Monday morning "town halls" at Mozilla are open to the public, and anyone can look at the code that powers Mozilla's popular Firefox web browser. The company's employees are encouraged to speak their minds and even criticize the boss on Twitter. Thousands of programmers help Mozilla improve its products - free - because the programmers think it is important.
But one thing that Mozilla has in common with other tech companies is that it has grown large. It has 1,000 employees, more than $300 million in revenue (mostly from licensing technology to Google) and many competing interests. And Brendan Eich, who resigned as Mozilla's chief executive Thursday after just two weeks in the job, may not have been the person to run a company with such expanding interests.
The question of who is the right person to run Mozilla reached a peak when attention was drawn to a $1,000 donation that Eich made in 2008 to support a California state referendum that banned same-sex marriage. Mozilla employees and members of the programming community criticized Eich - an influential programmer and a first-time chief executive for the donation. Instead of addressing the criticism head-on, he insisted that his personal views should not matter to Mozilla.
Criticism mounted and, combined with Eich's refusal to discuss his views, made the situation untenable for Mozilla and Eich, according to current and former Mozilla board members.But issues at Mozilla, based in Mountain View, Calif., run deeper than the furor over Eich's personal views. It is an organization in flux, struggling like many others with the tech industry's migration to mobile devices.
"Mozilla has always been a messy place and misunderstood," said John Lilly, a former chief executive and former board member of Mozilla."People on the outside can't decide if it's the United Nations, or Apple, or a nongovernmental organization, or a soup kitchen. It's a hybrid, mission-driven organization."That mission has historically been to provide an alternative web browser.
When smart people work free out of commitment, as the programming community does for Mozilla, Lilly noted, the chief executive requires an unusually strong emotional capability.
"This is playing out as a fight over free speech and equal rights, but that oversimplifies it," he said. 'This is about how organizations will process individual rights and free speech, and how leadership helps them think through that." Lilly, now a venture capitalist with Greylock Partners, resigned from the Mozilla board two weeks ago, before Eich's appointment."I left rather than appoint him," he said, declining to elaborate further.
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