Mozilla and Market Forces
At the risk of seeming narcissistic, I can’t resist reposting my comment to Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker’s musings on the danger of organizations getting too comfortable and set in their ways. I frequently read comments about AllPeers along the lines of “oh god, why won’t they just let my browser be a browser.” Answer: that’s the whole point of Firefox.
For what it’s worth (as an outsider but a very active participant in the Mozilla ecosystem), I don’t see this problem at Mozilla. It only takes two people for someone to feel that their ideas and opinions aren’t being given enough weight, and this dynamic is amplified in larger communities. Success is not defined by universal warm fuzzies… mediocrity is. What is needed is a meritocratic framework for filtering out the best initiatives, something that Mozilla excels at. Great programmers who make great contributions are going to be taken more seriously when they come up with kooky new schemes, and this is exactly as it should be.
The process you describe is precisely what I see happening constantly at Mozilla. Someone writes something the wiki, people comment, things eventually get implemented, tested and find their way into the software. Granted, it’s much easier for the leading lights of the community to get their initiatives noticed, but that’s unavoidable.
Which leads me to Mozilla’s real trump card: its extension mechanism. Over a year ago, we started working on an ambitious extension to add P2P networking, identity, presence, services integration, local storage and much more to Firefox. We had no experience with Mozilla or visibility within its community. Nonetheless, we were able to add all of these capabilities to the browser, with extensive support and assistance from people who were willing to lend a helping hand just because we were asking for it. Of course, this is no guarantee that our work will end up being valuable to Mozilla. The important thing is anyone with an idea and the initiative to bring it to fruition can extend the Mozilla platform and let the market will decide whether it’s interested. Harnessing market forces in this way is by far the most powerful protection against organizational sclerosis.
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Why don’t you guys break away and follow Flocks footsteps and create your own distribution of Firefox?
Comment by Corey Farwell — 7/6/2006 @ 5:11 pm
Why would we? The whole point of Firefox’s extension mechanism is to do exactly what we are doing. If everyone just forks the codebase, that doesn’t do much for interoperability.
Comment by Matt — 7/6/2006 @ 6:01 pm
“Of course, this is no guarantee that our work will end up being valuable to Mozilla.”
It will once you release the mother as everyone I know will be constantly running Firefox!
Keep up the good work
Comment by Jon — 7/7/2006 @ 3:05 pm