Mitchell Baker Named CEO of Mozilla | Hacker News Reader

Mitchell Baker Named CEO of Mozilla

blog.mozilla.org

57 pointscpeterso34 comments

If that name rings familiar it is because Mitchel has been the chief lizard wrangler at the Mozilla foundation since forever.

I think they stopped with the wrangler title and changed it to chair woman though.

She now sits as the head of both the foundation and the corporation.

Mark Surman is the Executive Director (CEO)[1] of the Mozilla Foundation.

[1] - An executive director is a chief executive officer (CEO) or managing director of an organization, company, or corporation. The title is widely used in North American non-profit organizations, though many United States nonprofits have adopted the title president or CEO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_director

Mozilla is quite dead as a company, sadly.

And I really LOVE using Firefox...when it works.

But I extra especially HATE building FF from source. I'll take chromium any day for that.

Had the same experience. Mozilla source & build are a mess.

Uh, really? In my experience Chromium takes far longer than Firefox to build, especially from scratch. Not to mention all the steps and bespoke repo-management tools involved in just checking out the code and bringing up a working build environment.

What problems did you run into building Firefox?

Dead? We are all here and not going anywhere.

Does anyone can tell anything positive about her?

I am not saying there isn't any, I don't know her. My limited knowledge about her, is that while she was chairwomen and interim ceo, Firefox marketshare dropped a lot, while her compensation went up a lot - and it seems she was responsible for firing 70 people from the mozilla workforce, while she never wrote any line of code of firefox.

https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/13394-mozilla...

So from my limited understanding as an outsider: she does not really seem the best fit, for the job.

She created the foundation and has had a leading role in it since forever.

She’s not someone who came in left field as an interim and started firing people left and right.

I’m not sure why you think a ceo should also be a programmer.

I think a programmer might well do a better job than a lawyer.

Some years ago, Mozilla decided to relaunch their browser under the name "Firebird". That was a poor choice of name, because there was already a free-software database using it.

There was a kerfuffle about it for some time before Mozilla switched to the (much better) name "Firefox".

During that period, the Mozilla lawyer running the show (one Mitchell Baker) was insistent that there was no reason to change because their legal advice was that they weren't infringing on any trademarks.

A programmer might have realised earlier that trademark law isn't the only relevant consideration in a situation like this (consider, for example, what `apt-get install firebird` is going to do).

You can go back a bit further too as Firefox was called Phoenix before being called Firebird and Phoenix Technologies was not happy: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=83507

Because Mozilla is (self declared) not just any company, but one with a very idealistic active community, involved in the development process of open internet technology?

And in this area, I believe, a focus on technical expertise might be a better fit, than a focus on legal expertise.

You surely need legal expertise as well, but maybe not primarily. Primarily mozilla needs a superior browser, to combat bad market share. And the engineers at firefox surely are doing a great job (mostly), but then I really do not understand the connection of laying of technical people, who build the actual product and using this money to compensate the CEO which does not have technical expertise, if the goal is, to get relevant again as a browser.

> Does anyone can tell anything positive about her?

She's the reason Mozilla exists today as an independent, non-profit organization.

On March 31, 1998 Netscape allowed the Mozilla code base to be open sourced under the Mozilla Project. [1][2] This was the result of an intensive year-long effort to

(1) remove proprietary source code that couldn't be open-sourced,

(2) release the source code under a brand new license called the Mozilla Public License. This license was written principally by Mitchell Baker whose formal education is in law, with input from ESR, Linus Torvalds, VA Research, etc. [3]

On July 14, 2003 AOL (which had acquired Netscape earlier) closed down the Netscape division and laid off almost everyone there, including Mitchell Baker. That very day Mitch Kapor [4] stepped in with funding and advice to help Baker and a core team of total 10 employees set up the Mozilla Foundation in an office in Mountain View that is today occupied by the Khan Academy. [5]

Wikipedia [6] has a good summary of her career.

The documentary Code Rush is required viewing, IMHO, to capture some of the excitement of that era. [7][8] Bonus points for spotting JWZ. :-)

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/netscape-sets-source-code-free/

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/03/31/mozilla-turns-twent...

[3] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch11.html

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Kapor

[5] https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2003/07/mozilla-org-announces...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y

I understand that some people know more than others. But this was a perfectly legitimate question. Not everyone is following Mozilla leadership. We are genuinely curious.

Seems to me like every year there's a new mozilla CEO.

Not sure why you have that impression. Chris Beard, the previous CEO served from 2014 until December.

I guess some people tactically flagged the post, it's 3-4 pages from the front page now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com