Archive for February, 2008

Here’s a brief report of my trip to Europe, which started on Saturday, February 9 and ended on Friday the 15th.

Leave Saturday evening. Lose most of a night’s sleep. Arrive in London Sunday afternoon. Do some work, walk around a bit try to work out the kinks from the plane trip. Get a decent night’s sleep.

Monday: Up at 6 to get some work done before meetings start at 8 a.m. Press meetings go until almost 7 p.m., with fortunately a break for lunch. We had four taped sessions, two video sessions and two sessions with photographers. One photographer literally took us walking around the streets and blocking sidewalks for photos. The questions ranged from introductory and general topics to a discussion of philosophical differences reflected in different open source and free software licenses. Jane Finette manages the logistics and keeps me where I’m supposed to be.

Tuesday: Up at 5:30 for a flight to Munich. On the way Jane and I learn that the local city airport has cancelled many, many flights — including ours — due to heavy fog. In the cab Jane manages to get a new flight for us from a different airport and we head in a different direction. I was pretty surprised — I can’t really imagine being in a cab and being able to change a canceled flight from San Francisco airport to a different flight from the San Jose airport, all with a single phone call to a number gleaned from the airline’s website, but Jane and Lufthansa managed it. By the time we get to the airport (Heathrow this time) the fog has moved around and our new flight is a couple of hours late leaving.

This would all be fine except that the journalists we’re meeting in Munich have flown in from other parts of Germany and have their own plane flights back. We arrive at the hotel in Munich to find one of the journalists on the hotel steps eager to get started so we have time to talk. I’m so tired I promptly spill a bunch of coffee all over the serving table. But I’m also clear that the hotel has seen this happen many times, so I blithely ignore the dismay of the organizer and plunge in. Mozilla’s market share in Germany is around 35% so this is not an introductory conversation. It’s pretty deep into the specifics of Mozilla and the kinds of questions that someone very familiar with Mozilla would ask. The most novel part of the discussion was a few questions on the interaction of Firefox 3′s offline capabilities with our Prism project. I love the chance to talk to journalists who have time to develop their own expertise and perspective — one never knows where the conversation will lead.

Tuesday’s press meetings went until 7 p.m. or so. Jane and I managed to get a nice meal (my first actual meal of the day) about 8:30 p.m. I spent the rest of the evening thinking about the talk I would give on Thursday morning at the Netxplorateur Forum. I spent a few hours during the middle of the night thinking about this as well, since I wasn’t satisfied with my progress. I seem to be unable to develop a talk or a slide show or a presentation and give it over and over. Or even to take the same presentation and tweak it. I am compelled to prepare a talk for the specific audience and event. This means I am rarely really prepared until I have a sense of the event and the people. In other words, I am almost never prepared when I get on the plane. It adds a lot of extra stress but I’ve been unable to change this pattern.

Wednesday I leave Munich and fly to Paris. Wednesday evening Tristan, Anne-Julie and I meet up for a bit. Then we enjoy a delightful dinner with a bunch of Mozilla contributors who have gathered in Paris. This is my first trip to Paris on behalf of Mozilla and thus my first time meeting a bunch of these folks. I know of them of course, and in many cases have long online working relationships but of course meeting people and seeing all these folks together is extraordinarily invigorating. I leave around 10 to get ready for the talk the next day.

Thursday- get up early to get to the Netxplorateur Forum before it starts. Again, I am compelled to attend the early parts of an event where I’m speaking. I like to hear the introductory remarks and absorb the tenor of the event so I can speak more clearly to the audience. In general I like to hear the keynotes for this purpose. But today I am the keynote, so I have to gather the sense of things from smaller clues.

