This story has been a good opportunity to challenge my own assumptions. Some of the key questions I asked myself:
* Should Mozilla have a CEO who gave $1000 to support prop 8?
* Would it have been sufficient for him to renounce his support of the law?
* Would he also have to announce his support for same sex marriage?
* Would it be different if the campaign were to outlaw interracial couples?

Should private beliefs be enough to prevent someone from heading a project they helped found?

No, but he didn't keep his beliefs private, he tried to turn them into law. And that still doesn't mean he can't head the project, it just means a lot of people may walk away from it, and Mozilla.org needs to consider that.

Is the backlash itself justified? Well, to some, including myself, it is a bit like supporting segregation in the 1950s. Right now, it is a mainstream political view to believe that gay people should not have equal rights. There's a hundred thousand years of evolution behind that belief, and it is not realistic to expect everyone to switch that internal belief off at the drop of a hat -- no more than it was possible for people in the 1950s to instantly accept equal treatment of black people.

But what good people did do in the 1950s was stop expressing their prejudice. They stopped supporting segregation, and stopped saying that they found it to be an acceptable practice. Most of them still had that deep internal programming. Most people still have it to some extent today. Hundreds of thousands of years of "different looking means dangerous" genetic programming isn't going to go away overnight. But we have reached a point where we treat those beliefs as flawed baser instincts, like the desire to hit a person over the head and steal their BMW. We repress those feelings because we believe in being better than that.

We have reached a point in our society where prejudicial treatment of black people is no longer accepted. We will reach that point with gay people too, and Mozilla will be as embarrassed of having an unrepentant bigot for a CEO as Walt Disney Corp is of Walt's anti-Semitism. It is not that Mozilla should be forbidden from doing so, it is just a question of showing good judgment.

Mozilla, tell Eich to figure it out and recant his position. It's OK to be unable to overcome your baser instincts; that is a reality of being a flawed human. I'll admit that my instinctive reaction to the idea of gay sex is not pleasant. But it is not OK to express prejudicial beliefs or to support prejudicial laws.

What is the purpose of benevolent dictators for life then? (Torvalds/Stallman/ blender/drupal/mullenweg etc.)

To continue to curate the projects and organizations they founded, for as long as the community continues to trust them to do so. Sort of like Shuttleworth directing his distro, if his position were dependent on grassroots support instead of a corporate charter.

'... probably the most important single reason for the reservations about Ubuntu is its frequent attempts to assume the leadership of free software ... [S]ome of those who opposed it, like Aaron Seigo, have re-emerged as critics of Mir â" another indication that personal differences are as important as the issues under discussion.'

Seeing the same critics reappear does not necessarily mean it is a personal difference. It really only indicates that the underlying disagreement remains. Mark Shuttleworth believes in centralization of authority, Open Source is implicitly about decentralization of authority. That is a difference with Mark Shuttleworth's world view; as long as he holds it, and particularly when he tries to be the central authority, he will not fit in the Open Source world. That is not personal in the sense of holding a grudge, but it won't change unless Mark genuinely embraces the decentralized nature of this method of software development.

Some would suggest that their is a very good moral argument to be made by practicing agorism when more than half of federal tax dollars support activities many do not agree with.

I do not disagree with that statement, but I strenuously disagree that more than a very small percentage of people who have studied public finance would say that more than half of an average federal dollar is wasted. If military adventurism(*) is your major objection, then bear in mind that total military spending, budgeted plus war, is about 25% of each federal dollar. Of that money, less than half is war spending. So even if you say every single penny of that war spending is bad, that still leaves about 89% of every federal dollar that has not been determined to be bad. Suppose you cut our budgeted military spending to the smallest %age of GDP of any industrialized nation; that would still leave about 82% of every federal dollar that has not been determined to be bad.

Medicare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act and Social Security combined make up about 60% of the budget. And even an extremely dim view of that spending would put more than 80% of it going right back into the economy. I'm not saying that's good, because it's not. Wasting 20% (if you were such a pessimist as to accept that figure) of every dollar would be horrible. So that scenario cuts that 60% down to 48%, or a loss of 12% from the federal dollar.

Let's re-integrate those figures and see what's left. We lost 11% of every federal dollar because we hypothesized that the Middle East operations were a total loss -- not just wrong on balance, but a total loss. We lost another 12% from inefficiency in Social Security, ACA, and Medi*. We tossed out another 7% assuming that our budgeted military should be cut from the largest in the world to the smallest per GDP of any industrialized nation. That's 30% wasted out of every federal dollar, worst case scenario, so far.

But there's a problem. We reached that 30% waste figure by paring down 85% of federal spending. SS is 25%, health care is 35%, budgeted plus war military is 25%. That only leaves 15%. So now let's assume that every highway, the post office, everything the FBI does, the DEA, the CIA, border patrol, air traffic control, NASA, and everything else that the federal government does is a total loss -- nothing redeeming whatsoever. That brings the total waste up to 45%.

And I think you'd be hard pressed to find an economist who would accept *any* of the above figures as being a reasonable estimate of waste. Realistically, it's hard to waste 50% of a dollar without diong something completely irredeemable like building palaces. And even that, the contractors would be rolling a lot of that cash back into the economy. It's easy to waste 5%, or even 10%. 50%, though, is virtually impossible without a concerted effort.

So, if you think things are bad enough that the government should be overthrown, go for it. Begin advocating for the overthrow of the government. Or if you really think the US is irredeemable, leave. There are plenty of places on this planet that are better by many measures. But staying here, and quietly trying to get out of paying your taxes, telling yourself that you are taking a principled stand because 51% of your tax dollar is wasted, is bullshit.

