believe this to be a very unpopular view). I as your coworker will certainly have some very strong opinions about your character, some of which will likely leak into my interactions with you as personal bias, but ideally if you are a normal, well-adjusted person while at work I think you should be able to remain employed.
The rest of your comment confirms that you are indeed advocating an extremist position, which I don't think it would be productive to discuss further.
What a despicable way to respond.
"I don't care if you aren't able to marry your partner, as long as it means there's maybe a better web browser."
Because maybe I'm reading too much into it, but that seems to be what's implied. And - if that's the choice you make, well, fine. But it'd be nice to confirm that.
As I said in the second paragraph, I don't really see why would anybody be opposed to {1}. So it just so happens that I am pro-by-default, i.e. "pro, because why not", but I might have as well been strongly pro or strongly anti. I very well suspect there is a very good argument for anti-{1}, it's just that I've never heard of it, nor did I do much research on that topic. And if I do, I may end up falling into both strongly pro-{1} or strongly anti-{1} categories.
The point is, that {1} is completely unrelated to {2}, so I can work on {2} together with somebody who has a polar beliefs to those I have on {1}, i.e. in both cases:
- if I am strongly pro-{1} and he is strongly anti-{1}
- if I am strongly anti-{1} and he is strongly pro-{1}
I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here. But I just want to put it out there that reading this thread as a gay man in 2020 is massively dispiriting. It's clear that only a tiny minority of straight people, even on HN, have any real concern whatever for gay rights.
I don't think I would. For example, if somebody liked to spend their time skinning small animals alive and posting the videos on YouTube, I don't think I'd accept a job at their company. That's just a bit too far for me!
But if it's not for you- well, guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one.
I won't argue about fairness of comparing {not allowing same-sex marriage} to {skinning small animals alive}, but even in that case your analogy should be about "someone who was arguing back in 2008 for keeping skinning small animals alive legal" while you voted to make it illegal (note, that votes split almost 50/50 back then, BTW, so that's a lot of people you choose to never work with).
And, since you asked, yes, I know for a fact that some people I work with (including both superiors and subordinates) have wildly different political opinions on some topics than I have. With some we never discuss it, with others I'm comfortable enough to argue about that and even laugh them off sometimes. More than that, even some of my friends have strong opinions on which we differ. And with some we may go into mountains, and tie into the same rope (which, if you are not familiar, kinda means "trusting our lives to each other", quite literally), and not hate each other 100% of the time, because of some of our political beliefs don't match.
And if all of that is a problem to you, yeah, I totally can agree to disagree with you, I can even respect that, as long as your disagreement doesn't mean hunting people down, because their opinion doesn't match yours. Now with that I kinda have to disagree.
I have no problem working professionally with somebody who says taxes should be lower, or who argues that renewable energy is a waste of money, or who supports charter schools or school vouchers, or all sorts of conservative ideas. I'd disagree strongly with them, mind you, but...
I guess that's sort of a core part of it, ultimately. These are not dry political questions for me- they have a very real, immediate impact on my day-to-day life.
> And if all of that is a problem to you, yeah, I totally can agree to disagree with you, I can even respect that, as long as your disagreement doesn't mean hunting people down, because their opinion doesn't match yours. Now with that I kinda have to disagree.
I would also agree- although what do you mean "hunting people down?" Presumably not, uh, with bow and arrow. I would not hunt Brendan Eich for sport.
I will, however, criticize people vocally- not for their opinions, but for their actions.
Suppose I sent a letter to Mozilla's board - "I'm a queer person who uses Firefox and who contributes to other Mozilla products. The choice of Brendan Eich, who has contributed to find opposition to my human rights, as CEO makes me feel uncomfortable contributing further to Mozilla as an organization, and because of this I won't be giving my money or time to Mozilla while Eich is in charge of it. I urge you to reconsider your choice of leadership. Sincerely, (me)."
Could you respect me after sending that letter? Is that valid criticism, speaking out? Is that free speech? Or am I just another woke bully?
The problem is, when you frame this in terms of self defence, practically any action is justifiable.
I'm a believer that we need to change hearts and minds to make progress; social change isn't a war that can be won by force.
> Should I take the position that I am being deprived of my human rights
I think this reduces to the question of whether or not you think you are being deprived of your human rights. Do you? I think at present there is no generally accepted plan for how polyamorous marriage would work in detail. This is in contrast to gay marriage. At the same time, there is also not much concerted opposition to polyamorous marriage. (E.g., no-one is trying to pass constitutional amendments to rule it out.)
As for poly marriage, yes, there's no attempts to make it even more illegal because it's taboo to the point that nobody brings it up except when conservatives make slippery slope arguments (which gives you an idea of how unpopular it is). Kind of like there was no DOMA in the 1970's; gay marriage was unthinkable.
I feel that you're sidestepping the main question about poly marriage. How would it work in detail? Do you support a specific version of it? In fact, do you actually support it at all, in a real non-rhetorical way?
And while Australian law bans polygamy for married couples, it accepts a person can be in multiple concurrent de facto relationships at once [1]. A (rather small) minority of the Australian Muslim community actively practices polygamy; at most the first wife is recognised as a legal marriage (sometimes even the first marriage is not legally recognised – you can religiously marry without legally marrying, by choosing not to register the religious marriage with the government) – but second and subsequent wives are legally recognised as de facto relationships, and hence have the vast majority (if not all) of the legal rights that they'd have if they were legally married.
It also sometimes happens that a wealthy businessman dies leaving behind a wife and one or more mistresses, and the mistresses then claim in court that they were his de factos, and hence are each entitled to a portion of his estate [2].
This all has the potential to make various legal proceedings more complex than they would have been in the monogamous/monoamorous case. But the complexity is something that Australia's courts and government agencies are already dealing with. I don't think allowing polygamous/polyamorous relationships to have the legal status of "marriage", as opposed to de facto, would actually make any great difference in practice.
[1] https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20200323020828/https://www.hocw.c...
