Wrangler Doodles, green.

Building a Better World through Technology

co-founder Mozilla

( from the LizardWrangling Archive )

Category: Mozilla

  • Thinking About Search

    I’ve been thinking a lot about search these days. For quite some time we’ve been saying that the browser is important because it provides the mechanism through which human beings can access and use a range of web services. This is rather abstract though. What is a “web service”? The term is used a lot in the industry, but even there people mean different things. And for the general consumer who isn’t particularly interested in technology “web services” is probably incomprehensible.

    But people understand search. It’s the perfect example of a web service that consumers use constantly and that helps define the Internet experience. Search is also a great example of how browsers can make web services (here, search) more accessible and more useful. Modern browsers do this through the Search Box. The Search Box is a feature that people love. I’ve personally had people tell me they do far more searches on, for example, eBay because it’s included in the Firefox Search Box drop down menu. And so search has become a great example of browser software improving the Internet experience through better access to services.

    Search is one of the very few areas of functionality to which Firefox devotes precious screen “real estate.” I wonder if there will be other functions that rise to this level of centrality, or if search is the only one. I also wonder if and how the browser interface will change as search functionality becomes richer. The Search Box functionality in Mozilla Firefox already differs from that in many other pieces of software because it provides the users with choice and flexibility. Mozilla Firefox ships with a set of search engines already available — Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Creative Commons. The user can choose any of these search engines as the “active” search engine, meaning the search engine that will be used when a search is initiated. Once a search engine is selected as active, it is designed to remain the active search engine until the user changes it. In addition, the user can add additional search engines easily. (Just use the Search Box drop-down menu and select “Add Engines.”) Providing this kind of flexibility with a simple user interface is quite a challenge and I keep wondering what will come next.

    Search is also an area of great innovation. There’s a bunch of very smart people thinking about the different directions that could be taken to improve search and to tie search functionality to other applications. The established search providers are tying new ideas all the time; a set of start-up companies are trying to commercialize new ideas. The increasing integration between search and maps is extraordinarily helpful; I’m sure there are many other examples on the horizon.

    Search is also an aspect of the web that generates revenues and the search relationships related to Firefox generate funds for the Mozilla Foundation’s operations. These funds can play an important role in supporting our efforts. Raising funds at all is new to the Mozilla project. Before the Mozilla Foundation was formed funds were provided by the companies who employed participants and often funded other expenses associated with the project. Since the Foundation was formed we’ve raised funds through a number of sources, including charitable contributions from individuals and participation by companies interested in Mozilla technology. With the Firefox launch we started raising funds via a product offering.

    There’s no doubt we need funds for the project to have the best chance of achieving its purpose — promoting openness and choice on the client side of the Internet. Funds allow us to employ a core set of people and do the myriad of other things a project of our scope needs to stay at its most vital.

    So revenue from our search relationships is encouraging. It’s not as gratifying as the individual charitable contributions. Having people care enough about our efforts to voluntarily send donations is an extraordinary thing. I look at the names and addresses of contributors as I sign the thank you notes and this imparts a very tangible and gratifying sense of how much people appreciate what we’re doing. Revenue from search relationships doesn’t provide the same sense of directly touching people’s lives. But it brings diversity in funding sources and it may well provide a significant ongoing source of funds.

    This revenue isn’t perfect however. Like so many arrangements with commercial entities, the terms of our search relationships are governed by confidentiality obligations and we are not able to say very much about them. It turns out that marketing and business data remains sensitive even for companies that have grown comfortable with developing in the open. Even before the Mozilla Foundation existed companies would want to talk with mozilla.org staff about marketing, business plans and product information but would not share that information publicly. So we have a fair amount of experience with handling marketing and other sensitive information while maintaining the absolute requirement of open development in compliance with our policies. It’s new to have that confidential information include a financial component and I am working to find ways to make more and more information available over time. For now we are living within classic confidentiality constraints regarding these agreements, while maintaining the absolute requirement of open development.

    On the other hand, we’re learning about what’s involved in integrating the browser with services the Mozilla project did not create, we’re doing so in a way that users love, we’re exploring how to work with commercial entities, and we expect the revenue from this to make a significant difference to the project. So as much as I sometimes want to think about other things, search is on my mind these days.

