Mitchell Baker Quotes

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.

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

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

Some period of time later you look up and say, "That concern was right on the mark; it happened exactly as I thought it would." So that's been really helpful to recognize.

The Mozilla Foundation is an independent, nonprofit organization.

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.

I'm excited about mobile; clearly that's important. 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. We're excited at the idea that we can make the same kind of contribution in the mobile space. So that's one thing coming down the pike.

I grew up as an only child. I think it might just be that my dad really didn't care that I was a girl. "You're gonna do certain things 'cause I want you to, and that's the way it is."

I guess my other advice is that it's really good to be comfortable among groups of men! It's just a very common work setting and I don't actually think about it too much, but there must be some comfort level that I've developed over the years.

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

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.

Just to have the confidence to say, "Which end of that spectrum am I usually on?" That's been very helpful to me. Because it's a really awkward setting.

Our sense of "open" is that the authority to make decisions about that gets distributed based on merit and understanding and participation and leadership, not solely on employment or a title or a business plan. Technical colleagues will define "open" as "open standards," "interoperable" - you can find it, search it, cut and paste it, view source, mix and match - all those things that we associate with text on the Web, that you can continue to do that with audio and video and whatever's next.

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.

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

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.

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

You can get anything from Mozilla Firefox-based themes to nature themes to your own photographs.

There's something about being a woman in a technology space, unless you happen to be model beautiful, where there's always, always talk about what you look like.

Usually, you know, you're at a table and you're the only woman, you've got this idea, you finally speak up - I mean, I've been in some settings where every head turns toward me and then they all turn away as if I've never spoken. Which I think happens when whatever I said was so out of the blue, or so awkward, that they just didn't know how to respond.

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.

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

The sex symbol thing's a little bit different for me. Usually, like whenever there's a picture of me, there's always this set of things that comes out like, 'Oh my god, she's so ugly.'

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.

The average consumer does not know the difference between browser, Internet and search box.

But most of us who aren't models aren't models, right? And so, you just have to get used to that and sort of read right past it. So. On the sex symbol piece, I don't get that piece. On the personality piece, that people are excited to meet a leader from Mozilla - maybe there's more about meeting me personally than I give credit for, but I find that people are excited about what Mozilla is, more than 'Oh my god, there's Mitchell, look, her hair,' whatever.

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.

What's been most helpful to me is realizing that those times when all the heads in the room turn and look at me as if I was crazy, reinforce my own leadership capability. Because I've been in a number of those settings where I've been right. And I've been right often enough that now when it happens I don't automatically think, "Oh, my, what's wrong with me?" or "Ohhh, I must not be ready for this role," or "They know so much more than I do."

We should probably figure out a new word for this. For us, "open" means transparent, as in "open source" - you're not locked in to what the original creator did. And in our case "open" also means distributed decision making.

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.

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.

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

We're also looking a lot at graphics and video. We've done a lot on a deep technical level to make sure that the next version of Firefox will have all sorts of new graphics capabilities. And the move from audio to video is just exploding. So those areas in particular, mobile and graphics and video, are really important to making the Web today and tomorrow as open as it can be.