1) Multiple concurrent legal marriages should be treated in exactly the same way that Australian law currently treats multiple concurrent de facto relationships
2) If you are married under Australian law (and that marriage is legally undissolved), you will be able to concurrently validly marry a subsequent person, provided that (a) you have the written consent of all the people to whom you already have undissolved marriages (b) the person you are marrying has seen those written consents and acknowledges in writing having seen them
3) Foreign polygamous legal marriages will be legally recognised as marriages in Australia (provided they meet all the other legal requirements, like consent, not being incestuous, minimum age requirements, etc); however, if the foreign legal system does not impose consent to polygamy requirements equivalent to (2) above, and an existing spouse did not consent (or a new spouse was unaware of the polygamous nature of the marriage), then they will have the right to void the marriage. (This would represent a reintroduction into the Australian legal system of the concept of a "voidable marriage" – that concept used to exist in Australian law until 1975; it was inherited from English law, and still exists in English law until this day.)
Is there any problem with the above proposal? What is it missing? I think most of the meat is actually in (1); the only non-obvious element in (2) is requiring informed consent from both the existing spouse(s) and the new spouse for a polygamous marriage. Multiple concurrent de facto relationships don't require such informed consent – a man with a legal wife can have a concurrent de facto girlfriend, and keep the wife and the girlfriend secret from each other – that's morally quite reprehensible, but doesn't make the de facto relationship legally any less a valid de facto relationship. I think morally, legally recognised polygamy shouldn't be possible without informed consent of everyone involved; and politically, it would be impossible to legalise it without giving such a guarantee.
The complexity in (3) is how to deal with the fact that some foreign legal systems allow polygamy without knowledge and/or consent – for example, some Islamic countries allow a man to take a second wife without his first wife's permission. I think the best solution, is if a person did not consent to a foreign polygamous marriage, they have the right to annul it under Australian law (but, if they are happy/accepting of it, they don't have to use that right, and it can remain valid.) I wouldn’t make it automatically invalid, because there may be cases where everyone involved knew about and consented to the polygamy, even if that consent wasn’t legally required under that foreign country’s laws, but the lack of a formal requirement for consent means there are no written records to prove it exists even when it actually does
- When 2 or more people get married, a new legal entity of the marriage is created. It has members, property and an estate. It pays taxes
- Divorce is from the perspective of a person leaving the marriage and leaves with 1/n of the marital property
- Reform child legitimacy laws (legitimacy doesn't matter, the state advocates for the well-being of the child)
- Rights normally reserved for a spouse are extended to all spouses (such as hospital visitation)
- Mandate that policies that extend to a spouse (such as life insurance) get changed to cover all spouses
And a bunch more stuff I'm sure I haven't thought about. Here's the thing though; I know I'm so incredibly unlikely to see it happen in my lifetime that it feels like a waste of time to get into the details of changing the law. Instead I spend my time on is making my relationships work and giving support to others about how to have happy and healthy non-monogamous relationships.
https://polyadvocacy.ca/
I'm not saying all this just to be difficult. There are genuinely so many ways poly relationships could be legally recognized. For example, would merely removing the prohibition on bigamy be sufficient? Or do we need group marriages rather than some combination of pairwise marriages between members of the group? How does divorce work? If A, B, C and D are in a poly marriage and A and B want to remove C, but D doesn't, how is that resolved?
I'm not in any way saying that there could not be answers to these questions, or that no-one has yet suggested answers. I just expect any serious advocacy for poly marriage to demonstrate a consensus across a wide range of the community on what the correct answers are. In the case of gay marriage this was much easier to achieve. Once gay rights advocates agreed on gay marriage as a goal, it was almost immediately clear how gay marriage would work. This simply isn't the case for poly marriage.
Western countries would want to make the institution non-discriminatory, which would mean: (1) allow women to have multiple husbands, as well as allowing men to have multiple wives; (2) allow same-sex polygamy, so a woman could have multiple wives or a man multiple husbands; (3) require knowledge and consent, so a person cannot marry a new spouse without consent of their existing spouse(s), and the new spouse must be aware of those existing spouse(s); (4) open to people of all religions and none, instead of being for Muslims only, or being for members of certain ethnic groups only
(3) actually already exists in some countries – for example, Singapore requires consent of existing spouse to contract a valid polygamous marriage – so that element isn't new. (Although some other countries allow a husband to take a second wife without the first wife's consent.)
(4) isn't historically novel either – although in recent times, Islam has been the only major religion to commonly allow polygamy, it has been widespread in human history and has never been unique to Islam. Indeed, polygamy for non-Muslims is legal in a number of African countries, for example South Africa – former South African President Jacob Zuma legally has four wives, and he isn't Muslim, he follows Pentecostal Christianity
Nor is (1) historically novel – a number of traditional cultures have polyandry, although in the contemporary world no country legally recognises it. (Well, apparently, polyandry is theoretically legal in Gabon, but unknown in practice.)
The only element of the above that's truly historically novel is (2), allowing same-sex polygamy. But, I don't see how that historical novelty is an issue. There's nothing special about same-sex polygamy which makes it somehow more complex than opposite-sex polygamy is.
> For example, would merely removing the prohibition on bigamy be sufficient? Or do we need group marriages rather than some combination of pairwise marriages between members of the group?
Compared to multiple concurrent two-person marriages, group marriage is historically very rare, and isn't legally recognised in any country today. Given that, I think it would be most logical to start with pairwise marriage only. If people really want group marriage, they can campaign for that separately. Given a group marriage can be simulated by a collection of pairwise marriages between the group members, does the lack of group marriage – in a society which allows polygamous pairwise marriage – really pose any issue?
> Once gay rights advocates agreed on gay marriage as a goal, it was almost immediately clear how gay marriage would work. This simply isn't the case for poly marriage.
That really isn't true. Given over 50 countries worldwide already have poly marriage, we can just do what they do, minus the discriminatory parts, none of which are essential to the concept.
I think perhaps it might make a bit more sense if you replace “marriage rights” with something such as “right to life”, which might be easier to relate to. And to make it more even, let us replace Brendan Eich with one of those two-faced comic book serial killers who is a functioning successful part of society in the workplace but outside of it likes killing people. Nobody in particular, just people in general.