The event was “designed to enable key political and business figures to grasp how Internet culture will transform the way our institutions and our companies are managed.” The audience was described to me as “400 French political, business and media decision-makers . . .” So the audience is clearly educated, in leadership positions but not necessarily particularly familiar with the ins and out of Internet technology. Firefox market share in France is around 25%, so I expected most of the audience to know of Firefox, but not necessarily to know much about the way it is created or how Mozilla is organized, or why so many participate. I was asked to speak for about 45 minutes and then to answer a few questions. The event was held at the French Senate. It was an odd setting because the buildings themselves are spectacular but they are not set up for an event like this. There was no place to get water for example, which is hard during a day of talking.

I spoke about what Mozilla is, how we work, our public benefit basis, why we believe building public, civic and social benefit into the Internet is both important and possible, and about the techniques we have found that promote participation and individual motivation. These are topics that people are very interested in. A number of people stopped me afterward to say how encouraging and hopeful they find Mozilla and our ways of working. Many of these people are not remotely technical and are unlikely to build software. But they certainly understand the importance of the Internet, the desire to be able to participate, and the joys of an organization where doing things well relates clearly to one’s influence and leadership.

Thursday afternoon was a series of meetings with French press. These conversations were detailed and deep, with journalists who know a great deal about Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird. We finished about 7 p.m. or so. Anne-Julie worked some miracles to get water, juice and even a good space where we didn’t have to keep changing rooms.

Thursday night I had dinner with Tristan and we talked about Mozilla Europe and Mozilla in Europe and Europe’s influence on the Mozilla project in general. It was a funny evening. We realized that afternoon that Thursday was Valentine’s Day, and thus a bad day to try to find dinner without a reservation in Paris. We managed it at one place, but then learned that the meal was a special 4 course Valentine’s Day dinner, complete with Valentine’s Day decorations and wine and rose petals and such. So we ended up in the bar of my hotel where they said they could make some sort of vegetable soup. I was a bit distressed — it was another day where by 8:30 p.m. I hadn’t actually had a meal yet, just a lot of coffee and a snack here or there. But I forgot, I was in Paris, and even the makeshift vegetable soup was lovely. It wasn’t actually much of a meal for the day, but it certainly was tasty. Tristan and I managed to cover a lot of ground talking about Mozilla and making it even stronger and more effective at bringing openness and transparency to the Internet.

Friday morning I got up and went to the airport. Actually, I got up early to go to the gym after so many hours sitting in uncomfortable settings. But the hotel had forgotten to mention their gym was under renovation and not available. So much for trying to stay healthy! I made it home Friday night on the edge of a flu, but managed to shake it off by doing nothing Saturday but sit around feeling exhausted.

I was on vacation the week after the Europe trip, so haven’t had a chance to see the results of the various interviews. I’m feeling a bit out of touch still but hoping to get back into the swing of things in the next day or two.

Every now and then someone asks a question about the “Steering Committee” so I thought I’d give some background on what it is and how it came to be.

The Steering Committee began early in the days of the Mozilla Foundation, sometime in 2004, I’m guessing. In these early days we were already trying to do a number of things- develop Firefox, develop Thunderbird, ship our then-current product known as “Mozilla Application Suite” or “Mozilla 1.x”, figure out a funding mechanism to sustain ourselves, establish relationships with other organizations, develop new communities (in particular, the visual identity team and the marketing communities), work with other industry organizations, to name a few. (In those days we had between 10 and 15 employees, plus a set of volunteers that was smaller than today but no less active or committed. The project was much smaller than now, but still trying to do many things.)

We needed a way to make sure that these different activities were working towards the same general goals, that “the right hand knew what the left hand was doing” and that we had some sense of priorities for our resources. We also needed a way to think about “are we doing the right thing?” Is one set of activities getting too few resources? Too many? Causing difficulties in other areas of effort? Are we missing big opportunities? And we needed to do all this while still getting enormous- sometimes almost crushing- amounts of work done.

It quickly became clear that most people could not keep track of all of these topics, effectively deliver their particular individual contributions and remain sane.

