The new CEO of Mozilla, the not-for-profit organisation behind the Firefox web browser, declined on Tuesday to offer a rationale for his 2008 donation in support of California's gay marriage ban, insisting he would remain in post despite a backlash over his appointment.



Giving interviews for the first time since he was announced as the new boss of Mozilla on 24 March, Brendan Eich repeatedly refused to be drawn on his stance on gay rights amid a widespread row over his $1,000 donation in support of the successful Proposition 8 ballot measure.

“So I don't want to talk about my personal beliefs because I kept them out of Mozilla all these 15 years we've been going,” he told the Guardian. “I don't believe they're relevant.”

The first week of Eich's tenure had been marked by a series of public statements by Mozilla staff protesting his appointment, the resignation of three of Mozilla's directors, and a denunciation from dating site OkCupid, which urged all Firefox users to change browsers.

Eich said OkCupid's move was “rash”, and was keen to downplay other moves since his appointment.

Though his stance on equal marriage had been made public through his donation, Eich said he did not believe it was relevant to his role at Mozilla, and said the organisation's own code of conduct precluded him discussing his views.

“I agree with people who say it wasn't private, but it was personal,” he said of the donation. “But the principle that I have operated by, that is formalised in our code of conduct at Mozilla, is it's really about keeping anything that's not central to our mission out of our office.

“If I stop doing that now I think I would be doing wrong that code of conduct and doing a disservice to Mozilla. And I really do think it's an important principle of inclusiveness for Mozilla to succeed.”

Mozilla is one of the champions of the open internet, including the principle of net neutrality – that all traffic should be treated equally, and as such the organisation is often held to progressive standards more than other online corporations. As an employer, Mozilla supports LGBT marriage and provides benefits to same-sex spouses.

Eich defined inclusiveness at Mozilla as leaving political issues upon which coders or community members might disagree out of the office.



“With the board of directors departures, two of them were already planning to depart … those are before any of the current news about me came out,” he said. “I would also say that OkCupid is a good example. I think there's a chance that we could actually turn that around. I think they acted a little rashly.

“I don't think they were aware of the statement [Mozilla foundation chair] Mitchell Baker made at the weekend [that] Mozilla as an organisation believes in LGBT equality, and I've heard from a lot of people that OkCupid had actually not been aware of that. So I think we can actually turn that around.”

Baker, chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, of which the Mozilla Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary, wrote in the 29 March blog post: "I want to speak clearly on behalf of both the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla Foundation: Mozilla supports equality for all, explicitly including LGBT equality and marriage equality."

Eich stressed that Baker's statement applied only to Mozilla as a corporation and foundation, rather than to its broader mission.



“There's a difference here between the company, the foundation, as an employer and an entity, versus the project and community at large, which is not under any constraints to agree on LGBT equality or any other thing that is not central to the mission or the Mozilla manifesto.”

Eich said the reason Mozilla as a community did not take a wider stance on issues such as LGBT marriage was the same as his reason for not explaining his donation: to avoid fragmenting its community. Without a large group of people who disagreed on lots of issues, Firefox would never have happened, he said.

“So far we've been able to bring people together of diverse beliefs including on things like marriage equality,” he said. “We couldn't have done this, we couldn't have done Firefox One. I would've been excluded, someone else would've been excluded because of me – I wouldn't have done that personally, they'd have just left. So imagine a world without Firefox: not good.”

Eich also stressed that Firefox worked globally, including in countries like Indonesia with “different opinions”, and LGBT marriage was “not considered universal human rights yet, and maybe they will be, but that's in the future, right now we're in a world where we have to be global to have effect”.

Proposition 8, a ballot measure that banned gay marriage in California, passed in November 2008. It was ruled unconstitutional by a federal court in 2010, but remained in force until the US supreme court upheld that decision in June last year.

Eich refused to be drawn on whether he would donate to a Proposition 8 style campaign again in the future. “I don't want to do hypotheticals,” he said. “I haven't thought about that issue and I really don't want to speculate because it's not relevant.”

He said he was keen to get on with the Mozilla CEO job in order to “unionise the users”, a mission he said would be difficult and require someone of his expertise – Eich wrote the JavaScript language which powers much of the internet – to fulfil.

“If you think about how networks evolve you get superpowers, Yahoo then Google, Facebook on social, and that can be a good thing,” he said. “But because they have network power, users have to go in there and put their data inside walled gardens. Mozilla as a browser has the potential to unionise our users, and if we do that we get collective bargaining rights over our data. That's one of the corners I think I can help us turn.

“I think I'm the best person for the job and I'm doing the job.”