  • PC Forum 2005

    I’ve spent the last few days in Arizona at PC Forum, a gathering organized by Esther Dyson. This was my first trip to PC Forum. Esther contacted me a while back to say she knew she’d like me to speak on some aspect of the Mozilla project, and we then spent some time thinking about a topic. It was a very interesting process, quite different from my experience with many other conferences. This is not a case where the conference organizer come up with a desired presentation and then found someone to give it. Instead, Esther spent a fair amount time of time talking to me about the Mozilla project. We talked on the phone a few times, we met in person, we talked on the phone some more. Esther took what she learned of the project and of me, and then started thinking about how she might fit this into the event in some interesting fashion. After a while she came back and suggested a discussion with Kim Polese on some topic about how open source works in practice. I said sure. Then came a set of discussions about a bio. Most conferences ask for a prepared bio and print it up. PC Forum does this, but Esther does more. The version of Release 1.0 just before the conference contains extended descriptions of the speakers. I don’t know if Esther personally writes every one, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Esther tracked me down in Beijing for a set of phone calls to finalize the description about me. All of this means that there is a very personal feeling to the gathering — even newcomers like me are known to the conference host.

    On the other hand, the content of the discussion was left quite open. Esther was developing an idea of where to start and where to guide things, but at no time did we plan the content. I approached it as a “conversation with Esther” and figured she would guide us into interesting territory. I met up with Kim Polese a few minutes before our talk and she had the same experience.

    The conference itself is active. Of course a large set of attendees know each other from work and past conferences. There is the activity of the VCs and the companies looking for funding and /or partnerships. There are a wide range of very creative, accomplished people looking for interesting conversations. This year included a focus on health care, and also a discussion on the meaning of work and education initiated by Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union. Everything has a very technical bent but not every discussion is entirely technical. The energy level was high.

    It’s not new, but it’s still exciting to see the web take its place in all this ferment. The web enables a new set of activities, a new set of ways for people to interact, and of course the communities and businesses built on that. It was also fascinating to note the extent to which the idea of “community” has become mainstream. It seems everyone wants to develop a community around their company or project or effort. This makes sense to me, given the power and effectiveness of the Mozilla community. This focus on communities is not explicitly (or perhaps even consciously) tied to the open source experiences. However, I suspect that the accomplishments of open source communities may be a factor in this general business attitude.

    It’s also great to see the extent to which Firefox is seen as playing a role in the current climate of excitement and creativity. Many people stopped to say thanks for Firefox. I want to pass those thanks on to the astonishing community of people who are helping to make our goal of innovation a reality.

  • Community Transition Plan for Seamonkey

    There’s been a fair amount of discussion recently about Seamonkey and Firefox development. First, never trust the headlines! I’m frequently amazed by what I find.

    It is true that the Mozilla Foundation does not plan to ship official releases of the integrated Mozilla Application Suite (also known by its codename of “Seamonkey”) after the 1.7.x line. It is true that there are a group of developers who remain interested in developing and releasing new versions of the Seamonkey project. This group has proposed a plan for continuing the Seamonkey project as a community effort. In essence, the proposal is that interested developers would do the work and the releases, and the Mozilla Foundation will supply infrastructure support (cvs, bugzilla, etc.) We support this plan and will work with the developers to figure out how to implement it effectively.

    These developments represent the strength of the open source development model in action. One of the benefits of open source software is that consumers are not locked into the vendor; they have the flexibility to create, maintain and use the products they want. Here we see these freedoms in action.

    The Mozilla Foundation will cease development of new features for the Seamonkey product. (We’ll continue with 1.7.x maintenance and security releases to support 1.7.x users.) This decision has been discussed at length, and I won’t go into the rationale — we believe it is the correct decision for the overall health of the Mozilla project. There is a user and developer base that remains interested in Seamonkey. In a traditional proprietary world those users and developers would be out of luck, stuck forever using the last version received from the vendor or forced into an unwanted upgrade. In the open source world this need not be the case, and Seamonkey is an example of this.

    The community of people interested in Seamonkey are organizing themselves and beginning to plan the tasks for the next release. The Mozilla Foundation will provide infrastructure support as described in the Seamonkey transition outline.

    Like many open source projects, the Mozilla project is characterized by contributors who are fervently devoted to the technology, the projects and the releases they believe important. It’s no surprise that a portion of our community remains attached to the Seamonkey suite — these are some of the folks that made Seamonkey so good in the first place. It’s no surprise that a group wants to continue developing new features for Seamonkey — this is the commitment that gives the Mozilla project the power to be effective. An active Seamonkey community project reflects the success of the Mozilla project as a whole.