Now the question posed is, if you had no idea if they were a serial killer, would you work with them? The answer to that is “of course”: you know no reason not to. However, this issue is slightly different, because by some means it has been revealed that he is in fact a serial killer, but somehow this isn’t strictly illegal or anything so he’s coming in to work anyways. At work he’s great but once you leave work you are concerned (in general, not because he’s going to target you in particular) that he may be waiting in your bedroom to kill you.
Now we have a curious question of what we should do with this person. From a logical perspective, which is the one made in the comments you’re responding to, nothing should be done: removing him from his position doesn’t stop him from killing people, and if we do fire him we lose out on him entirely. I hope you can understand why someone might hold that position. And from that perspective, I think that they would likely respond to your letter with “you have every right to voice your criticisms, but I think you are being irrational because I cannot see how your letter asking Brendan Eich to be removed from his position helps your case because he can still privately donate all he wants regardless” (unless you in fact believe that he should not be able to hold employment at all and thus be unable to donate money because he is penniless.)
On your side, I think the argument is now fairly obvious: in the situation I described, I know very many people who would be hesitant to work with such an individual. We’re human, we associate qualities of a person and color all their actions through that lens. While you say you would be happy working with people of the opinions you mentioned that supposedly don’t directly affect you, I would strongly suspect it would affect how you thought of them at least subconsciously. Really, I think the opposition you have against working with someone who does not support LGBT rights is just this except amplified to the point where you can no longer try to correct your biases for that person because of it affecting you personally. And I think there is probably a very real negative effect of people working with others who privately hold views they don’t agree with, because that subconscious tension is always there even though if you look at it “rationally” it should have nothing to do with your work. And really, in many cases we seem to consider it OK to get rid of people who make everyone around them feel or perform worse.
Now, is that a valid reason to terminate someone? That’s exactly the argument here. Personally I tend to lean more towards “no” than most people would, I think. I am fortunate enough to not have anyone try to restrict my freedom of marriage or association to my knowledge, but I have worked with people who have never personally done anything to me but I have found out (usually after the fact, to be honest) that they hold fairly string views that I not only disagree with but I could consider attacking a category I might fit into (“people who defend freedom of speech of the alt-right should be punched”, “brown people are all H1Bs that take our jobs and we should send them back to their own country”). Notably, it was never an issue that I think I could measure impacting our working relationship, in many cases which I think I could prove for a fact because I didn’t know they held such views and they weren’t aware that I fit into the categories that they were talking about. And quite often I think we actually even did pretty well when we both were aware of this because it would just not come up in a working relationship. Would I work with them again? I think I would. I’ve come to realize that I personally have to separate people from their private (or private until solicited) opinions, because more often than not when I think I meet someone who shares my views on human rights they actually don’t and I’m just completely unaware. So for my own sanity I just have to separate them.
Skinning animals alive for fun is a criminal offence in many jurisdictions (animal cruelty), and recognised as a symptom of mental illness (it is in the DSM-5 criteria for conduct disorder, and maybe other disorders too).
By contrast, donating to a mainstream political campaign is not a crime, and is not recognised as a symptom of mental illness
So I think the analogy you are trying to make here is a poor one
Assuming you're not opposed to the idea of marriage altogether, try to imagine different-sex marriages being illegal. Do you see now? (Just trying to help.)
Anyway, back on the political question, on one side you have real people being affected and on the other you have vague and abstract claims of tradition. This sure makes it feel wrong to those people affected.
Edit: Perhaps the real problem is with the framing of the question. Some people just want the right to a legally recognized partnership. Some people see marriage as having religious implications. In any case it's a complicated issue that we're not going to solve here.
I tend to think that the state shouldn't be in the business of marriage at all. If private clubs / religions want to recognise a special ceremony between whatever groupings make sense for their club (someone suggested polyamorous families above) then they should go ahead.
The state should have nothing to do with it, not recognising relationships that have had such a ceremony as different to relationships without. Now I know that is not currently the case, but I'd be more in favour of removing state recognition of any marriage than changing who the state lets get married.
Places where it is genuinely useful to make the distinction should be replaced with thought-out duck-typing rather than nominative typing - if you've been living with someone as a partner for a certain amount of time, or are clearly trying to bring up children together then you should get the presumptive 'next of kin' status that the law finds helpful regardless of your ceremonial status. Or perhaps people should just have the right to add others to 'next of kin' status at will.
People have all sorts of private opinions. I hate the DMCA and think it represents an extremely dangerous precedent that completely misrepresents why laws like copyright were created in the first place. The idea is almost more dangerous than the implementation. That said, I think I would be ok with the Mozilla CEO donating to the DMCA as long as he did not take action on that opinion at work. I would be cynical and watching the corporate behaviour like a hawk. I would give little benefit of the doubt in assuming the worst of any official behaviour, policy, or stance that seemed inappropriate. I would be unsympathetic about any consequences that resulted from inappropriately projecting personal values into corporate action. I cannot say that I agree that it is appropriate to take corporate action against somebody for the opinions they hold as a private citizen.
A pharmacist needs to provide birth control even if they personally object to it for religious reasons—-because it is the law. If they don’t, there should be consequences ( perhaps losing their license ). However, it does not follow for me that they should be penalized for stating their opinion privately, at a rally, via donation, or even in the local paper. He has the right to stop his own daughter but not to stop mine. What he does with his family is not a good reason for me to go after his business. Now, I might not support his business. That is my personal decision. I might even suggest that others don’t support him either. I sure hope that this would not lead me to lose my job though. That would not seem at all fair to me. In fact, I would consider shutting down my freedom of speech and action like that to be quite unethical.
This is definitely valid! I thiiink I'd still disagree- in a public-facing leadership role, it's just not that easy to separate personal actions from business-related ones- but it's definitely a view I have some sympathy for. I do get where you're coming from.
That said- Eich resigned. He wasn't fired. And so far I've seen no real evidence that this wasn't just his decision- that he realized he wasn't the best candidate for CEO because of his past actions. Perhaps he really was just pushed out... If you have anything backing that up, I'd like to see it.
Because from what I've read- and that's not too much, so if there's any info I'm missing please fill me in- if I say "I don't like the CEO, I won't donate anymore while he's in charge, and you shouldn't either"...am I in the wrong?
Oh, come on. We all know what "resigned" means, when the one resigning is a CEO.
You say the only reason your partner could immigrate is due to being allowed to marry, but it is actually also due to US immigration laws not recognising civil partnerships or de facto relationships. If they did, your partner could have immigrated even if you weren’t allowed to marry. I don’t know what Eich’s views on immigration laws are (or were), but for all we know he might support such a change to US immigration laws. I think it is very likely that some people who voted for Prop 8 would have supported such a change (I can’t say whether that “some” would have been few or many.) Personally, I think immigration laws should be marriage-neutral, and treat married and unmarried relationships the same.
I think it is an important cultural norm that employees be allowed to engage in small-scale, mainstream, private political activity outside of work without getting in trouble at work for doing so. We need this norm to apply at CEO level as well, because the norm at the top flows downhill to the rest of the company. (“Mainstream” means it doesn’t apply to fringe groups like neo-Nazis; “small-scale” means it no longer applies if employee wants to run for public office, lead an activist group, etc)
(There is possibly an exception for CEOs supporting policies which directly contradict the core business interests of the company; I don’t think marriage laws relate to the core business interests of a browser vendor; DMCA laws are possibly somewhat closer to those core business interests, but even then probably not close enough - if Mozilla’s product was a content platform in its own right, as opposed to being a tool used to access other people’s content platforms, then DMCA would have been directly relevant to their core business.)
I think the biggest blame here lies, not with people who called for Eich’s sacking, but with the failure of the Board to publicly come to his defence. A CEO can weather any amount of public criticism so long as the Board still publicly supports them.
Or, heck, for all I know the donation was a complete accident. Maybe he just slipped and his checkbook fell out of his pocket onto a pen in juuust such a way that it signed a check to that organization. Somebody could have even stolen his identity to make the donation!
But when he refused to explain that donation, it's a lot harder to assume good faith, that he totally supports my rights but just has a problem with calling it "marriage", or that it was just a tragic checkbook-related trip-and-fall accident. Maybe he made public statements explaining his views that I haven't seen- links appreciated.
I myself wish he’d explained his views in more detail. However, I am not sure if his doing so would have helped much. Whatever he said, some people likely would have tried to twist his words in to making them sound as unreasonable as possible, and it would not surprise me if his PR team were advising him that explaining and defending his views in detail would only add fuel to the fire. Also, if one views it in terms of the principle that employees (CEOs included) should be allowed to privately express their political views by donation, then demanding a public explanation is undermining that principle and turning private views into public ones. It is possible that respect for that principle is one of the reasons behind Eich’s refusal to publicly elaborate his views on the issue.
/thread
It’s sad that Eich’s beliefs are still being defended here.
And again, I am not defending the belief itself, but the expression thereof.
No doubt there are thousands of people from your partner's country who would like US citizenship and can't get it. You're demanding a special privilege for your partner and then talking as though it were a natural right. (My country doesn't give citizenship for any kind of marriage, FWIW).
> You're demanding a special privilege for your partner and then talking as though it were a natural right.
It's not a special privilege. It's a privilege people who are straight get but not people who are gay, which is not okay.
It's the same kind of misrepresentation as saying Eich spent $1000 to hurt people like the poster. That's my point. No-one in these debates is actually setting out to hurt other people, yet from the other side that's how it's experienced.
I'm also pretty sure that you draw the line somewhere and I'd be surprised if you were fine with siblings being allowed to marry each other, even when they're deeply in love, they take care of each other like other couples and them being together doesn't harm you or anyone else the slightest.
Edit: My take on this is: Even though I'm married myself, I don't think marriage should be part of the legal system or the concern of the state. If the state wants to support people who take care of each other, it should state specific requirements and everyone who fulfils them gets the benefits, no matter who they are. And if people want to get married they can do that as part of a private ceremony, provided by the church or whatever, and if they can't live without the consequences of being married today, they can sign a private contract to their liking. No reason to involve the state in this private matter.
This is a valid position but the Prop 8 people showed no sign of believing it. They were, reserving marriage for themselves, not working to change the laws first, and this was very directly stated both in the language of the proposition and their advocacy for it.
Remember, gay marriage was legal at the time. They could have de-privileged marriage as a legal construct with no unfair impact but put no effort whatsoever into that. It was entirely focused on removing access to those benefits from gay people.
I lived in a relatively conservative part of California at the time, was canvassed a bit, a fair chunk of my family are Orange County Republicans, etc. The language was uniformly an argument on religious principles, and if you suggested reforming the laws which privilege marriage they were profoundly uninterested in those options.
You won't be singing the same tune when they take away the tax breaks, your right to visit your partner in hospital, your right to live in the same country as your partner should you be of different nationalities, etc. etc.
I'm so sick of straight people who essentially say "well if gay people can get married then I guess marriage shouldn't be a real thing any more". In 100% of cases these people turn out not to have even minimally thought through the implications of this. But maybe suddenly stripping straight people of their right to get married would be the only effective way to stop the endless stream of heartless and hurtful comments on threads like this.
I don't see how any of that should depend on people being married? All but one of those things are already possible where I come from without being married, and the last example could be easily fixed.
> I'm so sick of straight people who essentially say "well if gay people can get married then I guess marriage shouldn't be a real thing any more". In 100% of cases these people turn out not to have even minimally thought through the implications of this.
If have thought this through pretty thoroughly. So before we continue, answer the one simple question: where do you draw the lines, that exclude certain types of partnerships from getting married? If you draw it then you're doing the same thing opponents of gay-marriage do, and if you don't draw it marriage becomes a stupid concept within the legal system.
> But maybe suddenly stripping straight people of their right to get married would be the only effective way to stop the endless stream of heartless and hurtful comments on threads like this.
That is exactly what I was saying: Get rid of marriage as a concept within the legal system of a state.
