Mitchell Baker Quotations

We have a very active testing community which people don't often think about when you have open source.

I've learned that for many people, change is uncomfortable. Maybe they want to go through it, and they can see the benefit of it, but at a gut level, change is uncomfortable.

I'm a good communicator, and I'm a good translator. I can talk to engineers; I can talk to people for whom technology is not remotely interesting or even maybe scary - things like that.

The Internet offers untold potential for humanity. To make the most of it, we need to think of the Internet as 'ours.'

People are more naturally protective of what they create than of what they consume.

The name Firefox is not part of the open source licence, and that's why it's important to us.

The good news is, being a digital citizen comes naturally to many of us once we get the opportunity - human beings have been taking things apart and putting them back together throughout history.

We carry around computers in our pockets. Many people barely use them as phones. We use them as computers. If you think about the future, when you're traveling around, it's great to have a lightweight, small form factor.

We do care about control and privacy. It's one of the reasons we are so focused on having our systems be open source, so you or someone technically savvy you know can verify what the software is doing.

I mean, who wants to live waking up... at least I don't want to live waking up everyday about revenge.

When people think of Mozilla, they generally think of the browser, but Mozilla is really much more than that. Mozilla is of interest to people who want an end-user application like our browser that's not tied directly into the Windows platform.

We don't spend our days thinking about Microsoft or trying to get revenge on Microsoft. That's a really negative and backward way, and that's not how I want to live.

The Mozilla Foundation is an independent, nonprofit organization.

We actually have a real community of people doing useful things.

I think HTML5 is one area where Mozilla has done very poorly at actually communicating what we have done.

Mozilla has one foot in the Valley, Silicon Valley product technology, and partly one foot in the social enterprise space.

Saving the Internet requires a greater sense of shared ownership and fewer bystanders accepting whatever today's Internet has to offer.

Some people are really drawn to technology and I liken them to artists.

The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity.

Humanity is smart. Sometime in the technology world we think we are smarter, but we are not smarter than you.

I have a personal life and a professional life, and there's no way to separate them; for a while I tried, but no one could find me.

Money tends to make people suspicious, if there's any money floating around.

Tech, in the sense of... putting things together, that goes back beyond memory for me.

The organization is a way for people to find us and deal with us and know how we operate.

We invest heavily on Firefox on the desktop. We have a user base we want to keep happy.

We worked very hard to make extensions very simple.

There are dancers and painters and writers who pursued that whether or not they are paid for it. There are a lot of technologists who are the same.

When we got ready to ship out Firefox 1.0, the last set of things we did was to make it appealing to a consumer, to add the polish of a world-class product to it.

We're just over a year old but the Mozilla project has been around for a long time.

With this reorganization, the Mozilla Foundation will look much more like the Apache Foundation than it currently does.

So many commercial orgs have software where you can come and modify it, but they still control everything. And what's controlled is very clearly what's good for their business, or if they're more progressive, their view of what's good for the Internet.

Mobile devices are kind of at the opposite end of PCs, in that PCs are pretty open and you can do a fair amount with them, but many mobile devices aren't.

IE6 was a bad experience for consumers, but it was a terrible for developers. Not only it was technically bad, but it was closed, and you couldn't do much with it.

What we have is 95 percent there and what we are doing at the moment is actually polishing.

It is an effective model - more effective and certainly more disciplined and structured than many people realize.

Over the history of the Mozilla project, it turns out that the product browsers exists on many different kinds of machines.

We have a version of Firefox for mobile devices, codenamed Fennec. That's a type of fox - South American, I think, with giant ears.

Well, there actually is a real effort underway right now with the development effort and a fair amount of planning and thinking.

When Chrome launched, it was not a high point for Firefox. There's no secret about that.

We are so pleased to be named to Entrepreneur's prestigious and highly regarded Franchise 500. We appreciate being recognized as a strong and growing franchise and look forward to what this ranking will do for our business in the coming year.

The question of trademark is pretty unsettled in the open source world. The trademark is important in a consumer product, but there are a few groups who feel it's a restriction they can't live with.

Within that several-year time frame, if customers are interested in new features and maintenance, they should look at the new products and think about a migration strategy.

We will not build a society that reflects who we are and that has opportunities for equality or justice if we don't make progress for all participants.

You have to raise funds somehow. And once there's money in the picture, money is great because we all need it to live on.

And the standards process can slow down development and implementation of new things.

Flash is one of those very useful, very closed, very proprietary non-weblike things that has great tools and serves a need very well. But in the long run, we see video as part of the web, and it should be handled just the way other html elements are.

I spent five or six months as a foreign student in China many years ago and so going back in the new era was really exciting.

People sometimes ask if there are other features from which we could make money. The short answer is: We don't know. Perhaps search is the only feature that will both benefit users and generate this kind of revenue.

The Mozilla project has always been a project trying to bring together open source developers with commercial software developers and distributors.

The Mozilla Corporation is not a typical commercial entity. Rather, it is dedicated to the public-benefit goal at the heart of the Mozilla project, which is to keep the Internet open and available to everyone.

A lot of people start in the testing and quality assurance area because it's an easier way to get familiar with the project.

I mean, we're here to try and do something useful and help keep the Internet something fun and useful for us and have a good time while we're at it.

