Wrangler Doodles, green.

Building a Better World through Technology

co-founder Mozilla

( from the LizardWrangling Archive )

Category: Mozilla

  • Interview Technique

    A lot of my classmates at the trapeze classes are ex-gymnasts. I was talking to one ex-gymnast the other day about work topics. She is one of only a few classmates who also work in the Internet industry, in her case at a big well-known company that has e-commerce, search, portal-like activity, etc. She said her group has been trying to find someone for a specific job for so long that she feels that interviewing for this job is basically a permanent part of her job. So she’s trimmed her interview style.

    According to my classmate, gymnasts have a very simple way of interviewing each other. Maybe there’s a hello and an exchange of names, but there’s really only one critical question: “Hi. What can you do?”

    She says she’s adopting this model, and getting some revealing responses. I’d love to be the proverbial “fly-on-the-wall” for those interviews.

  • Thunderbird Proces of Change, Part 2

    As I noted in my last post, in late 2006 we started thinking very hard about creating a new organizational home for Thunderbird. A number of us came to the conclusion this was the best plan, including the Foundation Board and the key Thunderbird developers.

    In early to mid 2007 the Foundation board designated two members (in addition to the work I was doing) to meet with the key Thunderbird developers to work on developing a plan together. In a series of meetings it was determined that a new Thunderbird organization would need an organizational leader — the developers couldn’t both develop and lead an organization. And as I have mentioned, there was a very strong interest in seeing Thunderbird vision expand and that clearly required additional people. A set of questions were raised but few answers were developed.

    These meetings were not public for a couple of reasons. There are some key personal and personnel issues. I wanted to make sure that everyone already involved had a good opportunity to express their thoughts quietly, in a safe setting first. Second, we didn’t yet know what we were likely to do. I didn’t want people to worry we were adrift. I know people worried about this when we did start the public discussion. So either I was wrong to not start the public discussion much earlier, OR I was right to do a lot of ground work first and have an outline of how we would proceed before opening the discussion. Or I was *both* right and wrong, and there is no perfect solution.

    We then spent some time thinking about who might be a good organizational leader for Thunderbird. The Thunderbird developers and I also spent time trying to think through how to create a new organization. By June or so it was clear that it was time to begin a public discussion about our goals for Thunderbird and desire to create a new home for it. I started working on this. Around the same time the Thunderbird developers came up with the suggestion that they create an independent company and we move Thunderbird development to it. The company would be interested in promoting the Mozilla mission, but would be outside of the Mozilla umbrella of organizations; a private company owned and run by the developers. We spent some time thinking through the pros and cons of this possibility, how the developers and a new company like this would interact with the source code and with the Thunderbird product. This became the third option included in my post opening the Thunderbird discussion. This option had the advantage of exciting the developers.

    When we considered the idea of Thunderbird moving to a private independent company, a number of significant disadvantages emerged. First, this would mean that Mozilla as an organization was leaving the mail/ communications space and hoping that space would be filled by another organization. We weren’t ready to do that. Second, it felt like this would be moving Thunderbird to a more private space. We’re eager to see Thunderbird become an even more public project, with more contributors with greater authority. This concern is not remotely a reflection on the motivations of Scott and David. They have been devoted Mozilla participants for many years. This is a *structural* concern. It reflects the desire that Thunderbird — the product as well as the code — remain dedicated to the public benefit through the Foundation.

    As is the Mozilla way, the public discussion of Thunderbird allowed us to move forward. Through this process we realized that David Ascher, long a part of the Mozilla project, was an excellent candidate for a Thunderbird / mail organization. I talk to David periodically about many Mozilla topics, and I think perhaps I realized he might be interested in leading the new organization even before he did 🙂 After this, the first step was to have David come to Mountain View (he lives in Vancouver) and meet the Thunderbird developers, followed by a bunch of other folks. I became convinced that David could lead the organization, and had the personality and technical chops to work with the Thunderbird developers. In particular to navigate between their phenomenal commitment to continuing to serve existing Thunderbird users and the Foundation’s goal of broadening the product vision.