We created the Steering Committee to deal with this. The Steering Committee is a set of people who both represent and provide leadership in the various types of activities we are working on. Over the years the individuals and number of people have changed, but it has always included Brendan Eich for overall technical leadership, a representative from the engineering and outreach / marketing parts of our efforts, and me, for overall organizational leadership. Today the term “Steering Committee” is used inside the Mozilla Corporation (“MoCo”). Mozilla Messaging may or may not use this term or mechanism, and the Mozilla Foundation doesn’t currently use this term.

The goals of the Steering Committee are:

• to track the overall progress of MoCo efforts;
• to identify organization-wide activities and goals that move the Mozilla mission forward; and
• to lead MoCo and the Mozilla project effectively towards meeting these goals.

Thus the Steering Committee is responsible for a mixture of (1) empowering others to contribute most effectively; and (2) providing leadership in weaving the various strands of Mozilla together to bring the most possible benefit from our individual activities.

I once had quite a heated discussion with someone who disliked the name “Steering Committee” intensely and felt that it should be called a “Management Committee” or “Executive Committee” as is common in many other organizations. In particular, the objection was that “Steering Committee” was too vague and seemed to ignore the leadership role. But the word “Steering” reflects a basic truth about Mozilla: we work differently than other organizations do. Yes, we need people to focus on the overall picture and to tie different functions together. Yes, we need people to think about the strategic goals and how to reach them. We need people who are world- class in competence and rare in creativity to do this. We need leaders in our mission, our goals for the Internet, our organization. We need them just as much we need leaders in code, in technical vision, in adoption, in local sensitivities, in analysis.

But all leaders operate in the Mozilla context, including organizational and strategic leaders. These people must lead. They must motivate other people to join in the vision, to help create the means and the tools and the activities that allow us to succeed. Just like our module owners with code, these people must lead others who are not employees, and for whom the traditional management tools (salaries, promotion, etc) are irrelevant. This is not traditional management, it is something quite different. From the outside, from other companies, it may look a lot like traditional management. But within the Mozilla project the qualities that lead to success — respect, accomplishments, peer review, helping others to succeed, getting out of the way when someone with a good idea comes along, supporting new things based on mission and goals rather than personal style — must be reflected at all levels.

In this sense “steering” is leadership. But it is leadership in the sense of helping people accomplish things themselves, of identifying which path is most likely to get us where we want to go and steering in that direction. It’s leadership though, and it’s hard. And there are some things about Mozilla which are unusual and make it hard in unusual ways. I’ll say more about this in a subsequent post.

As I noted above, the Steering Committee is a set of people who both represent and provide leadership in the various types of activities we are working on, and who can work with others on topics that cross different types of activities. That’s a bit amorphous and doesn’t answer questions like “why type of activities” or “what level of leadership.” We try to have one person we can look to and hold responsible for each giant set of activities that we need to accomplish. In terms of titles, these people usually have a “chief” or a “vice-president” in their titles. Titles and management at Mozilla are a bit different than at other organizations, and so this isn’t a perfect way to map the Steering Committee to other organizations. But it’s generally close and probably the best “quick and dirty” way of thinking about the Steering Committee.

Today the Steering Committee is:

John Lilly, CEO
Chris Beard, VP Mozilla Labs
Mike Schroepfer, VP Engineering
Paul Kim, VP Marketing
Brendan Eich, CTO
Harvey Anderson, General Counsel
Mitchell Baker, Chairperson

You can see that these are truly giant chunks of activities- engineering, marketing, overall technical direction, labs, legal. None of this is set in stone, we need flexibility everywhere at Mozilla.

I’ve been feeling very behind on a bunch of things lately. This isn’t so unusual, but I’ve felt more fragmented than usual. This is both in work and in the rest of life- we’ve had a water and mud leak into our house for this entire rainy season and are still trying to get contractors and such together to stop the rains from leaking in.

