On March 24th, Brendan Eich was appointed as the new CEO of Mozilla (which produces the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client, among other things). Eich was one of the founding members of Mozilla, as well as being the creator of the scripting language JavaScript, and had been the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of the company until his appointment to CEO.  He’s well known in the tech world.

Yesterday, Eich resigned after ten days on the job, after a social media firestorm had been touched off by OKCupid, a online dating service, who pointed out that Eich, back in 2008, had donated $1000 to support Proposition 8 in California, which banned gay marriage.  When this tidbit caught fire, Eich responded with his own blog post, which said, in part:

I am committed to ensuring that Mozilla is, and will remain, a place that includes and supports everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, economic status, or religion.

But that was not enough for the self-appointed hall monitors of political correctness.  They wanted Eich’s full and total mea culpa (along with a donation to a gay rights organization – the petition asking for this has since been taken down), or his job.  Even Mozilla employees were tweeting that they wanted Eich to either resign or be fired by the Mozilla board.