Wrangler Doodles, green.

Building a Better World through Technology

co-founder Mozilla

( from the LizardWrangling Archive )

Category: Mozilla

  • Organizing the Mozilla Project — Mozilla Corporation

    The Mozilla Foundation has created a wholly owned subsidiary known as the Mozilla Corporation to help achieve the Mozilla Foundation’s goals of promoting choice and innovation on the Internet. We’ve done this to respond to the success and growing market-share of Mozilla Firefox and the new opportunities this makes possible. Mozilla Firefox is approaching 10% market share, with figures showing usage several times higher in selected groups and countries. We’re reaching the point where Mozilla Firefox is becoming a significant element of the Internet experience and has growing influence within the Internet and software industries.

    This presence brings a range of opportunities. Many of these opportunities involve working with other commercial entities. Some involve generating revenue. This is an exciting time, both because our products are so well received and because the opportunity for the Mozilla Foundation to become self-sustaining in terms of revenue makes the long term vitality of the project much greater.

    The Mozilla Corporation is created to respond to these opportunities. Non-profit law is reasonably well understood for traditional non-profit organizations like museums, universities and the traditional style of charities. But organizations like the Mozilla Foundation, which develops and distributes consumer software, are new in the non-profit world and the application of nonprofit laws to their activities is a developing area. We’ve found that this uncertainty makes responding to Mozilla Firefox’s success very complex. It is difficult to know what relationships with commercial organizations make sense for a non-profit or how to structure them. It is difficult to know what activities the non-profit should and shouldn’t engage in. It is difficult to determine what ways of generating revenue make sense for a non-profit and which ways of generating revenue are not appropriate.

    The Mozilla Corporation has been created to address this. The Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity and so is legally permitted greater freedom of action that is the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation will use this ability to interact with commercial entities and to generate revenue only in those cases where doing so meets the goals of the parent. In other words, its goals and mission are the same of the Mozilla Foundation, only it has greater flexibility in how to meet them. If it makes sense to generate revenue (as we currently do through search relationships) the Mozilla Corporation will look at doing so.

    The Mozilla Corporation is legally a taxable, or in general terms, a “for-profit” entity. However, it is not a typical commercial entity. Its purpose is not to generate a return on investment in the financial sense. It is not an investment vehicle or an IPO candidate. It is completely owned by the Mozilla Foundation to promote an open Internet, where consumers have choice and innovation thrives.

    More information about the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation and the relationship between them can be found at: www.mozilla.com or www.mozilla.org/reorganization.

    The health of the Mozilla project, its long-term sustainability, and its role in maintaining diversity to the web is critical for the web. The Mozilla Foundation is extremely important in this goal, and extremely important to me personally. Many people, myself included, have worked for years to see the Mozilla Foundation come to life, the Mozilla project grow and tens of millions of people choose Mozilla products. The Mozilla Corporation is another organizational tool to bring these goals about.

  • New People and Roles

    We have added some new people and management capabilities to the Mozilla Foundation engineering organization recently and I’d like to let people know how they fit together.

    First, Mike Schroepfer has joined the Mozilla Foundation as director of engineering. We’ve talked many times about the need to integrate overall product goals, specific engineering goals, technology goals, resource planning, engineering coordination and management much more fully in our development process, and to have someone chartered to guide the overall engineering effort. We’ve talked about this among employees, and I’ve received mail from a set of other community members noting the need for more organization, communication and planning as we grow. Mike is the person the Mozilla Foundation has asked to do this. We’ve consistently identified organization and knowing what other people are doing as areas needing improvement. So we’ve asked Mike to focus initially on product planning and delivery. We have planning efforts underway for specific areas, such as graphics, layout, content, toolkit, XULrunner, Firefox, Thunderbird, Firefox 1.1, Gecko 1.9, etc. We have asked Mike to lead the effort to bring these into a coordinated whole and to drive our efforts into cohesive product releases.

    Mike will also take on the classic people management functions for those people who are employees of the Mozilla Foundation.

