Mozilla

The Mozilla Tree

July 29th, 2008

The Finished Mozilla Tree

This morning at the opening session of the Firefox Plus Summit I showed this image, which has been in the works for a while. It’s my current approach to finding a good metaphor to explain the complex nature of Mozilla. There’s a fair amount of explanation needed for this image to make sense, and I’ll try to get that posted before long.

Categories: Mozilla | Tags: ,

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7 comments for “The Mozilla Tree”

  1. 1

    Pingback from Unveiling the Tree | Attack of the Blog!

    [...] has undergone a lot of evolution over the last several months, and it was really amazing to see the final version unveiled on Tuesday morning at the keynote. When I first started working at Mozilla, Mitchell [...]

  2. 2

    gandalf said on August 1st, 2008 at 1:49 am:

    I like this tree metaphore, and two follow ups that came to my mind while the Mozilla 2.0 talk were:

    1) If you remove/break/cut trunk or roots… the tree will still look the same, but it’ll be dead – lumber. Same with Mozilla. We can produce browser without those values, but it will be lumber, not a tree.
    2) This problem with what is trunk and what is branch appears when we’re switching to HG, where this distinction is also much harder.

  3. 3

    Pingback from Across the Stars » Blog Archive » Of bears, landslides, powercuts and cancelled flights

    [...] day of the summit started off with keynotes by John Lilly and Mitchell Baker. Mitchell’s analogy of what she thought of Mozilla was especially intriguing. A great way to kick-off the sessions that [...]

  4. 4

    Pingback from Mozilla in Asia » Blog Archive » On the greater Mozilla community…

    [...] with the internet. From this she built a metaphor that anchored her entire presentation: Mozilla is a tree. We have the elements of Mozilla that people can see: the branches. However, each branch is fed [...]

  5. 5

    Pingback from musingT» Blog Archive » Metaphoric Mozilla Tree

    [...] analogy that she has been working on for a long time and will continue to elaborate on through her blog.  So I won’t get into the details of what it all means, but instead shed some light on the [...]

  6. 6

    cain said on August 12th, 2008 at 8:31 pm:

    Hey Winifred, how doing? i love your work and I’m a dedicated firefox user. I suppose you get loads of mail, and I am not trying to take up your precious time, but i just really want to know… is the HAIR DOO a statement or something? i mean I’m really not trying to insult you, seriously, i must state i have never seen anything like this. I searched for information on it and could find nothing, so i thought i would just ask you instead.

  7. 7

    Anonymous Coward said on August 18th, 2008 at 9:23 pm:

    I am dismayed that external contributors are not even anywhere near the tree. “Open Source License” just says the code is there, not that patches will be taken. Employees are, of course, prominently visible.

    How much code in Firefox 3 was contributed by external contributors (people who have never worked at MoCo/MoFo/Netscape, including interns, and have no CVS access)? How many patches are rotting in bugzilla? How many patch authors have lost interest by the time somebody actually gets around to giving a cursory glance?

    How did people like Schrep get “distributed, earned authority”? Nothing against him personally, it just feels like everything is being advertised as open source… but people in Mountain View having a giant shortcut, especially management and up – the people who set the directions for the whole project don’t seem to have actually tried to reach out to the community at large (beyond those who attended the summit!) before being instated.

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