  • Adventures in Beijing

    I’m in Beijing again, after a hiatus of 10 (actually 11 years). I’m here for the Fifth Asia Open Source Software Symposium and for another event which I’ll describe later. The Symposium is quite interesting, it is an update on what some 20 countries in the Asian region are doing to promote the adoption and development of open source software. I came because both the Symposium and the other event coincidentally happened to be scheduled for the same week, which made the trip seem worthwhile despite the costs of being away from the office for a week. I have some Internet access, which is wildly different than Beijing in 1994. But there are still a series of problems that make working from here difficult — the internet cable in my room doesn’t like my computer, so I have to go to the business center and try to work when it is open. For some reason I time out when trying to connect to the IRC servers, even when I can successfully connect with websites. And mail is truly wacky. Sometimes I can receive mail but not send. Sometimes I can send mail but not receive. I think the problem is with my provider, since something like this happened once before. But it’s a hard problem to fix from here.

    So, if you’ve tried to contact me and haven’t gotten a response please give me a few days to get all this sorted out.

    Being in Beijing has brought back many memories. I was actually in Beijing in the fall of 1994 when I accepted a job offer from Jim Clark to join Netscape. At that time I was astonished to be able to send and receive faxes from my hotel. I had lived in Beijing a few years before when I was an exchange student at Peking University. During that era the idea of sending a fax was beyond comprehension. There were a few foreign law firms downtown that maintained fax machines. But exchange students never saw these! And besides, we were at least an hour bus ride away from downtown. In those days the only way to make an international phone call was to go to a PT&T (Post, Telephone and Telegraph) office, wait your turn, and have an operator place the call. We were very lucky that the dormitory for foreign students had such an office, but it could still take 45 minutes to make a call. So in 1994 sending faxes was a novelty. Today there is a fax machine in my hotel room and my problems relate to imperfect internet access. Quite a change.

    The hotel where I’m staying is in a neighborhood where I used to spend a reasonable amount of time. During my student days in Beijing this neighborhood was the transfer point between the two halves of the bus trip required to get from the University to downtown. I can hardly wait for a chance to get outside the hotel and walk around.

  • Sounds Fishy

    Two different people have contacted me asking if I am involved in a United Nations project related to equipping developing countries with open software. Each of these people had been contacted by someone claiming that I am involved in such a project and using my name to encourage some action. In one case the action was buying ads in a publication theoretically related to this UN project.

    Such a project sounds like a good idea. Nevertheless I am not involved in any UN project. Anyone claiming I am is incorrect — perhaps honestly confused, perhaps intentionally making misstatements.

  • Email Addresses, mozilla.org and the Mozilla Foundation

    A couple of weeks ago I wrote something about my belief that mozilla.org staff membership is different than employment with the Mozilla Foundation. Here’s a concrete example of questions that come up: email addresses. It almost sounds trivial when I write it. But email addresses are often a statement of identity or relationship and so they turn out not to be trivial I believe that membership in mozilla.org staff is not a decision that should be made by the Mozilla Foundation. And a hiring decision by the Mozilla Foundation should not automatically convey mozilla.org staff membership.

    When we set up the Foundation a set of key contributors became employees. Some of these people were mozilla.org staff members (Asa, Myk, Leaf, Brendan, me) of long tenure. Others were key contributors who had previously been employed to contribute their work product to the Mozilla project but weren’t officially chartered to speak for the Mozilla project or guide its general policies — jst, dbaron, Ben Goodger, Scott Macgregor, Chris Hofmann. (If this sounds obtuse or too “inside” to be understandable, please take a look at the Mozilla Roles and Responsibilities doc which lays out the role of mozilla.org staff in our past incarnation.)

    It’s pretty hard to argue that this latter group of folks haven’t been “speaking for the Mozilla project” or guiding policy or determining releases or doing the myriad of things that mozilla.org staff has historically been chartered to do. Even so, we didn’t have a policy for what mozilla.org staff meant vis-à-vis Mozilla Foundation staff. So we didn’t officially make these new people staff. That is, they are (still) not listed on the staff page. However, we did give them “@mozilla.org” email addresses. These addresses have historically been limited to mozilla.org staff members. And in the real world, an email address that is in use everyday is probably a much clearer indicia than a listing on a web page most people never see and may think is outdated anyway.

