The people who fought for Eich's departure like to downplay just how much knowledge he carries around in his head. I think deep down they're afraid to admit just how much damage they did to Mozilla, Firefox and the entire open source community. They still think they did a good thing.
Losing one of the most important people at one of the most important open source projects is a loss in and of itself. That was twenty years of experience and technical knowledge that walked out the door.
Losing one of the only people in a position to fight against DRM who had the will to do so is another blow. The end result as I see it is the social justice community gets a "victory", religious people at Mozilla learn they're not to take part in our political process, and those who were left gave up the fight against DRM. Not that they had a choice, how do you ride into battle short a CEO and a CTO, and while licking your wounds from a vicious boycott/smear campaign?