    Chris Hofmann has picked up a number of special projects in the last 18 months that need more attention. Having Mike Schroepfer on board means Chris Hofmann will now focus on these projects. The two most active projects today are working with organizations interested in understanding how to integrate with our technical development team; and the security work.

    There are a number of organizations that want to understand how to work with us. These include the companies who have engineering groups working on Mozilla, companies wanting to use Mozilla technology, companies thinking about support for Mozilla projects, to name a few. These needs have gone up dramatically in the last 6 months and we need more focus in this area. On the security side, Chris has been working with Secunia, our security group and interested parties. He’s been tracking security issues, proposed fixes, what those might mean for the web and so on. He’s been helping those who find bugs understand our process and figuring out good ways to work together. Security is a topic that will require even more attention in the future. Chris also has an enormous amount of information about our engineering and release processes; he’ll be spending a chunk of time initially making sure that information is dispersed throughout the organization.

    Mike Shaver is now officially working with the Mozilla Foundation. We’ve asked him to help identify and investigate technical domains which we should understand, and to help figure out and drive implementation of what we should do in these technology domains — should we build our own offering, partner with an offering from another source? Examples of the kinds of technologies that Mike might investigate include “identity,” “presence”, VOIC, XMPP / instant messaging. Mike will work very closely with Brendan in these areas.

    We’ve also asked Mike to help us bring out “platform” strategy and our product focus into crisper alignment, and to help us think of our platform technologies in more product-like terms, requiring not only technical excellence, but also an understood scope and good delivery mechanisms.

    Brendan Eich will continue in his role as the guiding voice of our technical development. No changes here, I include Brendan so no one wonders why I’ve left him out.

    These changes also allow Chris Beard to focus more on products, helping bringing a product focus to our engineering efforts. We’ve done some work in this area, but a great deal needs to be done and it’s a big step forward to be able to give Chris Beard time to do this. Chris has done a remarkable job at filling many roles, I’m very excited to be able to offload some of the operational and other tasks to have allow him to think in a much more focused way about our products, and to make sure that this thinking is closely tied with our technology and engineering plans.

    Needless to say, everyone will be working closely with each other and with the engineering mechanisms the project has developed — drivers, module owners, reviewers, etc. And there is always a fair amount of “doing what needs to be done” so flexibility remains key.

  • The Ends and the Means

    I was just reading Blake Ross’s comments about his discussions with various student newspapers and their participation in link farms. In a couple of places Blake makes the point that “the ends don’t justify the means.” I agree completely, but have long felt that this is an inadequate analysis. The means are important because the means become a part of the end result. They are not separable. There’s no magic line where suddenly the methods used fade away and the pure, untarnished goal spontaneously appears. The path one takes affects the location one reaches.

    There may be cases where one needs to use unpleasant means to get a desired result. I don’t disagree — there are some cases where the methods we prefer will not get a necessary or critically needed result. But unpleasant means affect people, and that result doesn’t simply vanish one day and leave everyone with a pure, shiny and perfect thing. Violent methods will leave a mark on the result.

    In the particular case Blake cites, maybe link farms are necessary to sustain student journalism. (I’m not agreeing with this statement, only noting the possibility that it is correct.) Blake notes the end doesn’t justify the means. I’d go further and say that the use of link farms, which aren’t about journalism, will affect the sort of journalism that they sustain.

  • Firefox Search Plugin for Creative Commons

    I was talking with some of the folks at Creative Commons recently — Creative Commons is housed in the same building as the Open Source Applications Foundation which I visit periodically and so we get a chance to compare notes now and then.

    Firefox 1.x ships with a Creative Commons search plugin. The CC folks noted that they’ve received a few phone calls from people who must have inadvertently activated the drop-down menu and selected Creative Commons as their active search engine. There are undoubtedly many people who do this intentionally, as I do when I’m looking for a photo I can use for some purpose. But these folks must have done so inadvertently because they called Creative Commons to complain. And not gently – the messages were angry, along the lines of: “You’ve hijacked my computer.” “You’ve taken away Google and put yourself in their place.” “I can’t believe that an organization like Creative Commons would behave in this manner.”

