What is Mozilla?

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