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Interview with Mitchell Baker

Cnet has an interview with Mitchell Baker, leader of the Mozilla project, about 1.0, competing with Microsoft, marketing plans, and more. An interesting quote:

But we don't aim our releases for mass-market consumers. We're not producing that product. We're producing the technology that others can build to use those products.

There's been a lot of press leading up to the 1.0 release. There will probably be a lot more when it's actually released.

Comments

It was launched with the expectation that thousands of programmers would suddenly appear able to work on this complex, key technology...

I don't want to bang on the Mozilla folks too much, but as someone who wanted to be involved, tried, and was unable, I think they mis-prioritized their efforts. On a huge, complex open-source project like Mozilla, if you want to enable new people to come in, you're going to have to spend a significant amount of effort making that easy. You need to have well-written explanations of the project, tutorials, and so on.

One thing I always found to be a great barrier to working with Mozilla was the development environment. It would have been great if there had been a link on the Mozilla page that said "Download the development environment", which would give you all the tools, setups, configuration files, etc. to start working on Mozilla. And granted the default Linux installation is probably close to what was needed, but how about Windows?

Scott Turner