    I outlined my view of the future to David and Scott, the Thunderbird developers — David Ascher joins Mozilla to lead the new organizaton, David Bienvenu and Scott McGregor join the new organization, they continue to work on Thunderbird as they have been and participate in the efforts to broaden Thunderbird. David and Scott reiterated their interest in forming a private company but agreed that David seemed a good person to run an organization and a reasonable person to work with. We (meaning the Thunderbird developers and I) then spent time talking through how this arrangement could work.

    These discusions involve nitty-gritty details like the status of the build system, ensuring that different versions of a product based on the Thunderbird code could be built. They also involve discussions of how modules owners like Scott and David would work within the new structure. Module ownership isn’t related to employment; it’s related to activity and the ability to lead and draw others to one’s work. So we expect the current developers to remain module owners for as long as they are active, interested, and leading a healthy community. We expect someone from Mozilla (eventually at MailCo) to make the final decision about when that code is ready to have the official Thunderbird name and be released as a product. There’s nothing new in this, but it’s always good to reiterate a shared understanding in a time of change.

    In September I announced Mozilla’s plans for a new Thunderbird / mail organization. David Ascher is already at work getting to know the community, find out who is interested and able to help, and working through the details of setting up an effective organization. Scott and David are working on their plans as well. One of the fundamental aspects of Mozilla is that participation is not dependent on employment. Mozilla has phenomenal contributors who have never been employed to work on Mozilla. We have people who change jobs and remain equally involved with Mozilla. We have people who change jobs and later change their involvement with Mozilla, based on their preferences and their ability to lead others. Both Scott and David have stated their plans to continue their involvement with Thunderbird. It’s an unusual setting, and extremely powerful.

    In the coming months a large set of Mozilla folks with be working on getting the new Thunderbird / mail organization organized and running, as well as serving Thunderbird users. We are also very eager to see Thunderbird become a broader product vision and to see a community with greater distributed authority. More people with the expertise and ability to authority to work deeply in the code will lead to a better product faster, and will spur the development of new experiments to improve mail. If you are driven to see Internet communications improve and can assist, please get in touch with David.

  • Thunderbird Process of Change Part 1

    In the coming months there will be a lot of discussion about how mail and Thunderbird will evolve. There will also be more detailed discussions about the new organizational home as we move from plans to concreteness. This seems a good time to describe how we got to where we are today.

    Thunderbird has been a part of the Mozilla Foundation since the Foundation was created in 2003. Initially the developers did all the work, including build, release and QA. After a while I arranged for the organization to provide the full range of resources to Thunderbird as well, meaning build, release, QA and marketing. We did not make separate groups to support Thunderbird (other than the actual application developers, where we had one Firefox developer and two Thunderbird developers).

    That setting remained unchanged but started to grow uncomfortable as the web started exploding in 2005 and 2006. Not only did Firefox marketshare and mindshare explode, but the web (and the browser) as a delivery platform for new applications also came of age. Firefox was at the center of a new wave of activity and a giant ecosystem. Through this Mozilla acquired a stronger voice for openness, innovation and participation on the web.

    Thunderbird remained an important product with a significant and dedicated userbase. But Thunderbird diverged from our browser based efforts in a number of ways. One is the scope and vision of the product. Thunderbird is an email client. IT has some RSS and newsgroup capability, but it is primarily an email client. Increasingly other forms of web communications are developing. And Thunderbird the email client is not the complete answer to email needs. A complete solution might have other functionality (for example, calendar is a highly desired feature). A complete solution might include some server aspects, it might include a strategy for webmail, etc.

    Second, email is a decreasing percentage of Internet communications. It’s still critically important to those of us who live in it of course. But even those who live in email often also use instant messaging, SMS, and other new ways of staying updated. Thunderbird is an excellent basis for thinking about these topics and improving Internet and web-based communications as a whole. But this wasn’t happening. And third, we weren’t seeing Thunderbird develop the kind of community or influence in the industry that Firefox has.