So I looked at bit at my travel schedule. I sometimes say I don’t travel much, but I think that’s really a way of saying I don’t travel as much as I could, since Mozilla is an extraordinarily global project and I could spend all of my time traveling. In reality, I travel more than I realize. In December I was home for the weekends before and after Christmas, but I was sick for both of those. Really sick for one, which is rare for me. In January I was home for one weekend. I’ve been away for a bunch of February as well.

With some poking around my airline milage account, it looks like I’ve flown something like 45,000 miles since Nov 23 — close to 500 miles a day for 3 straight months. It makes me feel a little better about being so behind, but not a lot

So if I owe you a response, or it seems like I’ve started things and not finished them, I apologize. I think I’m traveling a bit less in the next couple of months and will turn to better follow-through.

Yesterday Robert Accettura made an interesting post about the range of SQlite today titled “The Winner For Most Embedded Is: SQLite.” This reminds me I’ve been wanting to talk about SQLite Consortium for a while. Robert points out thatSQLite is an element of “Adobe Air, Mozilla Prism, Google Gears, Android, iPhone SDK (likely through Core Data API), Ruby On Rails (default DB in 2.0), PHP 5 (bundled but disabled in PHP.ini by default).” I personally would probably say Firefox as well as Prism. In addition, SQLite is an open source (actually, public domain) piece of software. At Mozilla we view SQLite as important both for our product and for advancing transparency, openness, innovation and participation in the Internet.

Last December Symbian and Mozilla became the charter members of the SQLite Consortium. Last week Adobe announced that it has joined the SQLite Consortium, demonstrating Adobe’s recognition of the importance of Sqlite and its participation in various open source projects. Hopefully other organizations that rely on SQLite will do the same.

Here’s a bit more on the history.

A while back Richard Hipp contacted Mozilla to see if we had some time to talk to him about sustainability models. He had a problem we at Mozilla were familiar with — difficulty in getting organizations to fund the development of the core. At Mozilla we have seen this repeatedly — many companies understand why it’s important for them to fund development of the particular aspects of Mozilla that specifically benefit their business. It was much harder to find companies that would fund the core development applicable to all users of Mozilla code.

Dr. Hipp was facing the same issue with SQLite. Many companies were willing — eager even — to enter into contracts to enhance SQLite to meet their needs. But few were funding the fundamental core of the offering. I was embarrassed to learn that Mozilla itself belonged to this group. We had entered a contract with Dr. Hipp some time before to do some work related to full-text indexing support. I knew about this of course but it never occurred to me to ask if the SQLite developers needed funding to maintain the core capabilities. (I should note that Richard didn’t raise this point with us; I asked directly and thus learned of my failing ). Fortunately the folks at Symbian were more perceptive. They had realized that providing stability and sustainability for long term development of the core of SQLite is important and were talking with Richard about how to do this. As a result Richard contacted Mozilla to see if any of our experiences could help him with his thinking.

Once I got over my embarrassment I spent some time talking to Richard to understand his goals for SQLite and to see how best Mozilla could support Richard and SQLite. Richard was clear about the main goals: keeping SQLite an independent project, and freely available for anyone to use. On behalf of Mozilla I expressed a strong interest in the current developers (Richard and his colleague Dan Kennedy) retaining technical direction over the SQLite project and in developing a sustainability model that does not diminish the effectiveness of the technical leadership. The Symbian folks agreed completely, and Symbian and Mozilla became charter members of the Consortium, which was launched on December 12, 2007. The Consortium is described in general terms on the SQLite website, and the form of Consortium Agreement is also available online.

The Consortium Agreement makes it clear that technical direction of SQLite remains solely in the hands of the developers. Consortium members receive access to the developers for support if desired. I noted that Mozilla would join without the support offering solely to provide support to the core developers to do what they think best (and I suspect the other early members might feel the same way). Dr. Hipp felt that it would be easier to attract additional members over time if the support component was retained. I don’t know that Mozilla will make use of this. But I hope that other organizations that use SQLite in their products will find this significant enough to help justify participating in the Consortium.

