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Mozilla is not your typical Silicon Valley company. Monday morning "town halls" at Mozilla are open to the public and anyone can look at the code that powers Mozilla's popular Firefox web browser. The company's employees are encouraged to speak their minds and even criticise the boss on Twitter. Thousands of programmers help Mozilla improve its products - free - because the programmers think it is important.
But one thing that Mozilla has in common with other tech companies is that it has grown large. It has 1,000 employees, more than $300 million in revenue (mostly from licensing technology to Google) and many competing interests. And Brendan Eich, who resigned as Mozilla's chief executive on Thursday after just two weeks in the job, may not have been the person to run a company with such expanding interests.
The question of who is the right person to run Mozilla reached a peak when attention was drawn to a $1,000-donation Eich made in 2008 to support a California state referendum that banned same-sex marriage. Mozilla employees and members of the programming community criticised Eich - an influential programmer and a first-time chief executive - for the donation. Instead of addressing the criticism head-on, he insisted that his personal views should not matter to Mozilla.
Criticism mounted and, combined with Eich's refusal to discuss his views, made the situation untenable for Mozilla and Eich, according to current and former Mozilla board members.
But issues at Mozilla, based in Mountain View, California, run deeper than the furore over Eich's personal views. It is an organisation in flux, struggling like many others with the tech industry's migration to mobile devices.
"Mozilla has always been a messy place, and misunderstood," said John Lilly, a former chief executive and former board member of Mozilla. "People on the outside can't decide if it's the United Nations, or Apple, or a nongovernmental organisation, or a soup kitchen. It's a hybrid, mission-driven organisation."
That mission has historically been to provide an alternative web browser.
When smart people work free out of commitment, as the programming community does for Mozilla, Lilly noted, the chief executive requires an unusually strong emotional capability. "This is playing out as a fight over free speech and equal rights, but that oversimplifies it," he said. 'This is about how organisations will process individual rights and free speech, and how leadership helps them think through that."
Lilly, now a venture capitalist with Greylock Partners, resigned from the Mozilla board two weeks ago, ahead of Eich's appointment. "I left rather than appoint him," he said, declining to elaborate further.
The board knew about Eich's donation, as it had been public for two years, but it thought any controversy would pass. In many ways, Mozilla was not ready for the blowback over Eich because it had not realised how much the company itself had changed.
Building a browser to provide an alternative to Microsoft's near monopoly was a significant technical achievement when Mozilla was founded in the late 1990s, but the money, technology and relationships of building an open system in the mobile world have taken the company into entirely new territory.
"Working with telecommunications operators around the world is much larger than just a browser," said Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's co-founder and executive chairwoman, in an interview. "The stakes have grown." Mozilla's competition with Apple and Google's Android system has created an expanding list of commercial contributors who are business partners, Baker said.
"Being the head of Mozilla is like being a head of state," she said, adding, "Brendan had the technical vision. But he did not have the head of state part."
Compounding the problem, two of the three directors who left ahead of Eich's appointment had long before signaled that they would leave. When Eich was named, there were only two people on Mozilla's board, Baker and Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. A third, Katharina Borchert, the head of Germany's Spiegel Online, joined last week.
Both Baker and Hoffman said that they tried to get Eich to remain in a senior position at Mozilla, but that he quit because he thought it would cause more harm to the company if he stayed. "He was the right person for all of the technical growth, but the other things steered into him hard," Hoffman said. "He said, 'My continuing is not good for me or the organisation.' "
Eich was not available for comment on Friday.
Chief executives are held to a different standard, fair or not, Hoffman said. "We agreed with Brendan that as long as he stayed in the chair, things wouldn't end," he said. "We agreed with him that he had to go as CEO, but we spent hours trying to argue with him out of leaving Mozilla." Baker is now the acting head of the company, and a search for a new chief executive is expected to begin next week.
The backlash against Eich has created a backlash of its own. His departure has raised anger from other parts of Mozilla's own community, people who think he was entitled to an opinion without risking his job.
"The people who were criticizing Brendan were people who have advocated passionately for the rights of the oppressed," said Geoffrey Moore, a Silicon Valley consultant and author who has worked closely with Mozilla. "For them to turn on someone this way is wrong."
Eich, he added, is a very analytical person who got into a situation he did not have the social skills to navigate. "My bet is he's feeling very wounded. He gave his life and soul to this. Sometimes a community doesn't really know what it's doing," Moore said.
Baker said the reaction to Eich's resignation was a product of misunderstanding. "There is anger and frustration at Mozilla," she said. "But it's an incorrect understanding that we fired him."
©2014 The New York Times News Service