Why do you think this idea is relevant here? It's only relevant if you want to argue that gay marriages shouldn't be legally recognized because no marriages should be legally recognized.
You mention that you're married yourself. If you really wanted the state not to be involved, you could just have conducted a non-legally-recognized marriage ceremony. So why didn't you? My guess is that you (a) didn't actually feel strongly about this issue at all and (b) wanted the many benefits conferred by a legally-recognized marriage. As to (b), gay people want these benefits too.
If Eich had donated money towards an organization that opposes marriages of more than two people, so this discussion had been about those types of relationships instead, I would have brought forward the same arguments. But I have the feeling that Eich wouldn't had lost its job in that case in the first place.
> Why do you think this idea is relevant here? It's only relevant if you want to argue that gay marriages shouldn't be legally recognized because no marriages should be legally recognized
No my take is: Either make all relationships legal (of course as long as none of the participants are exploited), if you insist on keeping marriages as a legal concept. Or, preferably, get rid of marriages altogether from the states point of view, since this is much more efficient and practical.
I'd find your opposition to the legal recognition of any marriages more credible if you divorced your wife in solidarity :)
No, again: If opposite-sex marriage is legal, then I think any other type of partnership should be allowed to become married as well, whether its same-sex with two men, 20 women, a whole family, ...
> I'd find your opposition to the legal recognition of any marriages more credible if you divorced your wife in solidarity :)
Why do you assume I'm married to a woman? I'm married because we get the most benefits out of it and my partner is kind of sentimental and has a different opinion about that topic, so I'm doing them a favor as well.
Like with every other human being, my views and actions aren't always consistent. For example I also don't like child labour, but here I am typing this on a machine that likely made quite a few children suffer.
I didn't respond negatively to that comment. I provided an explanation, that those people who object to the idea of gay marriage do the same thing as almost everyone else, even many who are in favor of gay marriage: They have a certain image or ideal in their head, of how a marriage has to look like, and everything that doesn't fit that image feels wrong to them and shouldn't be legal. Hence almost everyone wants to exclude certain types of relationships from getting married.
I explicitly focused on that argument:
> They very explicitly wanted to take a right away from other people, even though they suffered no plausible harm from those people exercising that right.
from the comment, which IMHO is a misleading argument, since I don't believe that many gay marriage supporters take it seriously. So you should finally answer my question, so I know where you stand: Do you believe that that argument is valid, i.e. are you also fine with a mother (50) marrying her son (30) or 12 people getting married? According to that argument it should be legal as well, since they don't harm anyone, but I have a strong feeling that even most gay marriage proponents wouldn't support such a type of marriage. So they're line would just be somewhere else.
If you are genuinely interested, see p. 208 of the following paper: https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
1. I never put forward an argument against gay marriage, yet the paper is all about debunking arguments against gay marriage.
2. I don't consider it a bad effect if other types relationships were allowed to get married, it's the opposite, I'd consider it a huge improvement to what we have right now. Yet the paper assumes someone said: "If we allow gay marriage, we will also have to allow [policy X], which would unquestionably be bad."
Hence I must assume, that you either didn't read or understand anything I wrote, or you didn't read the paper.
No, my point is that if someone brings forward the argument that same-sex marriage is fine because it doesn't harm anyone, but they then oppose other types of marriages that don't harm anyone, they obviously don't take their own argument seriously. Hence they shouldn't be surprised if others don't take it seriously as well, but they actually criticize them for doing so.
> It explains that it is not at all difficult to find good reasons for expanding marriage to include same sex couples without expanding it in every other conceivable way.
Which is completely irrelevant to this discussion, because the reason that was brought forward for expanding marriage was "it's fine if it does no harm to anyone", not some other reasons which prevent a slippery slope.
You're basically saying, that if the other user had brought up a better argument, my critique wouldn't apply.
Edit: But just out of curiosity, what argument would logically allow a same-sex marriage of men or women, who aren't closely related to each other, but exclude two brothers or sisters from marrying each other?
This isn't presented as an argument for the legality of gay marriage; rather, it already presupposes that gay couples have the legal right to get married (as indeed they did in California before proposition 8 passed). It's uncharitable and implausible to assume that the OP would be able to present no argument for the legalisation of gay marriage other than "it wouldn't harm anyone". It certainly doesn't advance the discussion to attribute to them a weak argument that they didn't even make.
>But just out of curiosity, what argument would logically allow a same-sex marriage of men or women, who aren't closely related to each other, but exclude two brothers or sisters from marrying each other?
What argument would logically allow an opposite sex marriage of a man and a woman who aren't clearly related to each other but exclude brothers or sisters from marrying each other? Unless you think that there's some kind of analogy between same sex relationships and incest, then same sex marriage is totally irrelevant here. Can't think of a reason to ban incestuous marriages? Then the slippery slope starts from opposite sex marriage, not from same sex marriage.
> What argument would logically allow an opposite sex marriage of a man and a woman who aren't clearly related to each other but exclude brothers or sisters from marrying each other?
I can't think of one, which is why I never claimed there are good reasons to not allow such type of marriages, unlike you. I said multiple times that I'm completely fine with all types of marriages and relationships that don't exploit or harm people.
> Can't think of a reason to ban incestuous marriages? Then the slippery slope starts from opposite sex marriage, not from same sex marriage.
Yes, which is why I'd allow such type marriages. You however claimed there are good reasons that the slippery slope either stops after same-sex marriage or doesn't even start in the first place. So would you just answer my question and give me one of those good reasons, why for example sibling marriages are bad and normal same sex marriages are fine?
I hesitate to engage because anyone who does this is unlikely to be interested in having a serious discussion. But here's a point you might have missed. Over the past hundred years or so, there has been a huge shift in the perception of the rigidity of gender roles. The expansion of the legal definition of marriage to include same gender couples is a logical continuation of this trend. If men and women are fundamentally equal, it's hard to justify gender restrictions on marriage. In contrast, attitudes to incest have not shifted much at all. Indeed, if anything, cousin marriages are less socially acceptable than they were previously. Why is this? I think the answer is obvious. People have seen many examples of normal, successful, non-abusive long term gay relationships. But they have not seen similar evidence in the case of incestuous relationships.
This being said, I think you'll find that most people don't actually care very much whether incestuous marriages are legal. And indeed, around the world, the extent to which incest is legally prohibited varies greatly. Do you even have any evidence that most supporters of gay marriage are opposed to the legalisation of incestuous marriages (in jurisdictions where they are not already legal)? Or indeed, can you point to any concrete evidence of gay rights advocates campaigning to impose additional restrictions on incestuous relationships?
Here in Australia, the government has decided that unmarried couples in long-term marriage-like relationships (with characteristics like intentions of permanence, sharing of finances and mutual financial support, living together, raising children together, etc) should be treated equivalently to married couples, and receive the same rights and entitlements as married couples do – those long-term marriage-like unmarried relationships are called de facto relationships. This has been enshrined in law, and is now mostly true (modulo some obscure legal technicalities, and the fact that some government agencies at times fail to adhere to the spirit or even letter of the law – although to my knowledge immigration is the main and maybe even only offender). So, in Australia, there are no special tax breaks for being married – unmarried people in de facto relationships can claim the same tax breaks. Family law courts, etc, treat long-term de facto couples as if they were married for issues like property settlements and child custody. This gave a somewhat different character to the same-sex marriage debate in Australia – unmarried couples, both opposite-sex and same-sex, already had pretty much the same rights as opposite-sex married couples, and extending the right of marriage was primarily a symbolic statement of equality rather than a change in people's real world rights and entitlements.
I think other countries, including the US, should do the same thing as Australia has – extend long-term/serious unmarried couples the same legal rights and entitlements as married couples.
And once you've done that, there really is no obstacle to abolishing marriage as a secular legal institution. People who want to participate in it, either as a cultural institution or as a religious institution (or both) are free to do so, but there really is no compelling reason for the government to get involved.
This impractical pie in the sky stuff about abolishing marriage as a legal institution is almost always just a lame excuse for opposing same sex marriage. I'm not sure why you're bringing it up or why you think it's relevant to Brendan Eich.
I already said that, for the case of immigration/visas, it wasn't working that way in Australia; but, that is the only case in Australia in which I know about. But, that's a problem with the Australian immigration system that could be fixed with sufficient political will; it isn't a problem with the principle that serious/long-term unmarried couples should have the exact same rights as married couples, it is just a correctable failure to fully and correctly implement that principle in practice.
For many years I was in an opposite-sex living-together relationship, including having a child together, without being married. (We did eventually get married.) I know people in my extended family who have lived together (in opposite-sex relationships) for 30 years, had kids, never got married, never experienced themselves as being disadvantaged in any way compared to legally married couples. So my lived experience in Australia tells me that unmarried couples rarely or never experience any discrimination on the basis of their marital status, outside of the immigration system. (And maybe some religious institutions, but that has nothing to do with the government or legal system.)
> People usually used this impractical pie in the sky stuff about abolishing marriage as a legal institution as a lame excuse for opposing same sex marriage
When did I say I oppose same-sex marriage? I support same-sex marriage, but I also support abolishing marriage. The two positions are not mutually exclusive – so long as the state is in the business of recognising marriage, it should treat same-sex and opposite-sex couples equally – but, it should get out of that business altogether.
> I'm not sure why you're bringing it up
I didn't bring it up; someone else did. But since it has become part of the conversation, why shouldn't I share my view on it?
The idea of removing marriage as a legal institution and "fixing" 101 other rules that used to depend on marriage is, as I said, pie in the sky stuff. This silly idea is great cover for homophobes. It's harmless to discuss it in the abstract, but not so much in the context of the question of whether gay people should have fundamental rights.
If immigration officials are not treating married and unmarried couples equally, that's a problem with either the law or its enforcement in practice – both of which are fixable with sufficient political will – not a problem with the principle that married and unmarried couples ought to receive identical treatment.
If the principle of equal treatment were legislated, and if that legislation were consistently enforced, what then would be the problem with abolishing state recognition of marriage (for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples equally)? I can't see how there could be any.
> You "support" gay marriage in rather a quiet and ineffective way, I'd say.
In 2017, Australia had a national postal plebiscite on the question "Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?". (Technically called the "Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey", since by calling it a "survey" the government was able to carry it out without the permission of Parliament.) I voted "Yes". I told my friends and family I was voting "Yes". I even posted a photo of my "Yes" ballot paper on Facebook (I covered up the barcode so that I didn't spoil my vote by doing so). Over 60% of my fellow Australians voted the same way. Within a month of the result being announced, Australia's Marriage Act was changed to reflect the result of that vote. So how exactly was my support ineffective?
In your pie in the sky world, I'm sure they will. In reality, not so much.
I deleted my point about your support being "quiet and ineffective", as I didn't have a justification for that - sorry. But I do think you are very naive in thinking that undermining the importance of marriage as a legal institution is a good way to advance rights for gay couples.
Right. Because government agents and agencies never systematically violate equal treatment mandates.
In the case of immigration/visas, a big problem is that (in many legal systems) most immigration/visa decisions are not judicially reviewable. (There are often exceptions for certain areas of immigration law, such as refugee status determinations and deportation proceedings, but if you are refused a visa from outside the country you usually have no legal recourse.) This means that, even if you believe you have been discriminated against on a legally prohibited ground, no court will even hear your claim.
I think that's wrong, and that should be changed. And it impacts all kinds of people; I'm sure some people get discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality when seeking visas and have no legal recourse, but plenty of people get discriminated against on other grounds – or even just get visas denied for completely inscrutable reasons (e.g. Daniel Stenberg's continual denial of a US visa) – and have no recourse either. But this is a problem which could be fixed with sufficient political will; the law could be amended to grant rights of judicial review in all visa/immigration matters.
Another point: you can say "even if the law says that married and unmarried couples should be treated equally, immigration officials will ignore/violate that law", but you can equally say "even if the law says that same-sex and opposite-sex married couples should be treated equally, immigration officials will ignore/violate that law". I don't understand how, the risk that some immigration official might discriminate against a same-sex couple is a good argument for retaining the legal recognition of marriage, since immigration officials can discriminate against same-sex couples whether marriage is a legally recognised institution or not.
