Much as my European tree-hugging-hippie socialist politics would love that everyone support all the things James mentioned in the first mail in this thread, I'm with Stéphane and Gervaise on this.

There's nothing to stop the Foundation having staffing policies on those things or acting towards those aims (in ways that the trustees feel appropriate, of course) — such as choosing a more-expensive but more-environmentally-conscious hosting provider, perhaps — but, much though it weren't the case, I'm sure there are many people in this movement who think that universal preventative healthcare is a means of abrogating personal responsibility or of spreading vaccine-based autism cooties or something.

While *I* may think that the people who believe those things are wrong and stupid, I don't think *the Foundation* should be telling them that.

I'm afraid I'm unaware of Harald Bischoff and how he might or might not have defrauded anyone, so I don't (yet) have an opinion on that.

Owen

On Mon, 27 Jul 2015 at 14:20 Gervase Markham <gerv@mozilla.org> wrote:

Delurking momentarily, might I say that in a Mozilla context we have
found this:

On 26/07/15 21:11, James Salsman wrote:
> I am of the often non-unanimous opinions that the Foundation should, in
> complete yet indirect accordance with its mission, take at least pro
> forma and ideally active stances in favor of social issues such as free
> public education through college, universal preventative health care,
> income equality, gender wage equity, and greenhouse gas mitigation.

to be a spectacularly bad idea.

People support <ORGANIZATION> because they agree on the explicit goals
of <ORGANIZATION>. There is no guarantee whatsoever that they will agree
on other goals, and to make <ORGANIZATION> support them institutionally
risks alienating volunteers and supporters for negligible gains.

You may think it's obvious that anyone who supports the goals of
<ORGANIZATION> must also support these other "obviously good" things ("I
support them! So therefore every right-thinking person does!"), but I
would say that people are more complex than you think, and (at the very
least) you need to admit that people can be inconsistent, and that
should be OK.

Gerv

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