Top 40 Mitchell Baker Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I grew up as an only child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We worked very hard to make extensions very simple.

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

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