New Chief Executive of Firefox gave $1,000 to support California’s Prop 8 equal marriage ban
Brendan Eich, who financially backed efforts to ban equal marriage in California, has been appointed CEO of Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web browser.
The American computer programmer and creator of the JavaScript scripting language is a co-founder of Mozilla.
It was revealed in 2012 that Mr Eich donated $1,000 (£605) in 2008 to the campaign supporting California’s Proposition 8.
The law banned same-sex marriages in the state and was finally struck down by the US Supreme after years of legal battles in June 2013.
Following the appointment of Mr Eich as Mozilla chief executive, San-Francisco based computer programmer Hampton Catlin and his husband Michael, said they are boycotting Mozilla as a result.
In a letter to the company, Mr Catlin wrote:-
As a married gay couple who are co-founders of this venture, we have chosen to boycott all Mozilla projects. We will not develop apps or test styles on Firefox anymore.
Effective today, we’re removing Color Puzzle from the Firefox Marketplace and stopping work on all of our Firefox-related applications, notably the about-to-launch Firefox version of the popular Dictionary! app for iPhone and Android.
This is in protest of the appointment of Brendan Eich to the position of CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, where he had previously served as CTO.
We will continue our boycott until Brendan Eich is completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla, which we believe is extremely unlikely after all he’s survived and the continued support he has received from Mozilla.
This makes us very sad, as we love the little guy fighting to make things better. But it’s because of our status as a minority that we simply can’t ignore this slap in the face of giving him a promotion to lead your organization.