This is how right-wing activists frame it but it’s thoroughly dishonest, not to mention unscientific. A baby is a human child which has been born. The contraception options those people oppose affect what is at that point a few cells. Abortion is always well before the point of viability and increasingly rare the later it gets – you’re talking cases with severe health risks and a long way from being developed enough to have any chance of surviving in a NICU.
The key issue in the abortion debate is – "at which point in the development of an individual human does it gain the moral status of a person". Some say at conception, some say at birth, some say at some point in between the two. The natural sciences (including the biological and medical sciences) can't directly answer that question. It depends on what are the correct criteria for an entity to have the moral status of a person, and that is a question for morality/ethics/moral philosophy, not a question for the natural sciences. At best, if we have agreed on moral principles to determine the answer to that question, then the natural sciences can provide factual information which can be combined with those moral principles to reach a moral conclusion; but, in this case, the different sides don't agree on what are the right moral principles to apply, which is a question beyond the proper scope of the natural sciences. Hence, I don't think either side's position is inherently "unscientific", although people on both sides of the debate are fairly called that when they wrongly present the debate as something which science can settle.
> A baby is a human child which has been born
"Baby" is a term of everyday language; I don't know if it has a formal scientific definition, but even if it does, you can't presume someone using the word outside of explicitly scientific contexts means the word in some technical scientific sense. In everyday language, "baby" is the correct term to use for an unborn child (at least one which is sufficiently far along); I know when my wife was pregnant, she had a baby in her womb, and when she was pregnant with our daughter, we told her big brother that "there's a baby inside mummy's tummy".
Is "baby" the right word for a newly conceived embryo? Not in many people's usage; in my own usage, an embryo isn't a baby yet, but it is going to become one at some ill-defined point in the future, yet prior to birth. However, maybe in some people's usage, a newly conceived embryo is properly called a "baby". Different people use language in different ways. And how the term "baby" is or should be defined in everyday language is another question which is outside the proper scope of the biological and medical sciences.
> Abortion is always well before the point of viability and increasingly rare the later it gets
So, a friend of mine who identifies as "pro-life" told me about a case in the state of Victoria, Australia, in the year 2011, in which a termination of pregnancy was performed at >= 37 weeks gestation for a "maternal psychosocial indication" (i.e. no confirmed or suspected congenital abnormality). I didn't believe him at first, but it is in the official statistics (see Table 6.20b, page 141 of [1]).
I don't support a complete ban on abortion (possibly my "pro-life" friend does). But I do think there is something wrong with a state's abortion laws if healthy babies can be legally aborted at >=37 weeks for a maternal psychosocial indication. I don't see how that morally differs from performing infant euthanasia post-birth for a maternal psychosocial indication.
[1] https://www.bettersafercare.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2...
Its sometimes framed that way, but since the situation is sui generis in other ways (no one ever has entitlement to another human's body the way necessary for compulsory continuation of pregnancy in any other circumstance) there are other valid framings; particularly, its equally valid to frame it as "what is the extent of the right of bodily autonomy against intrusions by other humans".
In truth, there is no single key issue, and there is a fair degree of correlation between the differences on those issues, so its often difficult to even pull one out as decisive for any individual, much less for the general debate.
But, even if one were to agree that a woman has a right to bodily autonomy which outweighs the right of her unborn child to life, how does that apply to a case like the one I referred to, of a termination at >= 37 weeks for a maternal psychosocial indication? If the mother didn’t want the child, why not permit it to be born alive, then put it up for adoption? It seems clear that particular line of argument, whether or not it is correct, is insufficient to justify the law and practice of the state of Victoria, Australia (and the same may possibly be true of some other jurisdictions as well.)
You could start with the first case I mentioned: opposition to contraception, which is something American right-wingers are increasingly trying to class as abortion even though there are nothing more than unimplanted cells at that point.
Most dictionaries define baby as starting at birth. Medical science has been able to push the point of viability back earlier (fortunate for the prematurely born children we know) but that’s nowhere near the first 8-9 weeks when the vast majority of abortions occur. Where science comes into this is answering questions about development: when the brain is a handful of cells, without the major developments which start on the path to cognition it’s not what almost anyone would call a “baby”. (Yes, politics means that more people will now claim otherwise then did before this was turned into a major political recruiting issue in the 1970s. We don’t need to let bad faith arguments redefine common words.)
My personal benchmark: when would you have a funeral? Somewhere between a third and half of the fertilized embryos spontaneously abort. If you wouldn’t have a funeral or a forensic investigation, it’s something else.
As for the case you mentioned, I can see that’s a favorite talking point of Australian anti-abortion groups who are trying to portray it as common. Given that it’s a single record for common medical procedure my first thought would be that we don’t have enough information to know that it wasn’t a data entry or classification error. The narratives portraying these situations as doctors happily killing viable babies have a long history of turning out to be gross misrepresentations of very painful medical situations.
Ask yourself how likely it is that this would happen and NOBODY would say a word - no horrified nurse going to the police, no clerk calling the news, etc. - and ask whether that would happen in the situation as portrayed by abortion opponents? You keep using this data point in your comments rather than an extremely rare outlier so it’s really important to your argument to establish that it’s a real and valid case since you have exactly one data point.
Which forms of contraception are you talking about? Which "American right-wingers"? (And why pick on Americans? You seem to be at least partially talking about the moral views of conservative Roman Catholics, whose views are largely the same everywhere and have nothing to do with whether they are Americans or not.)
Some people believe that the moral status of an individual human being begins at conception. Some forms of contraception may prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg. If you believe a fertilized egg has the moral status of a person – a belief which is neither "scientific" nor "unscientific", but rather beyond the scope of the natural sciences to judge – then forms of contraception which prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg are plausibly immoral. Everyone can choose which moral beliefs they want to accept and which they want to reject, but either way moral beliefs are outside the proper domain of the natural sciences.
