Brendan Eich

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Brendan Eich
Brendan Eich Mozilla Foundation official photo.jpg
Brendan Eich, official Mozilla Foundation photograph, August 21, 2012
Born (1961-07-04) July 4, 1961 (age 62)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Alma mater University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Santa Clara University
Known for JavaScript
Website brendaneich.com

Brendan Eich (/ˈaɪk/; born July 4, 1961)[1] is an American technologist and creator of the JavaScript programming language. He co-founded the Mozilla project,[2] the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer and briefly its chief executive officer, before he was forced to resign shortly after his appointment due to controversy surrounding his opposition to same-sex marriage.[3] He is the CEO of Brave Software.[4]

Early life

Brendan Eich received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science at Santa Clara University.[1] He received his master's degree in 1985 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Eich started his career at Silicon Graphics, working for seven years on operating system and network code.[5] He then worked for three years at MicroUnity Systems Engineering writing microkernel and DSP code, and doing the very first MIPS R4000 port of GCC.[5]

Netscape and JavaScript

He started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995. Having originally joined intending to put Scheme "in the browser",[6] Eich was instead commissioned to create a new language that resembled Java, JavaScript for the Netscape Navigator Web browser. The first version was completed in ten days in order to accommodate the Navigator 2.0 Beta release schedule,[6][7] and was called Mocha, which was later renamed LiveScript in September 1995 and later JavaScript in the same month.[8] Eich continued to oversee the development of SpiderMonkey, the specific implementation of JavaScript in Navigator.[9]

Mozilla

In early 1998, Eich co-founded the Mozilla project with Mitchell Baker, creating the website mozilla.org that was meant to manage open-source contributions to the Netscape source code. He served as Mozilla's chief architect.[10] AOL bought Netscape in 1999. After AOL shut down the Netscape browser unit in July 2003, Eich helped spin out the Mozilla Foundation.[11]

In August 2005, after serving as Lead Technologist and as a member of the Board of Directors of the Mozilla Foundation, Eich became CTO of the newly founded Mozilla Corporation, meant to be the Mozilla Foundation's for-profit arm.[11] Eich continued to own the Mozilla SpiderMonkey module, its JavaScript engine, until he passed on the ownership of it in 2011.[9]

On March 24, 2014, Eich was promoted to CEO of Mozilla Corporation.[12] Gary Kovacs, John Lilly and Ellen Siminoff resigned from the Mozilla board after the appointment,[13] some expressing disagreements with Eich's strategy and their desire for a CEO with experience in the mobile industry.[14][15] Critics of Eich within Mozilla tweeted to gay activists that he had donated $1,000 to California Proposition 8, leading Eich to say on his blog that he was sorry for “causing pain” and pledged to promote equality at Mozilla.[13][16] Gay activists created an online shaming campaign against Eich, with OkCupid declaring they would block access to the Firefox browser unless he stepped down.[17][18][19] Others at the Mozilla Corporation spoke out on their blogs in his favor.[20][21] Board members wanted him to stay in the company with a different role.[22]

On April 3, 2014, Eich stepped down as CEO and resigned from working at Mozilla.[23][24] In his personal blog, Eich posted that "under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader."[25][26] Andrew Sullivan said of Eich's departure that "there is not a scintilla of evidence that he has ever discriminated against a single gay person at Mozilla"[27] and the episode "should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society."[28][29][30] Conor Friedersdorf argued in The Atlantic that "the general practice of punishing people in business for bygone political donations is most likely to entrench powerful interests and weaken the ability of the powerless to challenge the status quo".[31]

Brave Software

Eich is the CEO of Brave Software, an internet security company which has raised $2.5 million in early funding from angel investors.[4][32] The company's co-founders include Brian Bondy, who worked on Firefox and Khan Academy, and Kevin Grandon, who worked on Firefox OS and WebVR. The company's employees include Marshall Rose, a network protocol engineer, and Yan Zhu, who worked on SecureDrop and Tor.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found..
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ "On mobile devices, however, Firefox ranks 13th, with less than 0.1% share, according to Net Applications" Note Net Applications rated Firefox on mobile at 0.01% in Nov 2013 and 0.68% in Jul 2014
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  32. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

Preceded by CEO of Mozilla Corporation
24 March 2014 – 3 April 2014		 Succeeded by
Chris Beard
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