    Of course, Creative Commons hasn’t done anything of the sort; the plugin sits in the list of available search engines and becomes active only when selected. And by using the drop down box and selecting the preferred search engine the angry user can return to the search engine he or she likes best. Some people apologize when this is explained, others remain angry.

    The anger is not new — people call the Mozilla Foundation and scream at us for not providing free support to go with the free product. What strikes me is not that people are angry. What strikes me is the number of people who feel their computer is out of control and that things are happening that they don’t understand and don’t trust, and the enormous level of pent-up frustration that surrounds many people trying to find their way on the web.

  • Technology and Non-Profits

    One of my Mozilla-related goals for the last year or so has been to increase the outward focus of the Mozilla project. For years we’ve been so focused on getting a great applications shipped that we’ve been extremely inwardly focused. I’ve been spending a chunk of time lately meeting people who are in and around the Mozilla space, trying to get to know people involved in the consumer side of the Internet and people interested in the non-profit world. (I know a lot of the enterprise folks already, thus the focus on the consumer side.)

    I had lunch yesterday with Jim Fruchterman. Jim leads the BeneTech Initiative, a non-profit high-technology organization dedicated to building sustainable technology initiatives that address social problems. I met Jim courtesy of Kevin Lenzo, open source speech technologist from Carnegie Mellon University, who had been exploring uses of open source speech-related technology for providing greater accessibility in software. BeneTech has a range of technology projects in the literacy / accessibility and human rights areas.

    Talking with Jim is always great. He’s got great experience with the organizational issues that affect a non-profit. Non profits are subject to both various state laws that govern the operation of a non-profit and various federal laws that govern the tax exempt status. It’s a complex area with only a few technology organizations represented. Any many of these — such as the Apache, Perl and Python Foundations — employ very few if any full time people. So finding someone with a number of years of experience in this area is wonderful.

    Jim is also experimenting with different ways of generating funds to sustain these technological projects since traditional models don’t fit. And of course he’s thinking about how to generate funds and remain true to the mission of the project. These topics are very similar to those I think about with regard to the Mozilla project. I’m always drawn in by the process of understanding different perspectives and figuring out new ways to do things and Jim and I get together periodically to trade notes. Yesterday’s conversation was particularly interesting coming so closely after the venture capital focus of last week’s Women’s Technology Cluster awards ceremony. In that case the organizational model is known and the issue is finding the people, technology and market opportunities for successful execution of the model. Jim is trying to do something different, meeting needs of groups of people who aren’t likely to ever generate large return on capital investment. These problems — literacy, accessibility, human rights — need solving, and I hope we find some ways of making our vast technical capabilities available to those who need them so badly and can pay so little.

  • So much for resolutions!

    So far I haven’t done very well with either of my general goals for 2005 — I haven’t been consistent on writing about what’s going on in my part of the Mozilla Foundation world and I haven’t had any time for the trampoline. I’m going to try to make some progress on the former and officially give up on the latter for a while longer.

  • Musings on Entrepreneurship

    Last week the Women’s Technology Cluster hosted an awards event for the 4 venture capital firms who during 2003 invested in the most companies lead by women (apparently data is not available for 2004). The WTC is a business incubator headquartered in San Francisco that helps women leaders build technology businesses. I agreed to give a keynote talk and learned that I was to be the “entrepreneur keynote” as counterpoint to Cynthia Ringo’s VC keynote.

    This was interesting, as I tend to thing of “entrepreneur” and “founder” as synonymous. And of course, in the technology world “entrepreneur” is pretty closely tied with venture capital and the search for many multiples of return on investment. Neither of these quite fits my role in the Mozilla project. Although I was involved in the creation of the Mozilla project, the role was not that of a “founder” creating an idea and bringing it to life. I was closer to that with the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, but this was still much more of finding a way to organize and lead an existing group of people than the prototypical founder’s role. And of course the basic goal of the Mozilla project is not focused on a large return on investment. We need to generate enough funds to keep the project vital, but that is far different than the typical startup as an investment vehicle.

