Linux Foundation interviews Mitchell Baker
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, interviews Chief Lizard Wrangler, Mitchell Baker, of Mozilla.
You can find the audio of the interview here:
Open Voices Interview with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla
And a transcript of the interview here:
Mitchell Baker Transcript : Open Voices: The Linux Foundation Podcast
Lots of historical information in this interview. Highly recommended.
Jim Zemlin: I’m just curious as to, was Microsoft something that really drove what you were doing? {audio dropout} there a feeling in the people who {audio dropout} worked at the Mozilla Foundation at the time and worked on the project of, you know, “We can’t abide by a de facto monopoly web browser, that in order for the internet to be free, we’ve got to be successful,”? Was that mentality present at the time?
Mitchell Baker: Oh, sure. There are some things about Netscape mentality, but when you get past that, when you get the Mozilla Project, and for example why I was there and stuck with it and why a number of people did, one reason is absolutely that. That the browser turned out to be key in how, you know, human beings access the Internet. And if there’s only one way to do it, and there’s only one way to get to the information on the Internet, and that pathway is controlled by a single business entity and a single business plan, and, you know, one that’s giant and has shown itself to be very aggressive at using its assets to promote itself, then you’re in for a disaster. And I think we can see that. Because in, like, 2000, 2001, 2002 when we didn’t have a good product out on the market yet and there was essentially no browser competition, if you look back to it, you can remember that it was full of pop-up ads and spyware and, you know, whole computers slowing down because of all the stuff that was coming in through the one available browser. So we still believe and feel vindicated that you’ve got to have more than one option in these settings.
The later in the interview:
Jim Zemlin: What is it about a project like this—or Linux or Apache—that is so exciting to people; that motivates people to go to such extreme lengths of sacrificing personal time and, you know, extending huge amounts of emotional, physical energy towards something like that at these type of projects? What is it, in your mind, that drives people to participate?
Mitchell Baker: It’s a set of things. Some people have all of them; some people only have one or two of them. In some cases, it’s the sense that what you’re doing actually matters. And that one can see that the openness of the Internet that we want to live in can be affected, can be made more likely by the work that we do. So that’s one thing.
For many of us, the Internet itself. I sometimes say I have the Internet bug, or I was bitten by the Internet bug. I say that because I had malaria once. {Laughs} You know, it’s in the blood, right. There’s nothing you can do about it. And while you’ve got it and while it’s there, you know, you have to live with it because it’s just unavoidable. And I also feel that way about what I call the Internet bug. Alright, it is just such a powerful tool and so exciting, and there’s so much positive that can happen from it and anything that powerful can have that sort of a dark and unpleasant side. And you roll all those things with the feeling that, “Wow, you know, all of this is possible and we can make it better.” I think I’m not the only one who’s got that bug.
A third reason is technology. We’ve always been blessed that we have great technology and very smart people working on it. And that tends to attract other really smart people. And I think you’ll find, at many open source projects—you’ve named the big ones of course—but many of the smaller ones as well, it’s a love of the technology that’s also important.
And there is a sense, I would say, of community and bonding that is an extreme motivator. Sometimes people ask me why anyone would work on a software project if they weren’t getting paid for it. Well, think about how many people don’t like their job. Or feel like they’ve got expertise that doesn’t get used. Or their colleagues or their management or the people they’re responsible for get in the way. Or the company is going in a direction that doesn’t make sense and cuts off all the interesting projects. And your advancement isn’t based on reputation or skill, it’s based on, you know, who happens to like you. Well, we can mitigate or eliminate almost all of those things in an open source project. And so it turns out a lot of people do not want to be couch potatoes, right. And if you provide a setting in which something really interesting is happening, and it matters; you can see that other people use it and it’s got really smart people working on it, and they will accept you if you find interesting things to do, and some of them will even help you. And you can see the results of that, you know, you can generate a reputation and have people interested in you and have your work used by millions of people. That rolls up into a pretty motivating package.
The later in the interview Zemlin asks Mitchell about Mozilla and trademarks vs. how Linux handles trademarks. That’s maybe the most interesting part of the interview, in my opinion. Finally, Zemlin asks Mitchell for advice re: trademarks and the Linux desktop.
