when gender issues are poaching away resources from real work.
Your gender issues seem to be poaching away resources from real thinking. How is it related to web browsers what other people may or may not do with their nether appendages?
Btw I'm queer and I'm sad about how some marriage advocates made Brendan Eich quit. But I'm confident there's still "real work" going on at Mozilla.
Are you familiar with the debacle where the Gnome Foundation went broke because they blew all the money on their Outreach Program for Women?
Here's coverage if you're unfamiliar, although if you're a queer slashdot reader you probably aren't:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
The Eich issue showed the world that Mozilla is chock full of the same sentiment. And Mozilla's lost so much market share that they're only a bit player now. When push comes to shove, their "Real Work" is not cutting the mustard.
I've worked on technology projects with people who didn't agree with my views on the issues, and done volunteer work on community projects with people who didn't agree with my views, but everything worked because the projects were focused enough that they became something we could both agree on.
The reason gender issues are screwing up technology projects is because technology projects are extending their mission statements in political directions and it's removing the focus that made it possible for people who disagree on political issues to work together.
Expressed simply, if you stand for one thing, you get half the people agreeing with what you stand for and half of them not agreeing, and 50% of the people give you their support.
If you stand for two things, half the people who were supporting you will no longer feel comfortable supporting you, and they will leave. You shrink your support from 50% to 25%.
It's not that we disagree. It's that I can't actively support organizations that vocally espouse things that I think are nihilistic and therefore immoral, and logic dictates that if I was the only one, there would be no controversy, so therefore, I'm not the only one.
The ability to agree to disagree has been removed, and it's not going to do anything but harm.