Well, how should I...?
I don't actually think I've ever given a talk on the history of Mozilla
to a large set of people, which is pretty shocking...
Ok! So...
I'm gonna give it a try.
I'm not sure if I've actually given a talk
on the history of Mozilla to this many people.
So that's probably an indication that I need to do more of it.
Mozilla's been around for a long time, since 1998.
And I thought when we got started...
I'd like to ask:
Of the people here,
how many have been in Mozilla for three months or less?
Can you raise your hand?
Ok, excellent.
How many have been here a year or so?
That's a pretty good group too.
Ok, how about the five year?
Pretty good and I'm gonna say the ten year.
How many people? Who's around, though?
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine...
So there's nine people in this room that have been working on Mozilla
for ten years and more.
And there's probably another nine or ten people in this gathering today
who have been here that long as well.
And so I'm gonna explain the different roles that we had in the early days.
I'll try to name some names as we go along, I won't get all of those names,
but if you see this people and have questions about Mozilla or Mozilla's history,
find a good time and ask them, because we all have many memories.
So, Mozilla started in 1998. It came out of Netscape.
Netscape at one time had been the almost monopoly browser vendor.
It was the first commercial browser,
so we had, I don't know, 99% of the market share at one time.
And it was a pretty exciting time.
That was when the Internet and the Web actually really exploded.
Microsoft appeared. They started building its own browser.
Microsoft did a couple of things that ended up eventually building a good browser.
And it also engaged in a whole range of illegal activities.
And so the combination of that changed the landscape drammatically.
And Netscape management had the foresight to recognise they could not continue
and be successful in the way they had been operating.
And they realised with the help of the engineering folk set at Netscape
that the best opportunity was to convert their typical proprietary closed commercial product
into an open source product.
This was radical in its day.
Open source is mainstream now, but it was not then.
Open source was deep in the technical community,
it never surfaced in a product,
it was all sort of odd
and it was a very radical move.
The second thing that happened is that the management team,
I was there at the time,
a lot of us were,
but I was part of these discussions,
realised that an open source project had to be real.
So, inside Netscape there was created a small group of people
who were charged with the job of building a successful open source project.
And there was a larger group of people, engineering,
that was charged with building a successful Netscape product.
That Netscape product was designed to make money for Netscape
and ultimately money for AOL, after AOL bought Netscape.
So, in the very early days of Mozilla, through '98, '99, 2000,
we had these two different groups.
We had the engineering group, which was a 100-150 people
working on building the Netscape navigator product
managed by a set of people wanting to use that product to make money for AOL.
Then we had the small group of people who were charged with building Mozilla
as an open source project,
building contributors from all sorts of different places
and building a technology base that was useful for many different companies.
The open source side.
That was small in name.
There were six or eight of us.
Of those, Mick was one of them,
Gerv was one of them,
Dan was one of them,
Brendan was one of them,
I was one of them,
Shaver was one of them and there was a few of other folks
who aren't here any longer.
That was one group, then we had this very large engineering group
building the Netscape navigator product.
And in there Chofmann was there,
Johnny was there,
Jonas was there,
Dbaron was there...
Dbaron came actually a little later.
But there is a bunch of people here in that engineering group.
That went on for a little while
and it turned out to be not stable.
It turned out that the efforts of the Netscape management group
to build the product to make money for them
came into conflict with how we wanted to manage the code base
as a Mozilla open source project.
That conflict simmered for a while
and eventually it exploded.
Yes, please feel free to ask questions at any point.
[Question]
No, it turned out there are lots of ways to build a browser that makes money
that people don't like.
So in those days, Netscape had been acquired by AOL
and AOL was a website property.
So to that management team,
the browser was a tool to drive people to the AOL website.
You can do that, but it doesn't mean you like the product.
You can add user interface features to it,
you can focus on new buttons and menu items
that in those cases were AOL specific,
you can put your resources there
rather than on security and new features,
you might not be interested in features
that help people find things across the web,
because AOL wanted them going to AOL.
So we found that there were immense conflicts
and also, in an open source project,
you have contributors who have an "ownership stake",
meaning that they put effort in, they are building a product,
if they are using the product they have a set of needs
that might be different.
