Skip to footer

OkCupid protests new Firefox CEO, an anti-gay-marriage contributor

Mozilla Firefox infuriated many employees and users last week by hiring co-founder Brendan Eich as CEO. In 2008, Eich contributed $1,000 to pass Proposition 8.

  • By Martha Mendoza AP National Writer

| SAN JOSE, Calif.

The appointment of a new CEO by the company that makes the Firefox Web browser has prompted board members to quit, a Twitter frenzy and a push back from a leading dating website because he supported California's former gay marriage ban.

Mozilla, the nonprofit maker of the Firefox browser, infuriated many employees and users last week by hiring co-founder Brendan Eich to lead the Mountain View company. In 2008, Eich gave $1,000 to the campaign to pass California's Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that outlawed same-sex marriages in California until the US Supreme Court left in place a lower-court ruling striking it down.

The contribution was publicly reported and drew some negative attention two years ago, when Eich was Mozilla's chief technology officer. But when he was promoted to CEO last week, his support of the ban took on more gravitas.

Three of the Mozilla Foundation's six board members have quit, according to a Wall Street Journal blog, and thousands of employees and community members weighed in on Twitter over the weekend.

On Monday, New York-based dating service OkCupid.com replaced its usual home page for users logging in with Firefox.

"Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience. Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid," the message says.

OkCupid President Christian Rudder said he and the firm's three other co-founders decided to post the message after discussing Eich's appointment over the weekend.

He said 12 percent of OkCupid's approximately 3 billion monthly page views come through Firefox, while 8 percent of the site's users are gay or lesbian.

"We don't think this was the right thing for people to donate money to, and this is someone we do business with so we decided to take action," Rudder said.

Mozilla, which is promoted with the slogan, "Doing good is part of our code," responded Monday with an emailed statement saying the company supports equality for all, including marriage equality for gay couples.

"No matter who you are or who you love, everyone deserves the same rights and to be treated equally," said the statement. "OkCupid never reached out to us to let us know of their intentions, nor to confirm facts."

Mozilla says about half a billion people around the world use Firefox, which has free, open software written in part by volunteers. Firefox has been losing market share to Google Inc.'s Chrome browser in recent years.

Follow Martha Mendoza at https://twitter.com/mendozamartha .

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to OkCupid protests new Firefox CEO, an anti-gay-marriage contributor
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0331/OkCupid-protests-new-Firefox-CEO-an-anti-gay-marriage-contributor
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe