I founded Brave with a pay-cut to $160K/year. Note that due to my not taking anything near $2M+ salary+bonus annual comp when I was at Mozilla, I am not independently wealthy.
I'm not complaining (it was worth doing Brave on many non-material grounds), but you are disparaging out of malice and ignorance. This will not work well for you in life — my two cents!
My correction then but of course as some have said here, $160k/yr for heading the modification of an existing browser and stealing donations of those who don't claim them is considered overpaid.
That said, I wanted to use and like Brave but no gestures so I moved back to Vivaldi to support another overpaid decadent CEO. You can't seem to escape them.
Oh, and 'disparaging out of malice and ignorance', well some have made a good living out of it as we see in our current climate. Not going to name names here but I'm sure you know who I'm talking about.
"stealing donations" is a lie. Brave gave out grants to anonymous browser instances which users could direct to be tipped. For one month we had these flow into a common wallet but we were the source and sender of funds. We fixed this by making the browser hold for 90 days retrying every 30.
You are still maliciously and ignorantly defaming me, with false claims anyone can verify from open source. This reflects badly only on you. Will Rogers' advice, free then and now, applies: when in a hole, stop digging.
I'm just going on what I've read here but I think the biggest point of contention that others have pointed out is if they don't sign up for Brave's choice of proprietary monetary systems [0], including its own which it/you has a stake in, the donatee receives nothing. It seems you're trying to reinvent the wheel (browser), or rather pre-existing technology, and make a profit off of it when even decades ago a donate button worked fine without another middleman trying to shove their greedy hands between you and the donatee. You understand why this irks some people, right?
And threatening people online to basically shut up, who you view as misunderstanding, you're vastly underestimating the expected demeanor of a CEO. As a user you'd expect me to be frustrated sometimes and complain but as CEO, honestly, you should just answer the questions as it doesn't make you look professional when denigrating those who used to be in your userbase. And if anything, the fact that I among many have these questions and they've ran so rampant and unanswered even on this very tech-related forum reflects at least poorly on your company's PR department.
If the recipient does not verify in time, the funds go back to their source: our grant pool, in the case you misrepresented; the user wallet if the user actually provided the tokens.
You are the one doing the denigrating (“to criticize unfairly, to disparage”) here.
We see Eich with his own browser vision and executive style over at Brave, where he is unencumbered by legacy bureaucracy or codebases. He wouldn’t have been as free if he were at Mozilla.
The problem is that we have the person who arguably most understands the domain of web browsers, online privacy, and all the legal and ethical aspect thereof, working on another Chromium-based browser.
I do not need to elaborate on why a diverse browser ecosystem is important, there are enough threads on that already.
Mozilla had this jewel, exactly what it needed to succeed and make the web a better place. He was attacked for his personal beliefs regarding gay marriage, which went against the current popular liberal attitudes, who attack anything they perceive as against them with a fury on the scale of lynch mobs. The web, for better or for worse, gives huge leverage to whoever is willing to make the most noise and be the most unruly.
So Eich was attacked, Firefox market share plummeted, the new CEOs take home four times what Eich was taking home yet add "Pocket" and other misfeatures while funding for Rust and MDN is being cut. Instead of a 95% monoculture of a Microsoft product we now have a 95% monoculture of a Google product. But hey, the guy who doesn't support gay marriage is out of the picture, right? That's a win, right?
Sorry, but you're not going to paint Eich as a victim over what is a totally self inflicted wound.
And there is no argument from utility to be made here either along the lines of 'oh Eich may be a bigot, but look at that nice browser he gave us'. He has to work with the people around him and that scenario would have likely not panned out.
Instead, a large chunk of Mozilla/FireFox' employees may have walked if he had tried to hang on, or maybe he could have come around on the subject in a halfway believable way.
But he chose to walk instead, his loss, and ultimately, possibly our loss too.
> He has to work with the people around him and that scenario would have likely not panned out.
Or it would, since he worked with the same people before the wokefest with absolutely zero complaints from anybody. If people didn't decide having ideological purity and expelling wrongthink is more important than having a good independent browser. Well, they have their purity now. Hope they are happy. Their usage may be in the drain and their perspectives bleak, but at least nobody dares to form an unapproved opinion!
> Instead, a large chunk of Mozilla/FireFox' employees may have walked if he had tried to hang on
Or, somebody adult would explain to them it's actually ok to disagree on some subject, and that't the thing adults do sometimes. Unfortunately, looks like there's no adults in the industry anymore. Or at least not at those quarters.
Out of curiosity, do you know of any companies in your field where the CEO believes you personally don't deserve rights? Would you work for that company? Why or why not? If there is no such company, why do you feel qualified to level this opinion here?
All of the poly people I know work for companies that don't support their right to marry.
I think it's worth pointing out that the ballot prop that Eich supported actually won. It wasn't a niche belief, certainly not at the time. I don't think Eich was the only CEO in America that didn't support gay marriage. What set him apart was that he didn't do a better job hiding his beliefs.
I have no idea what's most CEO's opinions are on political subjects, and prefer to keep it that way. I would certainly work with CEO that has different opinions than I do - in fact, for all I know, I may already be.
