Technology

The fact that you would consider your counterfactual a mirror image is itself problematic.

It's definitely an imperfect mirror image, yes. One is a private person spending $1,000 of his own money contributing personally to a political campaign (for something fairly abhorrent, I agree.) The other is a public foundation spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of the money it's been entrusted with on various things which don't seem to line up with what I think most people's idea of their mission would be (i.e. software). I glossed over the asymmetry in the analogy to make a point but they're actually wildly different situations.

If you consider the EFF left wing, I think that says a bit more about where you stand.

What on earth are you talking about? I genuinely can't even make sense of you got yourself to this leap of logic.

Mozilla I think is generally understood as a software organization. The EFF didn't get their start by making a web browser called "EFF" which now has been rebranded as "EFF Firefox" and collects ad revenue for them through partnerships. I do realize that the Mozilla Foundation's mission statement now says they support general internet activism -- which, again, is fine -- but how you got from there to thinking anything about what I think about the EFF is genuinely very weird.

Also, I've contributed to the EFF. Have you?

The original article was outrage-bate blog spam, with random Capitalized Words and the prolific use of “scare quotes.” It doesn’t even say anything. No charges of misinformation. No citation of law. Just “They have a Billion Dollars!!” kinds of sentences.

Did you dig into its sources? I did. I'm sort of in agreement with you that it smells of some kind of right-wing hit job (like "HOW DARE THEY give money to this woman when she's on THE LEFT"), and I think I pointed out up above that obviously Mozilla has the right to support left-wing causes with their money if they want to, even if it makes some right wing person VERY upset. I would just think that Eich has the same right. Even if it makes you very upset. Doesn't he?

Be that as it may, specific things that I went back to its original sources and verified were:

• They're spending less money on software development
• They gave almost half a million dollars to a one-woman consulting outfit without much explanation of what got produced (for them or for the world at large) in return

It said some other specific things that I didn't dig into enough (that it paid one executive around $5 million dollars personally, which seems like a lot) (that they're claiming to people that they rely on people's donations to keep operating when they don't) (etc). But, I poked around enough to determine that at the very least the article passed the obvious-bullshit test.

On the other hand, the CEO of a company - particularly a small company - lends his personality to the company. It often makes sense to co-identify them, given that the CEO has an incredible amount of influence.

You know that this is the same type of logic that the right uses to claim that some company whose executives once gave $1,000 to Hillary Clinton now needs to be boycotted, right?

I know, I know, the left is correct, and the right isn't, so it's different. Look... I'm pretty sure I'm on your side, politically. I just think it's weird to advocate avoiding a web browser because one executive affiliated with them once gave $1,000 to a political cause I strongly disagree with. I think flipping it around to the other way is a pretty clear way of explaining why it's weird. That's all.