Joining the Consortium was an easy decision for Mozilla. We use the technology, it advances the Mozilla mission and — most importantly — the SQLite developers themselves are people who combine a fierce dedication to the openness and technical excellence of their work with discipline and structure. Like many great open source (here, public domain) and free software projects, the key developers have enormous commitment to their work. In my discussions with Richard I’ve come to understand that this commitment is combined with integrity, modesty, and an exceptional consistency of focus and quality.

It’s great to see the SQLite Consortium come to life. It’s great to see this grow out of Symbian’s very forward-looking thinking in supporting Dr. Hipp so early on; and great to see Adobe’s quick decision to join the Consortium. And I certainly hope that other companies who aren’t already supporting SQLite development will look closely at keeping SQLite independent and vibrant by becoming Consortium members.

[Note: I was traveling and unexpectedly without Internet access last week, so this post is a few days late.]

Ten years ago Netscape planted a seed by launching an organization to create an open source development process for future generation browsers. At the time no one knew how that seed would grow, what kind of open source project would develop, how we would build the key aspects of open source and free software development — transparency, leadership through respect, peer review, participation — into the Mozilla project.

Today we know. We’ve built a vibrant open-source project. We’ve built phenomenal products in an extraordinarily competitive environment. We’ve built communities of people who know that their participation makes a difference in their Internet experience. We’ve built opportunities for people to participate in improving their digital lives. We’ve built an organization that no one could have predicted, that has defied all manner of difficulties and flourished.

We continue to build these things today.

Here is the beginning of that organization:

NETSCAPE ANNOUNCES MOZILLA.ORG, A DEDICATED TEAM AND WEB SITE SUPPORTING DEVELOPMENT OF FREE CLIENT SOURCE CODE

DEVELOPER COMMUNITY WILL GAIN ACCESS TO FREE CLIENT SOURCE CODE, INFORMATION AND OPEN DIALOGUE; INTERNET ADVOCATES CALL MOVE A WIN-WIN FOR CUSTOMERS AND DEVELOPER COMMUNITY ALIKE

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (February 23, 1998) – Netscape Communications Corporation (NASDAQ:NSCP) today announced the creation of mozilla.org, a dedicated team within Netscape with an associated Web site that will promote, foster and guide open dialog and development of Netscape’s client source code. As a follow-on to Netscape’s recent announcement to make the first developer release of Communicator 5.0 source code available for free, mozilla.org will act as a focal point for developers who are interested in modifying and redistributing Netscape client source.Accessible today by going to www.mozilla.org, the Web site will provide a central point of contact and community by encouraging developers to download the client source code, post their enhancements, take part in newsgroup discussions, and obtain and share Communicator-related information with Netscape and others in the Internet community. The mozilla.org site is also accessible through Netscape’s developer Web site at developer.netscape.com.”By making our source code available to the Internet community, Netscape can expand its client software leadership by integrating the best enhancements from a broad array of developers,” said Marc Andreessen, executive vice president of products for Netscape. “This Netscape team will be dedicated to assisting developers in the development of the source code, building a community that addresses markets and needs we can’t address on our own and allowing our customers to reap the benefits through access to superior products.”

“The popularity and success of Apache, the Linux operating system, the BSD version of UNIX and many other software applications prove the value and impact of open source development,” said Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux. “By introducing mozilla.org, Netscape has created an environment that will bring the best of the Internet to a common locale, encouraging developers to create quality products for end users.”

“Netscape is the first major company to exploit the power of the open source strategy,” said Eric S. Raymond, open-source developer and advocate. “Making their client software source code free to developers is a bold move that will do great things for their products.”

As previously announced, Netscape plans to make Netscape Communicator 5.0 source code available to developers and the Internet community beginning later this quarter with the first developer release of the product. More information is accessible today by going to www.mozilla.org or by accessing Netscape’s DevEdge site.