    Two things became clear. We had the team for developing to develop a stand-alone desktop email application. But we didn’t have the complete set of people to address both that and the larger issues. Without some new impetus, Thunderbird would continue in a status quo pattern. The second thing that became clear was that we weren’t likely to build a mail / communications team we need inside the Mozilla Corporation.

    Why not? Sometimes diversification can be a good strategy. Some companies do quite well with wildly different product lines, different operating groups responsible for them, all connected in one organization. But doing this well requires a certain type of management, and that is not the type we have at Mozilla. If an organization has different product lines and different development organizations, there must be a set of people in the organization who are thinking about all of them. At a minimum, that set includes whoever is making (or in our case guiding) strategy decisions, whoever is making decisions about how much money to spend where, whoever makes decisions about hiring and job responsibilities.

    We could have a layer of decision-making that balances these two. But that involves more management, both in people and in process. Mozilla is about empowering as many people as possible to do, to make decisions and take action. We have managers and management in the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation, but generally we have as little as possible to get the job done.

    So in late 2006 we started thinking very hard about creating a new organizational home for Thunderbird. A number of us came to the conclusion this was the best plan, including the Foundation Board and the key Thunderbird developers.

    In my next post I’ll describe how we went from this realization to our current plan.

  • ED Search Interviews

    Last Wednesday (September 19) Dan Mosedale did a brief segment about the Mozilla Foundation’s search for an executive director on that day’s Air Mozilla episode. In that interview (available via a multitude of sources, check out the options are Air Mozilla) Dan described how the Search Committee is looking for input to form our questions and frame our initial discussions with candidates. The current working sets of questions / discussion topics for both first and second round interviews can be found linked from the Executive Director summary page, as can the notes describing the interview process from our kick-off meeting with our recruiter. The second round of interview is where we’ll really start to dig into how a candidate might interact with Mozilla.

    The search committee will do a better job if we know your hopes and goals for the Mozilla Foundation. Please take a few minutes to read through our topics so far and let us know your hopes and goals, and suggest types of discussions you would find valuable to have with candidates.

  • Mozilla24

    As those of you who read planet.mozilla.org know, last weekend was the Mozilla24 event. A lot of people have written about Mozilla 24 and I won’t repeat a general description. The thing that struck me was the power that the infrastructure can bring, and how the infrastructure really can bring people closer. Typically in the Mozilla world we’re focused on software (obviously!). We recognize the critical nature of the underlying infrastructure that we live on but don’t spend our days building it as we do the software layer. And so the proposal for Mozilla 24 seemed daunting to me, given the massive amounts of infrastructure needed to provide real-time video conferencing across multiple continents. But Mozilla 24 was spear-headed by Mozilla Japan with the significant assistance Dr. Jun Morai. Dr. Morai is known as the “father of the Internet” of Japan, is a VP of Keio University, a member of ICANN and the Internet Society, and a long time friend of Mozilla Japan.

    Dr. Morai is also the chairperson of the WIDE project which seeks to put this infrastructure to use for social benefit. I found Mozilla24 to be an eye-opening example of how powerful an idea this is. I attended the Mozilla24 event at Stanford University. It was a very nice facility — thank you Stanford! The room had 3 large screens. Generally one showed the presentation, another showed the audiences in other areas and the third often showed the Mozilla 24 photo stream. What surprised me was how strong the feeling was of “touching” and “seeing” the people in other locations. The images were good enough, the audio was good, and the transmission lag was so small as to be unnoticeable for much of the time. I participated in the last segment, which was the Kids” Summit, followed by a discussion with Dr. Morai and Dr. Cerf. It really was possible to have a discussion, to watch Dr. Morai, the discussion leader and feel as if he was “right there.” At one point Dr. Moral was speaking to the Kids’ Summit participants, suggesting we’d kept them long enough and it was fine for them to go home. After the children from Japan left he turned to the children from Thailand and suggested they were free to go as well. I thought to myself “Wow, I didn’t know the participants from Thailand had gone to Japan; I thought they were all at the University in Thailand.” But of course, they *were* in Thailand. Dr. Morai is simply so comfortable with this technology that it’s impossible to tell from watching him whether he’s talking to people in the same room or someone thousands of miles away.