As part of the open source project
we were balancing the needs of our employers, Netscape,
with various other people.
And eventually,
that broke down.
So for example, we'll take user interface
which is always a contentious issue in a product.
The single most contentious issue,
way back in 1999 and 2000,
was user interface,
because Netscape would want a user interface
that drove people to AOL
and Mozilla wanted an interface that was good for people using the Web.
I was the General Manager of the small group of people
building Mozilla as an open source project.
In those days we called ourselves staff@mozilla.org
or mozilla.org staff.
When the tension exploded over the interface,
over really who controlled the code,
we had long fights about what would the basic process is
by which we build the product.
So things we take for granted today,
like you have to earn the right to be a committer,
we fought with Netscape over that.
Things like code needs code review,
it has to be good enough;
that being hired as an employee
doesn't automatically make your code good enough;
that even after you are hired as an employee
your peers need to decide your code is good enough.
So basic things like code review were immense fights.
I was the representative of Mozilla
and when those tensions came to a head,
I was fired.
Yes.
Was Mozilla the open source browser in those days?
Mozilla was in those days a technol..
Sorry, the question was "Was Mozilla the open source browser in those days?"
Mozilla in those days was seen as a technology development organisation.
And Netscape liked to think that it was building the browser.
[Question]
Did everyone hear Dan?
The initial theory was like the Linux kernel,
where Mozilla would be the technology development asset
that builds the kernel
and other organisation would build the commercial products from it.
So we had this ongoing tensions
and one of them was Mozilla was becoming a product
in its own right.
It turned out that as the Netscape and AOL management
began building their product to drive traffic to AOL,
more people started using the Mozilla version
than the Netscape version.
That was going on in the background
and let to some of these tensions.
So I was fired
and the belief at Netscape at the time
was that by getting rid of me,
Netscape management would then have the ability
to control the Mozilla open source project
and could convert it into a set of people that helped Netscape
build the product that they wanted.
Essentially, to view the community as a free work force
that would help build the Netscape product.
Of course, the competing view is that we're all building an open source project
that has to meet the needs of the community
and that people who contribute and build the product
have some say in what happens to it.
What happened at that point was that the two groups of people,
the small group of people that had been mozilla.org staff
and the larger group of people which were all the engineers
contributing to Mozilla
reunited to form one shared outlook.
What happened was that essentially the engineers working at Netscape
were very clear that the leadership that they were following was Mozilla.
And it was me.
And it was not their management.
So, everyone involved voted to continue to try to build
an open source project.
So I remained the General Manager of Mozilla.
I remained the leader of the Mozilla project
and the spokesperson for the development of the Mozilla project,
much to the surprise of the Netscape and AOL management.
We learned a lot of lessons out of that.
We learned from that that leadership depends on who will follow you.
You need to lead people.
My own view is that you have to be leading in the right direction
enough of the time,
that enough people follow or enough people also lead in that direction.
[Question]
This would be... I was fired in 2001 and yes...
Yes.
Yeah. So that was 2001 when I was fired.
[Question]
Yes.
The question was:
"The open web is here today it's easy to see why it's important
back then in those days before the open web, how did you know?
What makes you willing to risk your job?"
We'd been working on a browser for a while,
so we could tell that the browser was important.
It was clear at that time, when Microsoft had maybe 90-95% market share
in the browser, in the operating system and in the productivity suites,
Office and Excel,
which were the only things that people used in those days.
And so it was clear
that in those days,
Microsoft controlled access to the Internet.
We didn't call it the open web then but it was the Internet
and we knew it was great.
It was very clear that by controlling the browser,
Microsoft controlled how individual people experienced the Internet.
That the server side of the Internet in those days
was developing, growing and becoming richer and more capable.
But the client side was deteriorating
and through that client,
Microsoft was able to ignore formats
to make vast quantities of content unavailable to people.
And to determine the business model
through which you could access content
and to have an immense influence over the entire structure of the Internet.
So that much was clear.
It sounds melodramatic but the future of the Internet
was already an issue at that point.
It was very clear the browser was the leverage point.
We were very clear about our jobs.
One second, I'm gonna tell a couple of stories
and then I'll get you Chris.