* Side note: Adventurism is a pejorative referring to politics or activism that involves reckless or irresponsible behavior or conduct pursued only in the interest of excitement. Adventurism is often used as a criticism against some government's policies. Countries pursuing foreign wars of dubious merit or which have little chance of success have often been accused of adventurism by opponents.

Are you really insinuating that the wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is eclipsed by the benefit of cheap oil?

No, I said the exact opposite. I said that in my opinion the cost is greater than the benefit. Your reading comprehension is terrible.

I'm sure you sleep well at night knowing that you have cheap gasoline for your auto. Who cares what harm this "adventurism" causes to the region or whether it is morally wrong.

Perhaps you missed the part where I said, "I don't like the heavy-handed..." (or perhaps you took my lack of expletives to mean I don't mean "heavy handed" in a strong enough sense, but I can't be responsible for your misinterpretation)

You should be less critical of people who actually want to *do something* about overreaching federal control rather than just being "critical" or "distrustful" and doing nothing.

Perhaps you missed the part where I said, "...and to work for improvement..."

If you find yourself reacting so emotionally that you fail to read the post to which you are responding, it may be time to step back, take a deep breath, and get a grip. Or seek help.

Considering what they blow our tax money on, I can't really see the "common good".

Not sure if you're just being playfully facetious or if you've actually been drinking the silly-juice. Just in case it's the latter, keep in mind that while there is a lot of inefficiency in government, the vast majority of it is still net positive. I don't like the heavy-handed Middle East adventurism, but it does get us cheap oil by keeping OPEC in check. I don't like our unsustainable social security policy, but it gets rolled back into the economy in relatively efficient spending. I don't like the lackadaisical work ethic of some road crew members or crony corporation asphalt price gouging, but our highway system enables trade and labor mobility that makes all our lives better.

It is a good thing to be critical of wastefulness in government, to treat our policies with a certain degree of distrust, and to work for improvement in government accountability. But to conflate that with the notion that tax evasion might be pro-social is sheer lunacy. Failing to pay our bills would be vastly more destructive than paying bills that are somewhat inefficient. People and corporations that shirk their duty to help shoulder the load are despicable.

Such changes could be difficult to implement, given the fact Bitcoin - by design - lacks any central authority." The main problem discovered is that transaction fees do not provide enough incentive to continue operating as "miner" after there are no more bitcoins left to be mined.

I'm not sure that is an accurate reflection of the research, but if it is, it is not very good research. Transaction fees can change, and have changed. The minimum transaction fee changed from 0.0005 BTC to 0.0001 BTC during the runup to $1100, to keep transaction fees low enough for small transactions. There is a central organization, The Bitcoin Foundation, whose authority is explicitly derived from consent of the governed; the miners and users choose to update their software to match recommendations by The Bitcoin Foundation.

If that summary is an accurate reflection of the research, it sounds like they don't really know much about how Bitcoin works. I mean, I know that much, and I've only spent a few hours reading about it.

Vicurex is tiny. They only did US$30,822 of business in the past 30 days. The corner pawnbroker is probably a bigger business. The corner gas station definitely is.

Bitcoin may be a future currency (though I doubt it is The Future of Currency). It may be a very bad high risk investment (though calling it a Ponzi scheme would be giving the players far too much credit). Whichever it is, or wherever in between, it is no more or less what it was in the (nearly imperceptible) wake of Vicurex's failure.

Society just hasn't adjusted to the total absence of privacy yet. They will - there is little choice in the matter.

Of course we have a choice in the matter. Long ago we decided that the Post Office could not look in your mail, and we have held them to that for over a century. We extended similar prohibitions to UPS, FedEx, and the voice carriers, and we have held them to it for decades.

It is neither reasonable nor inevitable for us to give up our privacy just because they are infringing it in a new way. Your meek acceptance of their imposition is the only thing allowing them to move forward.

Is it illegal to make these "agreements"?

Yes, which is why the DoJ is already well on the track to sentencing, and the companies are begging to broker a deal. And what's more, they've got the dirt on one of the originators of the scheme admitting he knew it was probably illegal and trying to cover his tracks (mens rea).

âoeI would prefer that Omid do it verbally since I donâ(TM)t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later? Not sure about this.. thanks Eric [Schmidt]â

Remember that whenever you hear "Do No Evil" -- that was mostly Sergey, and a little bit Larry. Eric Schmidt hates you and masturbates while thinking of doing evil.

Dicks getting punched for being dicks is nothing new. If you had walked through a college party ten years ago, taking pictures of people without getting their attention first, it wouldn't take more than ten photos before your camera met an untimely demise. The new thing here is the device making it impossible to tell when you are being a dick, not the reaction to such dickish behavior.

To those who claim that glassholes are doing nothing wrong, try this little experiment: Go to your local Wal-Mart, when the parking lot is busy with people walking in and out, take out your digital camera, and walk through a busy part of the parking lot. Squat down behind each car, and take a close-up photo of the license plate. Make sure it is very clear what you are doing.

Frankly, I don't think you've got the balls to do it, because you know it is wrong. And if you do, whether because you are a big enough dick not to care or because you genuinely don't understand that it is wrong, I give it less than ten minutes before someone fervently explains to you that your behavior is uncivil.

The reality is that US History courses don't do enough to explain what it was like to live in the 1800s and the kinds of shit people had to put up with.

http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/about/us_history.html

It's easy to look at that on paper and say "well that wasn't very long!", but there was a period of 68 years between the first state law limiting child working days to 10 hours and the push for national reform. Most of the people on slashdot have not been around for 68 years...At 68 years, some of your friends have already died after working in factories for most of their lives, and you are on the edge of your death bed.

Oh, it was also Unions that made this happen.

There's far more involved with labor situations in the early industrial era.