There is some controversy over whether particular forms of emergency contraception do indeed prevent implanatation or not. Some people have taken positions in that controversy which may not be supported by the scientific evidence, and so on that limited issue may be "unscientific", although I don't think anyone can fairly deny that it is at least possible that some forms of emergency contraception do sometimes prevent implantation. Similarly, although for IUDs the primary method of action happens pre-fertilization, my understanding of the scientific evidence is that IUDs do sometimes prevent implantation.
Quite separately, some religious people – in particular conservative Roman Catholics – believe methods of contraception which only act prior to conception, such as condoms, to be immoral. That's a moral belief, so (like all other moral beliefs) I can't see how it can be "scientific" or "unscientific"; and that moral belief is a separate topic from abortion. (Nobody claims condoms are a form of abortion, not even conservative Catholics who believe that condom use is immoral.)
> Most dictionaries define baby as starting at birth.
I don't agree. Which dictionaries are you talking about?
I've always considered the OED to be the most prestigious English dictionary, and it currently defines "baby" as "An unborn or newly born human being; a fetus, an infant" (sense I.1.a). That definition clearly includes the unborn in its scope, although possibly not the embryo. (And indeed, I myself would not call an embryo a "baby", although it is important to note that dictionaries are descriptive not prescriptive, so if somebody else does call an embryo a "baby", you can't argue they are wrong simply on the basis of a dictionary.)
> Where science comes into this is answering questions about development: when the brain is a handful of cells, without the major developments which start on the path to cognition it’s not what almost anyone would call a “baby”
It is not the job of the biological sciences to determine the meaning of the word "baby" in everyday use.
It is not the job of the biological sciences to answer moral questions, such as when does an individual gain the moral status of a person.
Embryology tells us that, at the point of implantation, the embryo contains around 200-300 cells, which are still largely undifferentiated. Nobody disputes that.
The question of whether those 200-300 cells constitute a "baby" (when that word is meant as a term of everyday language) or whether they have the moral status of a person, is not a question within the proper scope of the science of embryology to answer.
> As for the case you mentioned, I can see that’s a favorite talking point of Australian anti-abortion groups who are trying to portray it as common.
I've never heard anyone try to portray it as common. Everyone I've heard talking about it has presented it as a single case (out of around 14,000 abortions performed in Victoria in that year). (And, as far as I know, has not been repeated since.) The argument, however, is that whatever you think about those 14,000 as a whole (of which a mere 378 were performed post 20 weeks), surely you can agree there is something wrong with this particular case, and with laws which legally allow it. I think a lot of people who have no problem at all with abortion early in pregnancy – something which I personally support being legally readily available – think abortion of a healthy baby at 37 weeks should not be legal (and yet, under Victoria's laws, it is).
> Given that it’s a single record for common medical procedure my first thought would be that we don’t have enough information to know that it wasn’t a data entry or classification error.
So, it is in an official government report, prepared by a committee, whose members include specialist obstetricians, paediatricians, professors of midwifery, etc. Don't you think they would have noticed an outlier like this, and investigate it? The committee that prepared the report has access to the identifying details of the case (name of hospital, full name of patient, patient's date of birth, date of procedure, medical record numbers, etc). They certainly have the ability to inquire with their colleagues at the hospital where it was performed (we don't know that detail, but they do) and double check it is correct (Australian medical privacy laws have an exception for collection of government statistics, so that would not have been issue). Furthermore, there was enough controversy about it after the report's release, they surely would have investigated that data point afterwards if they hadn't already done so beforehand. If it was something as simple as a data entry error, I'm sure they would have been happy to publicly announce that. Given all of this, I think your suggestion is unlikely.
> The narratives portraying these situations as doctors happily killing viable babies have a long history of turning out to be gross misrepresentations of very painful medical situations.
I'm sure there is some very painful story behind it. My own guess is it is probably something like a young teenager (such as a 13 year old) pregnant due to rape/incest and who is actively suicidal. Obviously that's a very horrible situation, but even if my guess is right, I don't think it should be permissible to kill a healthy >=37 week baby, whether pre-birth or post-birth, even in such a horrible situation.
I think they really should have released more details about it – of course they can't publicly release any personally identifying details, but a few extra details might put the data point in greater context.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg#Association_wit...
Seems like the ideal candidate to me.
Whilst the UK obviously isn't exactly the same politically as the US (though they have a huge amount of political cross-polination) I get the distinct impression that pedo advocacy by people of the right tribe is treated as far less of an offence than holding views that are actually widespread but go against the woke consensus.
Anyway, we're now way off topic, which is why I didn't want to go into this kind of detail in the first place.
But lets not mix things up here. People that are conservatives and even homophobic in my experience have more to do with the cultural views of a giving period that they were raised and i think that in some cases, we must not take things lightly, but also give some time for them to rethink their values.
And im pretty sure that kicking these people on the teeth wont help them to get integrated at all. The only thing they will learn in to lie better and be a better hypocrite.
Here public/private boundaries are very important. So if the guy is tweeting about this point of view and damaging the image of the company, of course, this would be a good motive to fire him.
But if he believe this in private, dont force others in the company to follow his socio-political views and is good in what hes doing, even if you dont like his political views, we should not fire anyone because of this.
Pedophiles on the other way are people with very harsh psychological problems that may lead them to commit a very serious crime. You dont need to resort to this sort of rethorical trick to make me understand, as i already did before (you already have my empathy here as im on your side).
Really, with time we learn that we are all handicapped here and there, and by becoming more humble about that, we learn that we need to accept and work with people with a lot of different views, backgrounds and actions or else we are all getting cancelled.
We need to be more careful about social sidelining people, because we will just turn some people that were mildly into something to become real radicals and also at the same time losing good hands that would otherwise help us into build a better future.
What make the most harm to the society: A guy contributing in private, financially, to entities that lobby for policies that goes against gay people or a CEO and board with impeccable and fair social and political views but that end doing actions that harm the core of a company that is best know for their engineering culture, good products, open source and freedom values?
Because Mozilla will be vaporized in the coming years.. does it really worth it?
Not sure at what level within a company that becomes a relevant question. It's not for store clerks and store managers. It is for the CEO.