    But nevertheless the definition of “entrepreneur” turned out to be not that far off and the work I actually do is entrepreneurial enough that I found I had plenty to say. I spoke mostly about the “sense of possibilities” that I think drives most entrepreneurs. Those possibilities can be focused on making money, on creating technology, on helping others, on enriching one’s own life — the substance of the possibilities is not the key. It’s the sense that they exist, and the act of will required to bring them into existence. I also think that most entrepreneurs have a sense of the part of the possibility that they most want to conform to their internal vision. In some cases, that’s the whole thing, and the entrepreneur maintains control over all significant aspect of the project or the company.

    My case is very much the opposite. The actual technical direction is not my space — my colleague Brendan Eich provides leadership in that arena. Beyond that, and far more unusual, is the degree to which the identity of the Mozilla project and the Mozilla Foundation is shaped by the myriad of participants and volunteers.

    There is of course a piece of the Mozilla project where I have a very strong sense of the possibilities and a determination to see things proceed in a way that makes sense to me. That area is the organizational structure of the project. How do we integrate the various constituencies? How do we organize ourselves? How do we provide enough structure to build top quality products and still provide room for individual initiative and serendipity? How do we integrate the core development with the Spread Firefox community marketing effort, the mozdev.org development community, mozillaZine, the localizations groups, our International Affiliates which now include Mozilla Europe, Mozilla Japan and Mozilla China, and the numerous companies that use, develop and distribute Mozilla technology?

    How do we remain the center of great technology and individual drive as we integrate with commercial teams? How do we create polished end-user products? How do we generate funds and remain true to our mission? How do we integrate employees of the Mozilla Foundation, employees of other companies and volunteers? How do we create an asset of great value, keep it vital and maintain it? These questions are only a part of the Mozilla project, and yet they provide plenty of challenges.

    Of course, this was also a gathering celebrating VC investment in companies with women CEOs so I noted how often I find myself in meetings where I am the only woman. Or more accurately, how often I think back to a meeting to consider its content and realize in retrospect that I was the only woman. Being the only woman in a group of decision-makers is so common that I rarely even notice it any more. Looking at this gathering as I spoke I realized that this not noticing is probably learned behavior. This may seem obvious but it was a new thought to me.

    Later Heidi Roizen noted during her acceptance comments for Mobius Venture Capital that she’s recently learned of a business school professor who taught the same case study — a study about Heidi herself — to two different sections of a class. In one section the study was about Heidi Roizen, in the other it was about Howard Roizen. Afterwards the professor conducted a survey asking questions like “How much do you respect the protagonist?” “How much would you like to work with / for this person?” Howard scored noticeably higher than Heidi, particularly among the male students. I can’t vouch for the study or the methodology as I’m recounting Heidi’s message. Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that our “meritocracies” remain highly flawed and subjective.

    After the formal program ended one of the women from the Women’s Technology Cluster challenged me to take personal responsibility for the low percentage of woman hackers in the Mozilla project. I refused, saying I would take responsibility with her, and the rest of our society for this problem, but wasn’t willing to take additional personal responsibility. We have not yet begun trying to direct the nature of the community that develops around Mozilla beyond our nascent international efforts. It would be interesting to hear whether other people think I’m more responsible than most for the low percentage of Mozilla Foundation employees and key volunteers who are women.

    All in all it was quite an interesting evening.

  • Guidelines for commercial relationships

    A while back I wrote a bit about search. One of the comments to that post was a suggestion / request that it would be helpful if the “Mozilla Foundation published some sort of guidelines about the processes they go through when considering and entering into these relationships.” Rather than wait until we have a full set of guidelines I think I’ll just plunge in with the first and most obvious and then keep adding.

