The way you added "Or was someone offended on their behalf, preemptively?" suggested a different intent. I read it as a distrust that anyone at Mozilla would actually care, and explicit doubt on my earlier description of 'LGBT people and their fellow travelers working for and supporting Mozilla'.
The overarching question I have: what does "cancel" mean? According to my definition ("negative consequences to rich, powerful, or famous people because of actions or statements that the left disagrees with"), Eich was indeed canceled. But of course, my definition is little different than "those lefties need to shut up and stop complaining!" - just couched in fancier terms. [1]
Then, if he was meaningfully "canceled", does that mean that what happened was necessarily a bad thing? Obviously, as a lefty, I don't, since that would mean my complaints would never be heard.
I'll construct a dramatic hypothetical. Suppose 90% of the staff threatened to leave if Eich stayed on, because of his support for homophobic legislation. This would have shown that Eich's leadership role would have been rather ineffectual, so decided to leave, in order that Mozilla survive as an organization.
Would that still have been "cancelling" Eich in that case? And therefore would it be an intrinsically immoral or unethical act?
[1] And I still don't know how "cancel" can be applied to this Suess case, where the copyright holder [2] has decided to stop the publication on what appears to be a voluntary decision with only scattered activism for the change.
[2] Really, isn't the problem that copyright is entirely too long? Why should we wait another 40 years before a book published in 1937 enters the public domain? When he wrote it, the maximum copyright period was 56 years - until 1993. As a public domain book, we wouldn't be having this tempest in a teapot!
Copyright is absolutely too long, and I am saying that as someone who has significant income from royalties.
I would be for 10 years of automatic copyright, with the possibility to purchase up to X years more for a registration fee that would start very low but would grow to significant levels, so that only the most lucrative works stay protected after, say, 30 years.
The overarching question I have: what does "cancel" mean? According to my definition ("negative consequences to rich, powerful, or famous people because of actions or statements that the left disagrees with"), Eich was indeed canceled. But of course, my definition is little different than "those lefties need to shut up and stop complaining!" - just couched in fancier terms. [1]
Then, if he was meaningfully "canceled", does that mean that what happened was necessarily a bad thing? Obviously, as a lefty, I don't, since that would mean my complaints would never be heard.
I'll construct a dramatic hypothetical. Suppose 90% of the staff threatened to leave if Eich stayed on, because of his support for homophobic legislation. This would have shown that Eich's leadership role would have been rather ineffectual, so decided to leave, in order that Mozilla survive as an organization.
Would that still have been "cancelling" Eich in that case? And therefore would it be an intrinsically immoral or unethical act?
[1] And I still don't know how "cancel" can be applied to this Suess case, where the copyright holder [2] has decided to stop the publication on what appears to be a voluntary decision with only scattered activism for the change.
[2] Really, isn't the problem that copyright is entirely too long? Why should we wait another 40 years before a book published in 1937 enters the public domain? When he wrote it, the maximum copyright period was 56 years - until 1993. As a public domain book, we wouldn't be having this tempest in a teapot!