But we were very clear that our jobs were on the line.
It wasn't just me.
It was everyone I named and Marcia.
Is Marcia here?
I didn't see her hand go up.
But we would have meanings as the small group that was mozilla.org
when the tensions got really high
and we would get together
and we would say things like
"What happens if AOL pulls the plug?
What happens if we're all fired tomorrow?
How do we keep Mozilla operating?"
Those would be things like...
Our release engineer at the time
had the keys to the server room where the Mozilla machines operated.
These are small details but they were really important at the time
and we knew that if he could do it
he would help us keep Mozilla operating
and we knew that Chofmann was running the engineering organisation
and we knew that he would be helpful as it turned out,
we needed him.
And Marcia had the keys to the closet that was our single supply of Mozilla t-shirts.
Which I bought with my own money.
Oh, no. That was later, nevermind. The ones I bought later.
But she had that key
and she had access to some other things.
So we would sit and think how many machines do we need,
how many employees do we need.
If we have one employee,
is it Leef who runs the build machines?
If we have one employee,
is it Brendan?
Who is he?
And what's the best way to keep Mozilla operating?
But when it came to it I was the only one who was fired
and so the rest of the Mozilla folks were left
and Chofmann provided a haven
for us to try and continue to be effective as well.
So this was this first era.
So after I was fired there were a bunch of people still at Netscape,
working on Netscape navigator.
As part of that we finally managed to ship our first product as Mozilla.
Mozilla 1.0 we called it.
And this had been a long time in coming.
That was in 2002.
We started Mozilla in 1998 and expected to have a product
very shortly afterwards.
But it turned out, when we got into it
that the technology was pretty old.
Brendan made the decision to really build the new technology base.
That technology base is Gecko.
It cost us years to get the rendering engine to a point
where we could really build a good application on it and ship it.
We finally did that in 2002.
It was Mozilla 1.0 and it was technically a good product.
It was technically a shockingly good product.
Across the open source space, where people knew it
they were retelling us they were really shocked
to how good a product it was.
But it was not a consumer product.
It was really built by developers, for developers.
It didn't have a clear designed aesthetic,
it didn't have an approach to consumers.
So it was a very powerful product
and if you couldn't figure out what was really the best user experience
you'd build both and have a pref for it.
It was known as loaded and overweight
and technically good, but a poor product.
That was 2002.
About a year later,
AOL decided they were tired of investing in the browser.
They still had, I don't know,
75 or a 150 people they were paying to work on the browser
and they weren't really getting anywhere with it.
At long last, they became interested in taking mozilla.org assets
and giving them to those of us who'd been running the project.
Again, to give you a sense of what life was like in those days,
mozilla.org assets were
the trademark, the name, mozilla.org,
four big servers we fought for that ran all mozilla.org
and some seed startup money.
That was really it.
Yeah, Mick.
[Question]
That's definitely the timing.
Yes, so that was why it may well have been.
What Mick said was
"wasn't it the case that the reason AOL stopped investing in browsers
and in Gecko is that they just completed a deal with Microsoft
where they had agreed to use IE
or the Microsoft rendering engine in their browser."
Is that right?
Yes, that's right. The AOL client, that I forgotten about.
So Microsoft managed to buy AOL out of their own browser effort.
But it was good for us.
Because that didn't seem like a lot of assets,
but it was really critical to us.
We had thought before about starting our own effort at mozilla.org
but without the name,
it would have been really hard.
And four giant servers doesn't seem like much today,
but in that era it was a big deal.
We also got some seed money from them,
we got 2 million dollars.
That was a funny story too because
I had ended up working with Mitch Kapor,
I don't know if you know, from Lotus,
those who remember Lotus 1-2-3,
and Mitch had come to see that open source was really important,
after he left Lotus and he had his own open source organisation,
and I was working with him.
And he really stepped in to help us.
So Mozilla has a history of things appearing when we need them.
There is that saying that is it luck,
or is it effort, or is it skill.
And Mozilla has been blessed with all three:
immense effort, tremendous skill and this luck that things appear.
So, Mitch appeared and he essentially arm wrestled AOL
for that seed money.
