BLOWBACK: After Eich resigns, conservatives slam Mozilla—and call for boycott.
Media coverage of Mozilla and its Firefox Web browser over the past week has largely focused on new CEO Brendan Eich and his 2008 opposition to gay marriage (in the form of a $1,000 donation to California’s Prop 8 campaign). Yesterday, Eich resigned from Mozilla, and Mozilla has had plenty of support for letting Eich leave.
But it’s a new day, and that means it’s the turn of more conservative or libertarian thinkers and activists to bash Mozilla. Some are even calling for boycotts of the Firefox browser in campaigns that mirror those of sites like OKCupid, which encouraged users of its dating site to ditch Firefox as a way of pressuring Mozilla to distance itself from Eich.
Andrew Sullivan, the Daily Dish blogger and book author who has done as much as anyone over the last decade to make “marriage equality” a term that even conservatives can love, ripped Mozilla for not backing Eich.
“There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged!” he wrote.
Well, I hope Mozilla suffers enough to dissuade others from giving in so easily. But isn’t OK Cupid, the instigator here, the proper target for retaliatory efforts?