    As management goes, I’m not proud of this. It left key contributors in a state of limbo that would have best been avoided. However, I felt it was important for the health of the project to keep the idea that mozilla,org staff membership means something separate from employment status. Fortunately the people living in this limbo are dedicated primarily to the success of the project and were able to live with this. As I said, tolerance for ambiguity is a key value.

    Then we began hiring a few more people. By this time I had realized that not having a process for determining staff membership meant that we really shouldn’t give out “@mozilla.org” email addresses. Not just realized it, which wasn’t hard. But realized it enough to force implementation of it. So over the last year we’ve hired a set of people and asked them to continue to use their own email addresses. More precisely, I have declined to authorize more “@mozilla.org” email addresses. (I would say refused, but we haven’t had a real fight about it. Maybe others would say refused.)

    Again, I’m not proud of this. It’s definitely been awkward for the people involved. So we’re going to create email addresses for Mozilla Foundation employees. I’m not sure what they’ll be — @mozillafoundation.org perhaps. That’s awfully long so perhaps we’ll choose something shorter. Those of us with mozilla.org addresses will probably continue using them, just as current staff members employed elsewhere use their mozilla.org addresses.

    I expect that these new addresses will remain in use after we figure out the relationship between mozilla.org and Mozilla Foundation staff. Maybe it will turn out I’m wrong, and we’ll end up realizing that there is no need for mozilla.org staff or no need to distinguish it from Mozilla Foundation employees. But we spent years learning how to build an organization and manage the project separate from an employment chain, and I don’t want to let that experience fade away by accident.

    When we figure out exactly what the email addresses representing employment with the Mozilla Foundation will be we’ll say something about that, and hopefully get them implemented soon. And of course we’ll keep working on the question of what mozilla.org staff membership means — or could mean, or should mean — in the current era.

    I remember when I joined the Mozilla project I was astonished at how much energy went into technical topics that didn’t seem so important to me. I’m embarrassed to admit this included such things as directory names. Now of course I understand their importance better. And judging from the attention I have paid to the topic of email addresses and organizational identity, I have come to fit right in!

  • DevMo and DevEdge updates

    For months I’ve said I’ve been optimistic that the Mozilla Foundation would be able to reach an agreement allowing us to host and improve the materials from the former Netscape DevEdge site. I’m very pleased to report that my optimism was well founded.

    We’ve reached an agreement with AOL that allows us to post, modify, and create new documents based on the former Netscape DevEdge materials. The agreement is done. I want to thank AOL for making this happen. Netscape DevEdge was a great resource. We’re very pleased those materials haven’t been lost and that the Mozilla Foundation can host their continued development and use. I also want to thank the many people who wrote to offer encouragement and help regarding the DevEdge materials — your encouragement was very helpful.

    What happens now? Well, we probably won’t be able to simply recreate the site — we don’t have the build scripts for one thing. Naturally, we’re eager to get the data sorted out and the most important documents posted asap.

    Starting next Monday we’ll have a new person working full time at the Mozilla Foundation to help with just this activity. On Monday Deb Richardson joins the Mozilla Foundation as a Technical Editor and Project Manager for DevMo. DevMo is our community based project focused on developer documentation and resources. We have a group of people interested in working on this, and are thrilled Deb can join us to provide the overall coordination, support and project management for this effort, working very closely with our volunteer community. Deb comes to us with extensive documentation and open source experience, having founded both Linuxchix and the Open Source Writers Group. She has also worked professionally as a technical writer, freelance editor, web designer and developer.

    One of the first things we’ll ask Deb to do is to work with those familiar with the DevEdge material and sort out the most important documents, get those posted asap, and then develop a plan for handling the rest of the material. We want to make critical resources available asap and also build a coherent site. We already have a website at the developer part of mozilla.org that is hard to navigate, not well designed, and filled with material that is or may be outdated.

  • mozilla.org staff and Mozilla Foundation Employees

    In the beginning of the Mozilla project there was the “mozilla.org staff.” Mozilla.org staff is the virtual organization that guided the Mozilla project, spoke for the project, developed and implemented policy for the project. At its inception, the individual members of mozilla.org staff were all Netscape employees. As time went on more and more mozilla.org staff members were volunteers or employed by someone other than Netscape / AOL.

    Over time mozilla.org staff took over more and more of the activities previously managed by the Netscape management team — milestone releases, managing the CVS tree and so on. Mozilla.org staff members guided both the policy decisions and the daily operational decisions that kept the project going. Some years ago I described the role of mozilla.org staff in some detail in the Mozilla Roles and Responsibilities document.

