November, 2007

Mozilla — 8 Comments
12
Nov 07

uncategorized

I’ve been thinking a lot the past day or so about Noam Cohen’s piece in the New York Times about Mozilla. It’s really been rattling around inside my head because it missed so much of the essence of what Mozilla is and what we’re doing. It’s ostensibly a story about how Mozilla has sort of grown up — going from cute little underdog to corporate competitor. Here’s one line: “But in trying to build on this success, the Mozilla Foundation has come to resemble an investor-backed Silicon Valley start-up more than a scrappy collaborative underdog.”

But here’s the thing: by trying to categorize Mozilla with simple labels (SV start-up, scrappy underdog, cold war proxy (!), corporation, open source project, on and on…), he’s missing the point. Mozilla is a complicated thing, filled with tensions and subtleties.

We’re an open source project. We’re also a set of companies around the world.

We have distributed decision making. We also make some centralized decisions.

We’re a non-profit. We also pay people competitive wages for the industry and the geographies that they live in.

Our mission is to keep the Internet a medium of participation by everyone. We also care about Firefox market share because that’s our most useful tool at the moment to achieve the mission.

We do resemble a startup — we recruit talented techies who could work anywhere in the world, we work 24/7 on our technology, we participate in industry events. But we’re trying to build an organization — and an idea — that can last 50 or 100 years, and can make the Internet experience better for all.

We’ve got business relationships with Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and many others. But we prioritize the user experience over any business term.

We have a mission, but we also compete, in direct ways, for the hearts and minds and clicks of humans using the Internet.

We have a lot of money in the bank compared to any other open source project. We don’t have much compared to anyone else who’s generally considered competitive with us.

We donate money to other projects, but we also use money that we have to further our public benefit mission.

We build applications that people use — Firefox is one of them — but we also provide a technology platform with an open license that many, many developers have built great things on, commercial or otherwise.

I could go on and on and on. Mozilla doesn’t fit into clean categories — it never has, in my view. It didn’t fit neatly into a category when it started as an experiment at Netscape nearly a decade ago. It didn’t fit neatly when the small team left AOL to start something completely new called the Mozilla Foundation. And it doesn’t fit now, as an organization/company/project/product with more than 100 million people around the world using Firefox and with something approaching $100M in the bank.

I think it does a disservice to the project to over-constrain Mozilla with simple labels. I’m glad that Noam got as many of the facts right as he did. And I’m glad that more people are starting to tell the story about who Mozilla is and what it’s trying to do in the world — it’s an important story. We’re trying to do a better job at helping folks understand the story, too, in all it’s messy, complicated, contradictory and uncategorized glory.

politics — Comments Off
8
Nov 07

huh.

Georgia is in great shape, I’d say. Read all the way through…money quote is at the end.

Personal stuff / politics — Comments Off
7
Nov 07

vote

vote

Today is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, so that means Voting Day in the US. It’s an off-cycle year here, so no national offices on the ballot for another few months when the primaries start, which means most everything on the ballot is local issues: city and county level stuff. So most folks won’t get out to the polls today; in Sunnyvale, fewer than 1 in 5 residents will vote.

Still in all, in my view, local elections matter to our daily civic life in a million different ways. They determine who sits on city council, who’s the mayor, who sets the agenda. They define things like how zoning works, where you can build certain types of buildings, and what you can spend on schools. This particular election in Sunnyvale will determine whether or not we get a new library to replace our current lovely-but-50-year-old building. I’ve worked a bit on that election (although not as much as Jim, who’s completely blown me away with his dedication), and personally hope that we can get the new library bond passed. I think it’s important for our citizens, our kids, and our community.

Anyway, I voted this morning, and was reminded, yet again, how important that I think local civic life is, and how while it can be a little bit frustrating for me because of the pace and the (relatively) small stakes, compared to my work life, participation in our local communities is probably the only real antidote to the disenfranchisement and disillusionment that seems so commonplace today.

So whatever your views are, I hope you’ll go vote today if it’s happening where you live.

tv, movies, etc — 5 Comments
5
Nov 07

strike

looks like the writers’ guild strike is happening. i think my most basic emotion is that i’m strangely sort of happy about it — not about the economic impact on the writers, which is not good at all, but i’m happy that i don’t *have* to watch colbert & daily show 4 times a week. isn’t that strange? i could always have decided not to watch it, but this seems somehow easier. takes the bat out of my hands, so to speak.

anyway, i don’t find the prospect of less television very disturbing (especially since season 5 of The Wire is already in the can and awaiting us in January).

i *do* think, though, that this strike — and people expect it to be a long one — will have a highly damaging effect on the quality of television shows. the last really major writers strike in 1988 left us with shows like America’s Most Wanted and Cops, both of which heralded in a really crappy (and giant) genre of television. what will we get now?

but it’s one of those things, i think. for the studios, this feels, to me, like their waterloo, their napster. we’re in a period of incredible creativity in the world, incredible connectedness. putting down the hammer on the creatives — in other words, not letting them share fairly in the proceeds from the distribution of their work — isn’t likely to help the television and motion picture industry, in my own, admittedly uninformed opinion.

but we’ll see. maybe folks will pick up books. i do know that i’m going to cut any television shows that i’m watching that are marginal (i’m looking at you, Pushing Daisies and Weeds, and maybe you, too, DirtySexyMoney), and endeavor not to add any reality junk that shows up when scripted shows run out in january.

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