    The first and most basic guideline concerns the source code development itself: The Mozilla Foundation does not enter into agreements that try to affect what goes into our shared source repository.

    The source code is a community resource. A relationship between the Mozilla Foundation and another organization cannot try to control the source tree for the benefit of that relationship. The source code is developed by a set of people far broader than the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla project has a long history of distributing authority to module owners, reviewers and other respected people. The job of the Mozilla Foundation is to provide coordination, guidance and leadership to these groups to produce the best possible shared resource.

    The Mozilla Foundation does make decisions about the branded versions that the Mozilla Foundation distributes and might enter into agreements regarding the branded version. We would do this sparingly with a focus on user experience and user choice, but we might make some agreements about our branded versions. Future posts and resulting discussions will work through the guidelines for how we think, and should think, about this.

    But the basic principle is that any such agreement do *not* bleed over into the unbranded source repository. What goes into the source tree is a community-based decision. I’ve had a number of conversations with various businesses interested in Mozilla technology, the Mozilla project and how the Mozilla Foundation operates. One thing comes through loud and clear: the Mozilla community generates respect. People often don’t understand the details of how we operate, or how leadership and distributed authority work in practice. But they do understand that the Mozilla community is greater than the Mozilla Foundation, and that working with this community is critical.

    This is a big change from when I started having these discussions years ago (before the Mozilla Foundation). It reflects the growing awareness of our development methodology, and the respect for what the Mozilla project has accomplished.

  • Time Magazine Dinner

    Time Magazine hosted a dinner for the Time 100 last week, inviting this year’s list, last year’s list and a set of other interesting people. As you might imagine, many people don’t attend. I went, thinking it would be an opportunity to meet interesting people. The dinner was a black tie event held at Time Warner Center in Manhattan. That’s “Time Warner,” as in used to be “AOL/Time Warner,” which I found somewhat ironic. It was a classic New York event, black tie, with the red carpet and photographers and “headliners” to generate interest and so on. I was reminded once again of how pervasive the role of the media is in New York life, and how unabashedly people seek the spotlight.

    We (my husband and I) did meet some interesting people. For example, we turned around to talk with a gentleman standing behind us to learn he was James Watson who, with his colleague Francis Crick, is credited with figuring out the structure of DNA.

    As we got to the dinner table I found myself standing between two people from the Time 100 group of 2004. One woman, from the investment world, looked a bit unsure as I described Mozilla and Firefox. But she had brought her son as her guest and he immediately piped up “Firefox! Everyone I know uses Firefox!” And went on to describe why. I then turned to person on my other side, who is active in politics. He too looked a little lost of the idea of software. But his companion, a doctoratal student in the biosciences looked up and said “Firefox! I absolutely use Firefox. All my colleagues use Firefox.” And he went on to explain why as well. Then someone from the other side of the table joined in about Firefox. One person has a Spread Firefox account. I could feel the initial confusion morph into something along the lines of “hmm, I may not know of it, but it feels like something is going on.”

    I found the experience to be a perfect example of the Firefox phenomenon. A whole set of people have no idea about the Mozilla Foundation. Many find software confusing in general and have little interest in sorting through the complexities of the browser or other software. And yet all around them are people they respect who are aware, who do care, and who are actually connected to the Mozilla project in some fashion.

  • Two Interactions with Time Magazine

    A while back (in early January I think, but I can’t be sure) we hosted a writer for Time Magazine at the Mozilla Foundation office. He talked mostly (maybe exclusively) with Ben Goodger and me. would have preferred that this discussion included a set of other people who are central to the project, but we don’t make these decisions. We talked a bit about the community of people that makes the Mozilla project happen. (We try very hard to describe this community to the press, although this focus doesn’t always appear in the resulting stories.) This writer noted the importance of community and was clear that we wanted to know something about me as well.