    The Mozilla Foundation was born in July of 2003. For the first time we had an official legal organization that could hold the critical assets and hire people to work on the project. Launching the Mozilla Foundation was a hectic and pressure-filled time. The pressure grew continuously through the release of our 1.0 products. I’m sure anyone who’s been through a make-or-break product release cycle will understand this!

    With the creation of the Mozilla Foundation it was clear that some thought needed to be given to the relationship between mozilla.org staff and Mozilla Foundation employees. But we also needed to get the Foundation off the ground, establish key relationships, focus on maintaining our development community, think out how to raise enough money to sustain ourselves (a big topic, more on that later), develop our new applications and make progress on the underlying platform technologies as well. So the question of rationalizing the roles of mozilla.org staff and Mozilla Foundation employees (ie, Mozilla Foundation staff) has been on my mind, but not front and center. We’ve trimmed the mozilla.org staff list to reflect those people who have moved on and are now longer active. But we haven’t had a policy for what “mozilla.org staff” means in our new incarnation and so we haven’t added anyone to it. Even key players like our lead developers aren’t officially listed as mozilla.org staff members. (Tolerance for ambiguity is probably a characteristic of those comfortable in our world.)

    The Mozilla project still has a great deal to accomplish, and we’ve all got more to do than we can imagine finishing. But we have successfully completed a series of milestones with the release and adoption of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. So I’d like to start the discussion of mozilla.org staff and Mozilla Foundation employees.

    I have a few basic premises that drive my thinking. I should be clear here — these are my personal views. At some point I’ll write an official policy for review and (hopefully) adoption, but this isn’t it. My current working framework is:

    • The Mozilla project is bigger than the Mozilla Foundation
    • The Mozilla Foundation does not and probably never will employ all leading contributors to the project or all those whose voices represent the project
    • An employment relationship with the Mozilla Foundation should not take the place of peer review and leadership through respect
    • A single management chain, even that of the Mozilla Foundation itself, does not reflect the diversity of the Mozilla project
    • An employment relationship with the Mozilla Foundation should not be necessary in order for key contributors to have a respected voice in the direction of the project
    • Checks and balances create a messy governance structure but are nevertheless worthwhile

    In concrete terms this boils down to my belief that (1) a role for “mozilla.org staff” is important for the project, and (2) this role will build upon and modify the previous role of mozilla.org staff.

    It probably doesn’t make sense to continue the previous role of “mozilla.org staff” unchanged. Before the Mozilla Foundation, mozilla.org staff was the group involved day-to-day, making the operational decisions. Doing this requires pretty intense, constant involvement and Foundation employees do much of this. A staff member who isn’t involved on a serious if not full time basis will have trouble keeping current with enough info to make these decisions. This isn’t to say that I believe that dailyoperational decisions should be made only by Foundation employees. It’s possible this is the case, but I can also envision scenarios where this is not the right path at all. But I do believe that maintaining a group separate from Foundation employees to make daily operation decisions is a mistake.

    There should be a mechanism for clear, valued input into project direction and Foundation activities by those who are not employees. Our open-source DNA gives us mechanisms for this when code is involved — module ownership, peer review, leadership through reputation, etc. I think it’s important to develop mechanisms for significant issues that don’t end up in source code. This could be extending the Module Owner system to non-code areas. It could involve a role for mozilla.org staff. Perhaps both; perhaps something entirely new. The Mozilla Foundation will grow and change over the coming years. I want to do so in a way that delivers great products, moves the web forward and reflects the community that has built the Mozilla project.

    There’s much more to say but I think I’ll stop here since it’s getting late and there’s no need to get everything into one comment.

  • First Days at the Mozilla Foundation

    I recently came across a post I started many, many months back (like a year ago) but never finished. So I updated it. Here are a few short vignettes of coming to work at the Mozilla Foundation.

    Some months ago (this would be late 2003) there was a rattle at the door of the Mozilla Foundation. Our office is one big space, and it was about 5:30 pm, smack in the middle of prime working time, so everyone looked up. Someone actually got up, opened the door and let the new person in.

    The visitor looked right at home. He had a cardboard box under one arm, and knew exactly where he was heading. No one said a word; he went straight for a desk, dropped his box down beside it, sat down, plugged in his laptop and settled in. As he connected to the Mozilla network he lifted one arm in a giant “score” sign, a small cheer went up and he went to work. He was no visitor, he was our then-newest employee. He had finished his exit interview at his previous job, driven straight over to the Mozilla Foundation, plunked himself down at 5:30 and started work. I’ve never seen someone looks so happy at starting a second workday.