    Of course, Mozilla24 was an enormous amount of work. The Mozilla Japan team showed once again that they are masters of organization, and of bringing Mozilla DNA to well-organized, professional quality events. And the rest of the Mozilla world jumped in to make a rich program.

    Mozilla24 has made it clear to me once again how Mozilla is part of a much larger effort to bring openness and participation to *all* levels of the Internet stack. It made me realize once again all the different things that the Mozilla community is and does.

  • Mozilla’s New Focus on Thunderbird and Internet Communications

    Mozilla has been investing in email since the Foundation was created. We have a good, solid client in Thunderbird, and we have aspirations to do more. We’ve spent the last few months working on how to meet those aspirations. Many thanks to everyone who participated in the discussions.

    The result is that Mozilla is launching a new effort to improve email and internet communications. We will increase our investment and focus on our current email client — Thunderbird — and on innovations in the email and communications areas. We are doing so by creating a new organization with this as its sole focus and committing resources to this organization. The new organization doesn’t have a name yet, so I’ll call it MailCo here. MailCo will be part of the Mozilla Foundation and will serve the public benefit mission of the Mozilla Foundation. (Technically, it will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, just like the Mozilla Corporation.)

    David Ascher is joining Mozilla to lead MailCo. David has been an active participant in the Mozilla project for many years, both in his role as CTO of ActiveState and personally through participation in our governance discussions. In fact it was one if David’s comments on an early draft of the Mozilla Manifesto that helped crystallize its structure. David also has deep experience in the open source world and is a member of the board of directors of the Python Foundation. David also brings familiarity with Mozilla technology and the Mozilla community through years of using Mozilla technology to build ActiveState products, including the new Open Komodo project. We are very fortunate to have David join us to lead this effort.

    Mozilla will provide an initial $3 million dollars in seed funding to launch MailCo. This is expected to be spent mostly on building a small team of people who are passionate about email and Internet communications. As MailCo develops it and the Mozilla Foundation will evaluate what’s the best model for long-term sustainability. Mozilla may well invest additional funds; we also hope that there are other paths for sustainability.

    We’ll be setting up MailCo in the coming weeks. Part of this is forming the team of people, part is developing a transition plan to move Thunderbird into MailCo gracefully while supporting the Thunderbird users. That will take some time. We’re on the path now though and that’s a great thing.

    The goals for the new company are:

    • Take care of Thunderbird users
    • Move Thunderbird forward to provide better, deeper email solutions
    • Create a better user experience for a range of Internet communications — how does / should email work with IM, RSS, VoIP, SMS, site-specific email, etc?
    • Spark the types of community involvement and innovation that we’ve seen around web “browsing” and Firefox.

    One of the things I find most exciting about the Firefox work is the way people use Firefox to dream up what the web could be, and then go out and so something to make it happen.We can spark the same kind of excitement and energy level and innovation in the email/communications space. And when we do, Internet life will get much, much better and much more interesting.

    Help us make it happen.

  • Open Tools for a Better Web

    Good tools are a developer’s dream. I’ve been hearing the lament for better open source tools for open technology stacks ever since I started working with Mozilla. Today ActiveState is announcing the Open Komodo Project, bringing new open source tools for web developers into the Mozilla world.

    ActiveState has been a participant in the Mozilla project for many years. Its award-winning Komodo IDE is build on Mozilla technology. ActiveState has been continuously building non-browser applications based on the Mozilla platform longer than almost anyone.

    One of the goals of the Mozilla project is to create a world in which commercial organizations can and do make rational business decisions to promote open software and the open web. Today ActiveState takes another step on that path. And web developers have the promise of better open source tools to make their work easier. That makes today a good day indeed.

