Three Mozilla Board Members Resign Over Choice of New CEO

Alistair Barr, reporting for the WSJ:

Three Mozilla board members resigned over the choice of Brendan Eich, a Mozilla co-founder, as the new CEO. Gary Kovacs, a former Mozilla CEO who runs online security company AVG Technologies; John Lilly, another former Mozilla CEO now a partner at venture-capital firm Greylock Partners; and Ellen Siminoff, CEO of online education startup Shmoop, left the board last week.

The departures leave three people on the Mozilla board: co-founder Mitchell Baker; Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Katharina Borchert, chief executive of German news site Spiegel Online.

Two thoughts:

  1. If there were six board members, and three of them were so staunchly opposed to naming Eich as CEO that they resigned afterward, how exactly did the math on that vote work?

  2. An ugly transition like this is as sure a sign as any that Mozilla is in the midst of institutional collapse. They have one successful project: Firefox for Windows. That’s a relic of a bygone era. All the growth in the industry is in mobile, and Mozilla browsers have, effectively, zero share of the mobile market.

And this doesn’t even get into the fact that the Mozilla rank-and-file are opposed to Eich on the grounds that he was a financial supporter of California’s Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to prohibit gay marriage.

★ Saturday, 29 March 2014