We look at the 2 million dollars
and we thought that we could support maybe 10 people
for two years.
Because we had set down as mozilla.org
and thought that to be effective as a project,
the minimum number of people we needed was 10.
Running the machines was one person.
You know, we keep the project alive but we couldn't be successful.
And Mitch had pitched a little bit of other money
and IBM and Sun were our first commercial partners
and they pitched in some money and started maybe with 12 or 13 employees.
What that meant was:
Johnny Stenback and D Baron,
that was the platform team.
One person on Firefox for the front-end team,
one person on Thunderbird,
one release engineer,
Chofmann as an engineering manager,
Mick did the ultimate sacrifice and ran our systems for us,
for a year or two before we were able to get him back
into a role that really fit him better,
we had one person helping us on sustainability,
Brendan as Brendan,
and me trying to be successful.
And that was it.
And that seemed like a lot to us.
[Question]
That's right, I forgot Asa
How can I forget Asa?
[Question]
And project management.
And still.
From that day till now, phenomenal.
Whenever I have a problem with my browser, Asa is always able
to figure out what it is.
So that's it.
No one else can ever do that.
[Question]
All of a sudden, we had our own independence.
It was pretty scary,
10 people is not really enough,
there was no ongoing financial sustainability that we knew of,
it was a gamble,
but we had our own independence and we could make a product.
We made phenomenal changes in that period.
It was our second set of phenomenal changes.
When we were founded we made up an organisation that was revolutionary,
as Chofmann described.
How do you work with a company?
How did we do code review?
How did you earn your authority?
There was nothing quite like it before.
When we started the foundation
we remade ourselves over again.
We were, as I said, a small number of people,
we made a bet on a new product that was Firefox.
We didn't have a product to ship at that time.
And Asa with our community involvement
continued to ship the Mozilla suite
for fifteen months,
as the only product we had in the marketplace
until Firefox was ready.
We made that bet, which is a scary bet.
Imagine not to have a browser,
I mean we didn't have a person working on the product we were shipping.
But we did that because we knew that Firefox was our opportunity
to make a commercial product.
Our first five or six years of life taught us that technology alone
will not change the industry the way we want to.
Technology alone does not change people's lives the way we want to do that.
Our opportunity with the browser is to have a product that touches people.
Yeah.
[Question]
Yeah. So that's where I'm trying to get to.
That technology alone is not enough,
that raw power of technology is not enough,
that if you really want to touch people,
not us, not power users, not developers
but if you want to touch consumers
and change their lives,
you have to be utterly committed to that.
You can't build the features that you want
just because you want them.
You can't tell people:
"Oh, you should behave this way,
you should want to be this way."
You have to build the product that is elegant
and beautiful and powerful under the covers
but that people love.
That was the first thing.
That is a big change.
Many open source projects never make that change.
I started calling it the tyranny of the product.
If you are serious about wanting to touch hundreds of millions of people
you have to be committed to those hundreds of millions of people.
You can't just think they're stupid,
or they don't understand.
You have to really be committed to making their lives better.
So that's what Firefox do.
So we didn't rewrite all these switches, and all the preferences
the way our first product had.
We also made an initial experience for people they could relate to.
That's our Start page.
Before...
[Question]
Do you want to?
You don't have mics, and there's no mic for that.
How about... you (...)
So I'm gonna step back.
How did Firefox come into being?
Firefox had started in a few years before, in 2001 maybe,
where it became clear that the old products had a bunch of problems.
Not only was it really built for developers and much too powerful,
not too powerful but not elegant
and not beautiful on how it displayed its power.
And it was a combined browser, email client, IRC client, app launcher environment.
This was a cause of intense fighting
and so a small group of engineers went off
and had an idea for doing something more elegant,
just a browser, that was focussed on a product
a family would want to use.
So there were five or six of them.
[Question]
Yeah. So Dan says a couple of those guys
were at Netscape working on the suite as their day job
and during their spare time some were community members
and some were not engineers like Asa was involved
So that had been bubbling a lot for a while, and so on.
It wasn't anywhere near done
and it was both a source of a relief and some contention
for the engineers working on it.
Was there more you wanted to say?