  • Activities: Mid July & Aug 2007

    In doing some blog maintenance i realized that the last summary of what I’ve been working on — which seems so recent in my mind — was from mid July. So here’s a summary of specific projects I’ve been working on since then.

    • Lots of work on describing the Mozilla project, our goals and how we achieve them, why we are different than commercial enterprises, and what the nest few years are likely to bring. I gave a talk at OSCON on this topic. I then put together and presented shorter, simpler, more text-and-fewer-pictures version at the Internet as a Public Good seminar. More recently I’ve been thinking about how to take the work on identity, combine it with the initiatives we have underway and describe what to look for in the next few years. When I get this a bit more cohesive I’ll start distributing it for comment.
    • Lots of time working on the mail / Thunderbird questions. The possibilities aren’t quite far enough along to describe yet, but I’m hopeful we’ll be able to do so soon. I’m also quite optimistic we’ll end up with a good solution.
    • Mozilla Foundation executive director search. Created the search committee. Had a first meeting where our recruiter Eunice gave the search committee general information about how to think about candidates. The notes from this meeting are posted on the mozilla wiki. A bunch of us were at OSCON during this meeting, so we didn’t get to figuring out logistics for making this meeting generally accessible. Had a second meeting to talk about interviewing candidates and what types of questions to ask. The recommendation is that in a first interview, the candidate should do most of the talking. And the questions should be open-ended, not specific to Mozilla or Mozilla knowledge. The goal here is to get to know the candidate. If that goes well, then a second interview would delve much more into Mozilla specific questions. The questions should be posted at the preceding link shortly. We’re starting to generate a good set of candidates, but there’s more work to be done here. Asa will be organizing an Air Mozilla broadcast on the ED search.
    • Mozilla Foundation organizational work. We hope to have our audited financial statements for 2006 ready shortly. I’ve also spent some time reviewing requirements and regulations for 501(c)(3) public benefit corporations, which is how the Mozilla Foundation is classified. There’s a bunch of ongoing work related to tax-exempt status that requires attention.
    • Brainstorming about the mozilla.org/foundation page of the website. The mozilla.org website in general has been on my mind, and I’m very glad to see there are a bunch of people actively working on this now through bug 345664. Right now my personal particular focus is on the foundation page. I want to make that a page that speaks to people whether or not they are programmers. I’d like it to describe the scope and potential of the Mozilla project. I’ve got a bunch of ideas now, am hoping to get them implemented for review shortly.
    • Participated in Mellon Foundation grant selection process for the Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration. Worked in conjunction with other members of the Award Committee. The awards will be announced in December.
    • General management, product, organizational and recruiting topics (this covers a lot of ground but is also true constantly).
    • 3 days of vacation. Short, but very relaxing.

  • Firefox is a Public Asset, part 2

    I understand what Matt over at AllPeers says about finding new ways to combine open source, public benefit and the economic incentives of commercial enterprises. I’m also quite interested in seeing this happen. But we still have a different point of view about Mozilla and Firefox.

    Firefox is not the place to test the effects of the profit motive.

    The difference might be in a view of the fundamental platform. Matt believes (as I understand his argument) that the Mozilla platform is the fundamental building block right now. An easy way to think of the Mozilla platform is as everything that an application needs to work that a human being doesn’t touch directly. This may not be 100% correct technically, but is close enough for this discussion. In other words, the Mozilla Platform is the giant chunk of code that understands networking, is able to get information from a web server, convert that info into something a human being can understand, present that information to people and allow interaction with that information. This is sometimes called “XULrunner.” Firefox is built on top of a version of XULrunner. Myriads of other applications, are built using this Mozilla technology. So it is possible to separate Firefox conceptually from the Mozilla platform.

    But the browser is not just one of many applications that understand the Internet. It is the closest thing there is to a universal client. By that I meant that the browser is the mechanism for delivering an overwhelming majority of web content to people. As more and more web-based applications (from classic style applications like spreadsheets to newer applications like maps and social networking activities) develop, more types of activities flow through the browser.

