What is Mozilla?
Let me try to answer this
Mozilla is a collection of people
Mozilla is a global project,
it's a non-profit organization
it is this incredible movement of
really, really passionate people
I think it attracts people who are interested in helping others
and who want to work with a group to do something important
(laughs) crazy people
Mozilla is of course best known for our product Firefox
The Firefox project was born in a time
when the Web became stagnant
and the only browser out there
was Internet Explorer
It's one thing to talk about competition
as sort of an idealized economic good
it's another thing to say
"your browser made my life so much better
my computer was so slow and I was getting pop ups and couldn't use it"
I thought the Internet was terrible
and now its all better
and this is what happened in 2004
when we launched Firefox
There is a lot of innovation
we drove in the browser
which you found today across all browsers
A lot of the good things that we built
have come from people who
don't happen to work on the project full time
and that's a really important thing
Innovation doesn't happen unless people are tinkering
and tinkering doesn't happen
unless they have access to the code
You end up with a much richer ecosystem
when you have more people
trying out their ideas
and seeing what works
and sometimes that translates back into us
and we say "that's a good idea
we would like to use it
and we're going to ship it to everybody"
Mozilla is a very important experiment
because we operate like
a for profit company
we have a high quality product
we have customers
and instead of shareholders
who want profit
we have a mission
to keep the web open
to provide choice
that's why we're a non-profit
is so we can make our product decisions
based on user experience
and empowering people
and building a product that cares
that you're a citizen and a human being
and not based on
that you own a wallet
we are for
an independent
and open Internet
If Mozilla or other organizations weren't fighting
for these things
The web would become like other mass media
That is, dominated by a few
The definition of open source implies
working together without discrimination
The web isn't just something that you consume
it's something you can actually affect yourself
We have these ideas about how the world should work
and we tend to embody that in
something that individual people can touch
and be part of
and that's different