Musings on the Mozilla Manifesto
One of the most heated discussions in the Mozilla room at FOSDEM concerned the Mozilla Manifesto, a draft of which was published recently by Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker. As this excellent article on Inc.com explains, Mozilla faces the challenge of laying the ground rules for a completely new type of organization: an open source company that actually makes money… lots of it.
Traditional corporations have it easy; their goal is basically to maximize return on investment for their shareholders. Run-of-the-mill open source groups do not generally have to engage in too much soul-searching either. The vast majority are so small that they can operate on feel. And the larger ones mostly seek only to improve their software, with no revenues, business goals or other such messiness to distract them. Mozilla, on the other hand, is now attempting to reconcile the altruistic goals of an open source community with the needs of an entity that makes software for consumers, not developers, and finances its activity with a healthy stream of revenue from outside parties.
The Manifesto does an excellent job of making the Mozilla credo explicit. Despite nitpicking about the third principle (after all, who doesn’t think the internet should enrich the lives of individuals?), Fosdemers didn’t find much to criticize, which is quite remarkable considering the scope and ambition of the document. The main complaint, which I share, is that specifics about Mozilla itself are too intertwined with what might otherwise serve as a general framework underpinning a wide range of other companies and non-profits. One excellent suggestion (made by timeless, a mysteriously pseudonymous Mozilla developer) was that details like the history of the organization be included as annotations rather than embedded in the core text. I suggested that the pledges be reworked to make them as easy to adopt wholesale as the principles are (something that I think would require very few changes to the text of the document).
The real question is: will Mozilla succeed in its audacious goal of creating a new type of organization, able to compete in the consumer space against armies of blood-thirsty capitalists without become one of them? I admit to being mildly skeptical (while remaining steadfastly supportive). Won’t the best contributors eventually jump ship in the search for fortune, as well as just fame? Will the organization be able to maintain its democratic ethos as its staff, user base and revenues continue to grow? It’s certainly an awesome challenge, but then writing a successful web browser ain’t no piece of cake either, and Mozilla is as well-placed as anyone to give it a shot.
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It’s about social economy, see : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_economy
Comment by Flo — 3/1/2007 @ 11:22 am