Ok. So it had been bubbling a lot and existed in a source code repository,
I think when we formed the foundation it was 0.2 or maybe 0.3.
That's probably a good time to tell the story of the name of Firefox.
So when it was first started, the engineers thought
"wow we're building a new browser out of the ashes of Mozilla 1.0"
and so it was named Phoenix.
[Question]
For a really non-product but Mozilla/Browser when it came to have a name
it was Phoenix.
Well, there is a company, Phoenix Technologies,
it's a BIOS company, it's been around forever,
they once had a browser kind of thing
and so the World of Trademarks contacted us
and said we couldn't use the name Phoenix
and we looked at it and they were probably right,
they had a product that was pretty close.
So of course, from Phoenix, the next obvious name is Firebird.
So our browser was Firebird for one or two releases
and it turns out there was, and still is,
an open source database project by the name of Firebird.
[Question]
So, not really legally trademark violation
cos it's distinct enough
but certainly perceived as unfriendly, awkward and difficult.
That went on for a while, and Brendan and the rest of us
posted something that said
"OK, you're right, we're gonna change the name
we'll change it before we ship our next version."
That was a problem,
because it meant that the version was ready to ship
before we had a name for it.
Shipping it with no name seemed like a loss of momentum,
Brendan had made a commitment
and we had a really intense emotional survival fight
like a couple of weeks, I think it was a couple of weeks,
to try to figure out what we were gonna call this thing.
The developer, Ben,
liked the idea of doing something with fire in the name.
So we went through a dictionary or a book
looking for all the words that started with fire
that might make sense.
So we started going through them.
On the side, we were doing a very professional process
of thinking about "oh, what does the browser mean?
How do you develop a brand?
Is it navigation? Is it freedom?
Is it these kinds of words?
What are the values you associate with it?
Is it trust or is it fun?
And there was this very professional process on the side.
But the reality was the name was chosen
when Ben had a list of words that started with fire,
we started looking at the ones we liked,
and then taking the ones we liked
and looking to see which of them didn't have trademark problems.
And Firefox was the one.
It turned out it had a slight trademark issue
but we were able to resolve that one.
We also knew that it had a mascot,
we could have an image that would be good
and I think it might have been Asa
who first found the Chinese red panda,
that there really truly is an animal called the Firefox
and it's adorable or whatever.
So there we were.
We picked the name and then were able to ship Firefox 0.8.
Seven!
Seven? Ok, seven.
So this would be in 2004.
This is in the spring of 2004,
we had the foundation for seven or eight months,
we're burning through our money,
we're trying to figure out how we're gonna support ourselves,
we have a good size community,
we have an office, a very funky sublet from some friends of the Mozilla project,
who when the giant .com boom had gotten a lot more office space
than they needed
and so they'd given us this little funky sublet,
there is one picture of it floating around
if you've seen that picture of 10 or 12 of us at a table
with the cables hanging down in the middle of it,
it had no running water, you had to go back into the janitor's closet
in the back of the building to get running water or to wash any dishes,
we bought a portable dishwasher
and we rolled it down to the janitor's closet to wash our margarine glasses, mostly.
So we were finally able, in the midst of all of that,
we have a name, we can ship our product.
So we shipped our 0.7,
and I think it was when we got to 0.8 with Firefox
which it would have been on May or June of 2004,
that we finally understood we had a chance.
Like a real chance.
Because 0.8 of Firefox was far enough along
that people started noticing it.
And the number of people using Firefox started to grow.
Pretty soon there were more people using Firefox 8
than had ever used the Mozilla suite.
Something like a million, or two or three million.
And the other way that I knew that we were on the right track
was Tim O'Reilly called us up.
I mean I know Tim forever
because I've been in the open source world for a number of years
but this time he called up to say
"Hey, we're hearing a lot about Firefox.
Can we come down and talk to you?"
Tim O'Reilly's greater skill is he has a phenomenal nose for what's new,
what's coming and what technology is gonna be interesting.
So there were a lot of clues.
Then, the summer of 2004 was a long summer.
Because in between 0.9 and 1.0 was five or six months,
that's when the extension system was built
and I think I've been the most nervous I've ever been in that phase.
I remember speaking and I could not...