My CEO believes only the people who have a baby should receive a bonus (a stimulus of a kind) for having a baby. Those who don't have a baby a specific year have no rights to that kind of a bonus. No group of childless people formed with the intention to cancel him.
It's obscene to paint Eich as the perpetrator of a self inflicted wound for not "coming around on the subject in a halfway believable way", for not trying to appease the mob. "Stop hitting yourself."
My understanding is that Mozilla employees protesting his politics were not actually planning to walk and were disappointed and a little embarrassed that he left. They just wanted some sort of apology.
It looks like the closest they came to working with Mozilla was porting a simple game to Firefox OS. Getting attention at the time doesn't mean they spoke for anyone else. It sounds like you don't know how Mozilla employees felt.
"My gut reaction, is that they [homosexuals] are security risks, but I must admit I haven't given this much thought…I’ll be darned!’” -- Joe Biden, 1973
How many of those that "cancelled" Eich are still going to vote for Biden?
Ignoring the very clear bias/agenda you're trying to present, the lag time of 47 years is huge compared to some other high-profile instances of people being "cancelled". Also you can apologize for something and lack sincerity, which is even more insulting.
Personally I'm not a huge fan of the intense court of public opinion of cancelling, but it's absurd to paint it both as a leftist-specific act, or that if you're a leftist then you're allowed to get away with it.
I believe in people being able to actually talk and treat each other like human beings instead of monsters. The conversation unfortunately is hyper-polarized and many people aren't willing to even engage with someone who doesn't share the same belief set, and to me that is a shame. I don't think it's fair to paint this as a left/right issue. This total lack of engagement occurs on both sides.
I'm not a Biden fan, but Biden has since been a decent supporter of LGBT rights and pushed Obama on the issue. Eich never showed any kind of contrition like that. People can change. I am friends with a number of formerly homophobic people. However, Eich, at least in 2014, displayed no evidence that he had.
Did Eich make any statements at all? I recall he was cancelled out because someone found a donation of his to a political cause. He literally just gave money to a cause.
Imagine if who you supported on Patreon or Ko-fi caused you to be harassed until you quit your job? Imagine if someone says you're a hateful bigot because you openly donated to a podcast. Imagine if a donation to the Trump or Biden campaign caused all your employees to turn against you?
If he was firing homosexuals for being gay, that would be one thing and unacceptable. I grew up around Christians who would say they find x or y morally wrong, but that wouldn't prevent them from working with people who supported x or y, or believing they were human beings who are entitled to their own opinions.
Real tolerance is accepting people who have different beliefs about core issues, and working with them despite those differences.
A piece of paper promising fidelity is a fundamental human right? At most it is a religious construct, by definition not fundamental and far from universal. At a minimum, it is a government or social formality. And in both cases, it is designed to provide stability for the offspring birthed of such a union in societies unaccepting of bastard births.
A marriage is a legal contract, not a piece of paper promising fidelity. Fidelity has not mattered legally for a while now.
Romantic pairing is a common enough human thing that it makes sense to have legal constructs to protect both parties. If you are affording these protections to opposite-sex couples, then it is blatant discrimination not to do the same for same-sex couples. There is no rational basis for making such a restriction, after all.
Legal marriage, as in a civil arrangement, isn't really a right. However, being treated equally under the law is a right.
I am an atheist and yet I am married. I know other atheists who are married. Marriage can have religious aspects, but it doesn't have to.
> Romantic pairing is a common enough human thing that it
> makes sense to have legal constructs to protect both parties.
Why does either party need protection in a romantic pairing? I've been in dozens of romantic pairings but I did the religious ceremony only with the pairing that was expected to produce children.
Wait, "pushed Obama"? So Obama actually needed to be "pushed", because he was of the same opinion as Eich? But it's OK for the President of the United States to be of such opinion, because unlike CEO of Mozilla, he has no authority over the vast giant powers of Federal Government that actually decides what is allowed and not allowed in the country... Priorities!
I'm not going to dig into this, but from other comments on this post, it seems he did make statements that walked back the position specifically regarding lgbtqqiaap+
Yeah Brave's business model always seemed incredibly scummy to me. For ad blocking arguments can be made both ways, but Brave's "let's replace them with our ads" model (I know it's opt-in) just seems like a way to hold site revenue hostage. Either join Brave's network or miss out.
Vivaldi seems like the better Chromium wrapper to me. But my daily driver is Firefox.
FF is my daily driver too, but since Google properties increasingly only work reliably in Chromium, I use Brave for those (without opting in to BAT, which doesn't appeal to me). It's not bad, works fine on Ubuntu, built-in adblocking (but you can install uBo etc.)
He would've had an iconic brand, elite staff, an established business model & userbase, etc. I'd posit he'd have been a much better technology focused CEO then the leaders of Mozilla's current titanic trajectory into obsolescence.
Instead of Brave where he's having to build a product, brand & userbase from scratch & try to force a niche unproven VC business model with Brave.
FWIW, Brave's VC funding is < 10%. No "VC business model", whatever that is, either — I carved nature at the joint using science, proceeding from ad/tracker blocking and reconnecting the necessary parts of the Web's funding ecosystem via crypto.
