Ethereum Foundation told staff to sign a suicide pledge, then fired those who refused, lawsuit says
Crypto foundation demanded employees endorse suicide pledge
A Boulder woman is suing the Switzerland-based Ethereum Foundation for wrongful termination and discrimination, alleging that leadership circulated a 38-page vision document for the next 1,000 years and required employees to endorse a suicide pledge. Leaders who objected were dismissed, according to the Colorado lawsuit reported by The Denver Post.
On a Friday in March, employees at an international technology foundation received a 38-page document outlining leadership's vision for the foundation for the next 1,000 years.
- nostrademons
Yeesh, they should've learned that you don't try to get cute in a legal document.
I remember asking about the Crockford License's clause "This software should be used for Good, not Evil" in my Noogler training. And then having Chris DiBona need to tell me "for the purposes of this particular license, Google is Evil". Because the problem is that "good" and "evil" could mean anything in a court of law; they are 100% up to the jury to decide. And so any sane firm that wants to limit its risk and stick to predictable areas of law will not use them.
Yes, it's pretty clear to me that ritual seppuku is not meant to be taken literally. Juries are instructed to consider the text of the contract carefully though: do you have confidence that 12 people chosen at random will reach the same interpretation you do?
- DoctorOetker
> “If you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF,” [Bastian Aue] said, according to the lawsuit, which cited a recorded conversation between the pair.
except Fulton did not "make a stink" but only pointed it out, if Bastian Aue wanted to not continue rewarding those who actually make the stink, he should have fired whoever was involved with inserting the offensive memes and imagery into legal documents... this reflects very poorly on the Ethereum Foundation... any small sized team of cryptographers can recreate effective competition in this space, especially aided with LLMs.
Also, I don't think a contract prescribing a suicide pledge is a lawful contract. This means those people were fired for refusal to sign an unlawful contract! Imagine for a moment that instead of a suicide pledge it contained an assassination pledge, everyone signing it would be complicit (although the employees may point at fear of losing their jobs combined with non-chalance of governments looking the other way even as we speak). Unlike an assassination pledge the employees are probably not in fault, even though the contract is unlawful, but the employers drafting the unlawful contract even to 100% willing employees could very well be illegal. In the real world not 100% would sign, and the ~20% that refused to sign (53 of 250 or so) lost their jobs, that sounds lik […]
- ad_hockey
You can have "this mandate is so important to our mission that we want you to leave if you don't agree" or you can have "some of this mandate is literal and some is just jokes"
You can't have both.
- rdtsc
> After demanding that employees agree to the mandate, Bastian Aue, co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, defended the suicide pledge to employees as “part of the artwork of the mandate.”
This is insane. Is this something like a judgment or reverse loyalty test? “If you sign something like this, you’re too dumb to stay?”
- comrade1234
You can't sign away your rights like that in a contract. The contract is invalid.
- Heliodex
Actual document: https://ethereum.org/foundation/mandate/
- wslh
- qoez
I feel like it has to be a joke, but I wonder if such a clear "joke" would make other things in the contract possible to be invalidated in court given that if one assumes that part is a joke how can one tell what other parts are also supposed to be or not to be a farce in the contract.