    So we think of Firefox as a part of the web platform. As the entry point for actual human beings to interact with the web. Browsers aren’t the only entry point, but they are closest thing to a universal entry point that exists today. They may not be the major entry way at some point in the future but that’s a way off. And there is certainly a debate to be had about when the “next big thing” will displace browsers vs. how what we call a browser will evolve over time.

    For the foreseeable future, browsers are a fundamental part of Internet life. Firefox is a key component of keeping the web open, interoperable and participatory. Thus the importance of its public benefit nature.

  • Firefox is a Public Asset

    Recently a Mozilla observer and contributor asked why Firefox isn’t treated as a typical for-profit, commercial effort, and why we are giving up the chance to get rich. This is a great topic for discussion, I’m glad it was raised. I’ve got a very strong opinion on this, and am quite interested in what others think.

    There are many reasons why Firefox is a public asset, built for public benefit rather than private wealth.

    To start with, we want to create a part of online life that is explicitly NOT about someone getting rich. We want to promote all the other things in life that matter — personal, social, educational and civic enrichment for massive numbers of people. Individual ability to participate and to control our own lives whether or not someone else gets rich through what we do. We all need a voice for this part of the Internet experience. The people involved with Mozilla are choosing to be this voice rather than to try to get rich.

    I know that this may sound naive. But neither I nor the Mozilla project is that naive, and we are not stupid. We recognize that many of us are setting aside chances to make as much money as possible. We are choosing to do this because we want the Internet to be robust and useful even for activities that aren’t making us rich.

    It’s possible that some participants are deferring the chance for personal wealth rather than giving up on it. Contributing to Mozilla, passing up opportunities for stock and wealth now, and planning to step back into that world after a while. This is a topic I’d love to discuss further and may write more about before too long.

    But for now I want to concentrate on why I have always believed — and still do — that Firefox can not become a tool for some people to get rich. And why I believe the organizational home for Firefox (the Mozilla Corporation) must remain dedicated to the public benefit.

    Firefox is not the creation of a “company” or a set of employees. The Mozilla Corporation and its employees are important, but not enough. Not remotely enough. And even if we had 2 or 3 or 4 times as much money or employees it would still not be enough.

    Firefox is a great product because thousands and thousands of people care about it, and contribute to making it better. And the Firefox phenomena is even further removed from anything that could be accomplished if Firefox was a private company. Imagine 50 million people, or 100 million people or more. Now imagine getting all those people to download, install, and migrate to Firefox even though they have a similar piece of software already on their machines.

    That used to be known as impossible. Today it’s known as Firefox. It is happening because tens of thousands — I believe hundreds of thousands of people — have taken it upon themselves to create Firefox, to spread Firefox, to localize it, to extend it, to tell others, to install it for others, to help others use it.

    Firefox generates an emotional response that is hard to imagine until you experience it. People trust Firefox. They love it. Many feel — and rightly so — that Firefox is part “theirs.” That they are involved in creating Firefox and the Firefox phenomena, and in creating a better Internet. People who don’t know that Firefox is open source love the results of open source — the multiple languages, the extensions, the many ways people use the openness to enhance Firefox. People who don’t know that Firefox is a public asset feel the results through the excitement of those who do know.

    Firefox is created by a public process as a public asset. Participants are correct to feel that Firefox belongs to them. They are correct legally, since the Mozilla Foundation’s assets are legally dedicated to the public benefit. They are correct practically because Firefox could not exist without the community; the two are completely intertwined.

    Periodically someone suggests that it’s possible to build a community like this around a core of people who own a company, and use that company for the express purpose of generating wealth for a few. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it on practical terms. The participants I meet radiate the conviction that Firefox exists to benefit all of us. I don’t buy it on a philosophical level either. A people-centered Internet needs some way for people to interact with the Internet that isn’t all about making money for some company and its shareholders.

    We need a public benefit aspect to the Internet. That’s why we started building browsers in the first place. That’s why we build Firefox. That’s why we build Thunderbird, and why we’ll build future products.