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Brendan Eich’s Prop. 8 contribution gets Twittersphere buzzing

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Has your 4-year-old contribution to an anti-gay marriage law suddenly resurfaced on the Internet?

Then you know exactly what Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla, inventor of JavaScript, and general developer hero, is going through when it recently came to light that back in 2008, he made a $1,000 contribution to support Proposition 8.

The record of the donation has been available since at least 2008, but it was rediscovered by the Twittersphere last month and the information -- and outrage -- has continued to spread, with more than 5,000 people tweeting about Eich’s contribution Tuesday.

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“Apparently @brendaneich, father of #JavaScript, isn’t as versatile as his language,” wrote the Chaos Reactor. “He donated $1000 in support of a gay marriage ban.”

Matthew Tretter wrote: “I’m so used to awesome developers being awesome people too. Really disappointed that @brendaneich bucked the trend.”

And the IT journalist Peter Bright, who tweets under the handle “DrPizza” wrote: “Time I think to switch back to chrome.”

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Not everyone felt that Eich should be villified.

Ricy Rickard wrote: “@BrendanEich supported Prop 8 & internet goes nuts. Let the man have his opinion, even if it differs from you.”

And Paul M. Watson wrote: “Not relevant to JavaScript but I feel a pang of disappointment.”

Eich did not respond to an Los Angeles Times request for comment, but he did respond to a tweet by David Heinemeier Hansson, who created the open source Web framework Ruby on Rails, and has more than 55,000 followers on Twitter.

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In language we can’t repeat here, Heinemeier Hansson said that seeing Eich’s name and Mozilla’s name on the list of people who gave to Prop 8 was “nasty.”

Eich responded on Twitter: “@mmastrac cc: @dhh Mozilla has no say in employees’ contributions. CA law requires donors to list employer.”

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