If you're a Firefox user, you get accustomed to your history and the URL bar and finding things. That should be available on your mobile phone as well.

I like to see photographs: I like to see my family. To me, when I open a basic browser, and it's that very elegant silver simple user interface, I am unhappy. I don't need elegant and silver and simple!

In addition to that, there has always been a very active volunteer community and an active set of people employed by other companies.

But very often people ask us if we're in this for revenge or to go after Microsoft or if that's what we think about, and the answer is no.

I grew up as an only child. I think it might just be that my dad really didn't care that I was a girl. "You're gonna do certain things 'cause I want you to, and that's the way it is."

I'm excited about mobile; clearly that's important. Mobile devices are kind of at the opposite end of PCs, in that PCs are pretty open and you can do a fair amount with them, but many mobile devices aren't. We're excited at the idea that we can make the same kind of contribution in the mobile space. So that's one thing coming down the pike.

We're also looking a lot at graphics and video. We've done a lot on a deep technical level to make sure that the next version of Firefox will have all sorts of new graphics capabilities. And the move from audio to video is just exploding. So those areas in particular, mobile and graphics and video, are really important to making the Web today and tomorrow as open as it can be.

We should probably figure out a new word for this. For us, "open" means transparent, as in "open source" - you're not locked in to what the original creator did. And in our case "open" also means distributed decision making.

So many commercial orgs have software where you can come and modify it but they still control everything. And what's controlled is very clearly what's good for their business, or if they're more progressive, their view of what's good for the Internet.

Our sense of "open" is that the authority to make decisions about that gets distributed based on merit and understanding and participation and leadership, not solely on employment or a title or a business plan. Technical colleagues will define "open" as "open standards," "interoperable" - you can find it, search it, cut and paste it, view source, mix and match - all those things that we associate with text on the Web, that you can continue to do that with audio and video and whatever's next.

What's been most helpful to me is realizing that those times when all the heads in the room turn and look at me as if I was crazy, reinforce my own leadership capability. Because I've been in a number of those settings where I've been right. And I've been right often enough that now when it happens I don't automatically think, "Oh, my, what's wrong with me?" or "Ohhh, I must not be ready for this role," or "They know so much more than I do."

Just to have the confidence to say, "Which end of that spectrum am I usually on?" That's been very helpful to me. Because it's a really awkward setting.

Usually, you know, you're at a table and you're the only woman, you've got this idea, you finally speak up - I mean, I've been in some settings where every head turns toward me and then they all turn away as if I've never spoken. Which I think happens when whatever I said was so out of the blue, or so awkward, that they just didn't know how to respond.

Ther average consumer does not know the difference between the browser, the internet, and the search box.

We've broken the code base into logical chunks, called modules, and the foundation staff delegate authority for the modules to people with the most expertise.

Some period of time later you look up and say, "That concern was right on the mark; it happened exactly as I thought it would." So that's been really helpful to recognize.

People notice it and they help you participate and see your work included in this project and when we ship our browser, you and millions of other people get to see the fruits of your efforts.

But I think it's always difficult when a product that you're using and accustomed to changes.

Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks.

I guess my other advice is that it's really good to be comfortable among groups of men! It's just a very common work setting and I don't actually think about it too much, but there must be some comfort level that I've developed over the years.

Of course, it's hard to support full-time programmers, so we do get funds from a set of companies that are interested in the health of the Mozilla project and so are willing to support the people working for the Foundation as well.

The sex symbol thing's a little bit different for me. Usually, like whenever there's a picture of me, there's always this set of things that comes out like, 'Oh my god, she's so ugly.'

There's the classic charitable contribution, which we receive thousands, and we're extremely grateful and they often come with notes from people, which are very heartwarming, about how much difference our products have made in their life on the Internet.

But most of us who aren't models aren't models, right? And so, you just have to get used to that and sort of read right past it. So. On the sex symbol piece, I don't get that piece. On the personality piece, that people are excited to meet a leader from Mozilla - maybe there's more about meeting me personally than I give credit for, but I find that people are excited about what Mozilla is, more than 'Oh my god, there's Mitchell, look, her hair,' whatever.

We've always been the development project that lived in a time pressured setting and always where commercial entities were relying heavily on releases in a certain time frame.

You can get anything from Mozilla Firefox-based themes to nature themes to your own photographs.

There's something about being a woman in a technology space, unless you happen to be model beautiful, where there's always, always talk about what you look like.

Especially if you don't have a job that's providing fulfillment in your technical expertise, there is a lot of reward to working on a very smart and demanding community that will respect you and will give you leadership and authority based on what you do.

WorldGate offers interactive set-top-box applications. Its customers want to interact with the Web as an adjunct to other things they can do, and WorldGate allows that through the layout engine in Mozilla, called Gecko.

The web as a platform is the most powerful platform we have ever seen.

The goal of Firefox and Thunderbird is a new architecture which allows those products to be built separately, to remain separate products.

The formation of the Mozilla Corporation gives the Mozilla Foundation new capabilities for becoming even more successful in delivering innovative open-source, end-user products. The Mozilla Corporation is not a typical commercial entity. Rather, it is dedicated to the public benefit goal at the heart of the Mozilla project, which is to keep the Internet open and available to everyone.