I was on a panel but I walked across the stage constantly,
I was sick to my stomach
because we knew this was our big bet,
we could see the stuff was happening
but there was that pressure that you have to ship the product.
So the final phases of Firefox,
getting the first version out,
were the start page and we...
Before Firefox the start page had been a typical open source project:
"Hi! Wanna help? Here is Bugzilla.
Don't like Bugzilla? Here's Despot.
You don't like that? Here's the link for Tinderbox."
So when we made the commitment to ship a consumer product
we realised that doesn't help most people.
[Question]
Unlike Bugzilla, which is smooth and lovely...
That shows you our standards, right?
So this was again an immense emotional intense, like knocked-down drag-out fight.
What to do? How much commercial relationship do we have?
There's the point of maintaining our values
and doing things in a way that represents our values
and be where people are.
There's often no easy answer.
In the past we had voted we will go where people are.
That's how we have impact.
We could be an open source project.
We were a very successful open source project in 1999
where we had thousands of people already contributing to Mozilla.
We were irrelevant to the marketplace.
We were irrelevant to consumers' lives
and irrelevant to citizen's lives.
And we changed that with Firefox
by consciously deciding to go where people are.
We even did a commercial relationship with Google and Yahoo,
which of course turned out after the fact
to be what sustains us going forward.
But we did those commercial relationships
because we wanted their searchs and we thought that they would be good.
Now, after the fact, it turns out they generated the money
that allows us to grow.
So sustainability is also an important piece.
How do you build those relationships
in a way that have Mozilla values in them?
We've done that before and we'll continue to do that.
And now I'm trying to think about...
Do we wanna have questions?
Has everybody asked the questions they have?
I can keep talking or we can go on to questions.
I do wanna close at the end, but go ahead.
[Question]
So we knew that... so we shipped Firefox 4...
Firefox 1,
in November 2004
and we had a goal of, I don't know, 10 million downloads in 30 days,
which we past in 10 days.
So we knew by December that the amount of money we would be getting
was beyond our expectations.
We didn't know how far it would go.
So we had been hoping to be able to generate enough revenue
to sustain those 10 people, or 12 people.
At the time, we didn't even know how to sustain those.
By January 1st, we knew that we would be able to do that.
The response to Firefox 1
was sort of the stuff of dreams.
Now, it turns out, those were also stressful times.
What happened?
We shipped Firefox 1 by February or March,
there was a security issue
that we didn't actually know how to fix right away.
Like a lot of times when a security issue is reported
it turns out that figuring out the problem is the hard part
and fixing it is the easier part.
But this was one, it was a class of vulnerability
that someone, somewhere, is this the guy in Japan?
I think someone had figured out a new way of attacking products.
So we had this immense focus, attention and user base growing
and this phenomenally difficult product to try and deal with it,
really giant.
So, someday if you see Johnny Stenback and you wanna know
what immense pressure is really like
ask him about that period,
the one that... 0.5 and 1.0.6...
So success has its own issues.
That was one of things that we learned.
That it is phenomenal to be at the centre
and so we experienced that with Mozilla today,
that success is phenomenal but it brings its own stresses and tensions,
and if you're not careful and you just focus on the stress,
it's easy to forget that is the sign of success.
The sign of success in that era was that we had this product,
like it was critical to fix this problem right away.
And you don't know how to do it.
Everybody's looking at you,
you really have to be more than you thought you could be.
It's immensely stressful, that's success.
So if you find yourself in those settings today,
of course try to step back, take a deep breath,
be healthy, get some exercise, do all of those things
but remember that that level of stress and tension
reflects the importance that we have,
how critical we are to people's lives
and is a measure of success.
Not the best measure, there's more fun measures
but when you're in the middle of those settings
it is important to remember that
if we didn't matter then that stress isn't gonna be the same.
Yes.
[Question]
Sure.
When we started as a foundation
there was never any question about that.
AOL knew that would be the case,
all of us who wanted to work for it knew it would be the case.
So we set it up that way,
and then, as in December of 2004,
became clear that we were gonna get significant amounts of money.
I think December was probably a 3 million dollar check,
as I remember, something like that.
So we had (...) that much in a year and suddenly we had it in a month.