It's absolutely true. There were a bunch of blog posts by Mozilla employees supporting Brendan as CEO (even though many disagreed with his position on Prop 8), all completely ignored by the media. Looking at the relevant date range on http://planet.mozilla.org/ should find them...

Uh.... Christie Koehler explicitly said she thought Brendan would do a good job as CEO. So I'm a bit confused about why you're lumping her into your list.

Jessica Klein and Jess Klein are the same person.

Christie Koehler doesn't belong on your list. She early and publicly supported Brendan as CEO --- a stand that made her quite unpopular with a segment of her LGBT community. She deserves great praise.

We did not "stand by and watch". Many Mozilla staff made public statements supporting Brendan as CEO, including (courageously) many LGBT Mozilla staff. Many more publicly supported Brendan than publicly opposed him. The media of course focused on his opponents because "Mozilla employees call for CEO to step down" gets more clicks than "Mozilla employees support CEO".

Maybe we could have done more. At the time the firestorm was hot enough that it was unclear whether speaking out (and what sort of speaking out) would help. Brendan's resignation came as a great surprise to almost everyone at Mozilla, including me, and up to then I honestly thought simply saying nothing and letting the controversy blow itself out was going to work and was the best course of action.

To all the people who are shouting about "free speech" now: did you speak up to support Mozilla while we were defending Brendan as CEO? If not, why are you more enthusiastic about bashing us now than you were about supporting us back then?

That is totally absurd. If the board didn't want Brendan to be CEO, they wouldn't have appointed him in the first place!

The evidence is clear that the board, and almost everyone else at Mozilla, wanted Brendan as CEO. Then came the protests, the social media firestorm, and the boycotts, and he stepped down (and was not "kicked out").

If you believe differently from what's indicated by the observable facts and official statements, produce some evidence. No-one has so far.

it's a city state

the policies that work for one small rich densely populated tightly controlled area does not apply to large areas of rural and urban, rich and poor

singapore offers no lessons about how to run real countries

Three board members didn't quit over Brendan's presence as CEO. But the Wall Street Journal _did_ make up a story to that effect, which has gotten widely quoted, and refused to retract it when it was pointed out it was false.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/... has a Q&A on the issue, but basically two of the board members had wanted to move on to other things for a while but stuck it out until the end of the CEO search (because that was the board's primary job at the time). They left the board as soon as a CEO was chosen, a week or two before the choice was even announced.

The third board member who left did leave because he did not think Brendan would make a good CEO, but for reasons that have nothing to do with the Prop 8 mess.

Just for context, a number of Mozilla employees spoke up in support of Brendan during the goings on (twitter, blogs, etc).

Further, he explicitly asked people to keep working on the Mozilla mission, even without him. Keep in mind that Mozilla is not just a company; most people who are there aren't there just for the paycheck...

Now obviously they (we?) could have gone ahead and just imploded the Mozilla project over this issue by leaving. Would that have made Brendan feel better? I sort of doubt that.

You should know very well that more justifications have been proposed than "it's gross". You may have good arguments against those justifications but what you have presented here is a pretty pathetic straw-man.

Those of us at Mozilla who haven't quit over this --- which is, as far as I know, all of us --- believe that pursuing our mission of the open Web is more important than quitting to express our disgust. And I think Brendan believes that too.

Sticking with Mozilla for the sake of our mission, in the face of all this turmoil, requires great strength of character, and I am proud to say that Mozillians have been demonstrating that in spades. Making angry comments on the Internet, on the other hand, requires no strength of character at all.

Mozilla is not a public company. It is a 501C3 tax exempt non profit and its wholly owned taxable subsidiary. Our stockholders are the people of the world. Our decisions are based on maximizing the value of the Internet for the benefit of everyone everywhere, especially those who lack representation from the giant institutional multinational publicly traded corporations like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

thank you

a clone tool like what?

that you only just switched disk drives in your preexisting comp and are entitled to the OS?

You're absolutely correct, but hypocrisy has never stood in the way of politics