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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.