    This morning (August or September 2004) there was another rattle at the door. Someone got up to open it and asked — does anyone know this person? Marcia replied “Maybe it’s Chase, he’s supposed to be here to start working as a Mozilla Foundation employee today.” Chase is our new build engineer, stepping in since Leaf has moved on to other things. We knew Chase by name and skills, but none of us knew what he looked like. All of our interviews had been done by phone, since Chase wasn’t living in the San Francisco area. Someone opens the door, there’s an awkward silence as the visitor looks around and we all look at him. Feeling responsible but a little awkward I get up and mumble something like “Hello, er, ah, are you Chase?” Sure enough, this is no visitor, it’s our newest Foundation employee. Wahoo!

    Update 1:

    7 days ago (Fall 2004) Chris Beard arrived for his first day. This time we all knew him, as he’s local and pretty much everyone in the Foundation met Chris before he joined us. So we greeted Chris by finding a half-empty desk periodically used by visitors and inviting him to make himself at home. This went on for a few days until Chris unleashed a frenzy of spatial reorganizing. Looking up one day he noted “We probably should actually figure out where I might have a desk because the person who uses this one is going to be back one of these days.” I suspect it may be because his temporary desk left he and I starting at each other across the table, and some distance is definitely a good thing. Soon machines were moving, racks were moving, our swag pile was moving, people were moving and desks were rearranged. Asa profited the most, coming away with a nice space near the windows and the sunlight he so craves. My own craving for a window and a nice space has totally evaporated — I can’t tell if this is good or a sign of trouble. In any case it’s convenient.

    Update 2:

    Doug Turner has arrived. There wasn’t much available room after our last re-shuffle, so Doug got the space facing the door. Doug addressed that problem by turning his back to the door, making a space with two desks and hunkering in. He still graciously answering the door when we have visitors, but I’ll bet he’s waiting for our next spasm of reorganization.

    Update 3:

    Today I came in and found that the giant chess board (about 18′ by 18′ — literally) has been folded up and moved out of the center of the floow. We’ll pull it out for special occasions. There is also a new cluster of desks set up under the soda-can bridge (a 19 foot long replica of the Golden Gate bridge made of soda cans, brought from Netscape and lovingly but partially reassembled by chofmann). So far, no one has claimed the new desks — maybe looking up at soda cans is inhibiting people. Or maybe people are waiting for the “real” office furniture we’ve been talking about getting, since we need some ergonomic upgrades.

    We didn’t really throw much away in all any of these rearrangements — we have a hefty supply of things left over from the Netscape era or accumulated on our own. Now there’s the real challenge!

  • Ben and Mozilla Firefox

    Ben Goodger has just noted that his employer has switched from the Mozilla Foundation to Google. We expect Ben’s role within the Mozilla project to be just about the same as the role he’s played for the last 18 months — pushing Firefox and the Mozilla platform ahead, and focusing on improving people’s experience with the Web. Ben has been the lead engineer for Mozilla Firefox because of his talents and drive, not because of his employment status with the Mozilla Foundation. We expect this to remain true.

    This is not unusual in the world of the Mozilla project. A number of people have moved from one employer to another within the Mozilla project. IBM, Novell, Sun, Red Hat, Oracle and now Google have employees contributing to the Mozilla project — some dedicated, some part time, and some as individual contributors. Having multiple companies offer jobs to key Mozilla figures has long been a part of our view of a successful project and we’ve traditionally worked closely with companies whose employees contribute to the Mozilla project. We’re looking forward to more great progress with Firefox and the Mozilla platform, and we don’t foresee changes in Ben’s role.

    Some people have asked if this means that Google has a corporate voice in Mozilla Firefox. The answer is “no.” Ben is the Module Owner for Firefox, and as Module Owner he has responsibilities to the Mozilla community. These responsibilities are documented in our policy on Module Owners and Ownership. The key responsibility is that the Module Owner’s job is to act in the best interests of the community and the project at large, not in the interests of his or her employer. Ben has lived with these responsibilities as a volunteer, a Netscape employee, a Mozilla Foundation employee and now as a Google employee. We’re confident that Ben will continue to help us drive great innovations in the browsing world.