14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Mozilla’s CEO Brendan Eich announced that he was resigning his brand new position and leaving the company after a scandal revolving around his support for an anti-gay marriage bill in California several years ago.
The company says it stands for equality and freedom of speech, and given the fact that Eich’s own freedom of opinion wasn’t respected that much for the sake of Mozilla’s public image, many believed it was wrong for the new CEO to have to leave the position so soon.
In fact, they went as far as to suggest that Eich was most likely pushed to resign, although the official announcement says that he made the decision on his own.
“Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He’s made this decision for Mozilla and our community,” said Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, as well as former CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
The CEO had originally tried to go through the crisis the best he could. Eich, who is one of Mozilla’s founders and has played an important role at the company in the past decade, including by inventing JavaScript, said in an interview that he believed himself to be a good fit for the company’s CEO job.
He also said that his personal views about same-sex marriage should have no weight on his position as CEO of Mozilla, since that was not something he let affect his work.
Despite his statements, it wasn’t long before the scandal flared up and Eich mysteriously stepped down for the good of the company.
Even though this seems to be a decision made out of his own free will, it wasn’t long before Firefox’s Feedback page was flooded with negative comments about the issue, accusing Mozilla of forcing Eich to take the step.
Mozilla defended itself, saying that they had all actually tried to get him to stay. “Board members and senior executives tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another role or to stay actively involved with Mozilla as a volunteer contributor. Brendan decided that it was better for himself and for Mozilla to sever all ties, at least for now,” reads an FAQ posted over the weekend.
The organization mentioned that just a handful of people had demanded Eich’s resignation, out of the 1,000 employees working for Mozilla.
This lets Mozilla without a CEO, although more information on this front will be revealed this week.