    This made the interview quite different from almost all others. (Esther Dyson is the only other person I can recall who has been quite so interested in the mindset and motivations of a non-programmer like me, and my discussions with Esther were several months after the Time Magazine interview.) The writer asked a set of questions about motivations, approach and leadership techniques that had not been asked before. Some were broad — I remember something about whether my participation in the project reflects a specific view of human nature — and some more specific. It was a thoughtful interview for me.

    This made me very interested to see the piece, as I had no idea how it would turn out. But it never ran. The interview was midweek, the writer said he would have the piece done by Friday, and it would probably run the next week. But it didn’t, nor the week after. We never found out why, that’s just how things are.

    Months later I was in the office during the early morning mail delivery time. First I open the door for a UPS delivery man with a package for a Mozilla Foundation employee. A few minutes later I did the same for a FedEx delivery. It is astonishing how much junk mail we receive at the Foundation. There appears to be an entire industry that scans some set of databases and does mass mailings to anything that looks like it might be a business and spend money. So a lot of dealing with mail involves sorting this stuff out from the legitimate mail. I looked at the FedEx package skeptically. It was addressed to me, from Time Magazine. “Right.” I thought. “What kind of attention-grabbing scheme is this?” Then I noticed that the return address had an intelligible name. (Of course FedEx requires this, but in the context of expecting advertisements it was a surprise.)

    I opened the FedEx package. Inside was a red envelope with my name printed on it. Inside the envelope was an invitation to a dinner at Lincoln Center somehow related to something called the Time 100. That’s it. No explanation. Just the invitation. Browsing the Web I found information about last year’s Time 100 and the Time 100 for 2000. (Have I said before how much I love the Web?)

    I thought “I’m on someone’s list of people to invite to fill tables.” Whose list could I possible by on? Rafael, our marketing guy, had a different take. “You’ve been nominated — I’ll bet you’ve been nominated.” I didn’t believe it in the slightest. So Rafael got the job of tracking down the person at Time Magazine and figuring out what was going on. A day or two later he came back to report that he was right, I had been nominated. The list would be announced in a couple of weeks.

    Then the list appeared online. Blake Ross pointed me to it and yes, I was included. It’s a fine description (except for the late-40’s part, which seems an exaggeration to me, but that’s life). It’s not the interview from my first interaction with Time Magazine. I would still like to see that piece. But this brief description has a good focus on the Mozilla project and the value of the project, which is good to see.

    In guiding the Mozilla project I find myself thinking about topics, organizational dynamics and goals in a way that is new and challenging. The existing analytic frameworks — how does one lead an organization to accomplish goal X — are helpful but do not fit our setting. The Mozilla project combines a set of passionately committed individuals with commercial and business players to produce great technology. Our goal is the health of the Web itself — the client side anyway (that’s ambitious enough). Choice on the client side, combined with innovative technology to bring the myriad possibilities of the Web to citizens and consumers everywhere. We achieve this goal partially by creating choice and great technology, and also by appealing to consumers so they take the extra steps to adopt it.

    It’s a new and exciting task. The Mozilla project has always broken new ground, building on Open Source traditions, learning from our peers and bringing our own experiences, creativity and drive. The Web is still young. It’s a fundamental piece of the digital world, and something as seemingly mundane as one’s choice of Web browser software makes an enormous difference in the long term health of the Web. Mozilla Firefox gives people that choice, provides a Web browsing experience that people love, and demonstrates that the commitment and dedication people bring to the Mozilla project makes a difference.

    It takes constant inventiveness to guide the Mozilla project. Fortunately that challenge is met by the enormous number of creative people within the project. At some point I assimilate the various needs and goals and try to create an over-arching framework in which people can be successful. This is always done in close collaboration with Brendan Eich, co-founder of mozilla.org, technical lead for the project and my anchor for making sure the project stays on course. That assimilation is a personal challenge as well, driven by the goals of the Mozilla project, the vitality and dedication of our community and the quality of people drawn to the project. Altogether it adds up to a sense of great responsibility, of enormous possibilities, and of great good fortune to be involved.