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We should probably figure out a new word for this. For us, "open" means transparent, as in "open source" - you're not locked in to what the original creator did. And in our case "open" also means distributed decision making.
Of course, it's hard to support full-time programmers, so we do get funds from a set of companies that are interested in the health of the Mozilla project and so are willing to support the people working for the Foundation as well.
I guess my other advice is that it's really good to be comfortable among groups of men! It's just a very common work setting and I don't actually think about it too much, but there must be some comfort level that I've developed over the years.
When people think of Mozilla, they generally think of the browser, but Mozilla is really much more than that. Mozilla is of interest to people who want an end-user application like our browser that's not tied directly into the Windows platform.
Flash is one of those very useful, very closed, very proprietary non-weblike things that has great tools and serves a need very well. But in the long run, we see video as part of the web, and it should be handled just the way other html elements are.
So many commercial orgs have software where you can come and modify it but they still control everything. And what's controlled is very clearly what's good for their business, or if they're more progressive, their view of what's good for the Internet.
So many commercial orgs have software where you can come and modify it, but they still control everything. And what's controlled is very clearly what's good for their business, or if they're more progressive, their view of what's good for the Internet.
There's the classic charitable contribution, which we receive thousands, and we're extremely grateful and they often come with notes from people, which are very heartwarming, about how much difference our products have made in their life on the Internet.
Especially if you don't have a job that's providing fulfillment in your technical expertise, there is a lot of reward to working on a very smart and demanding community that will respect you and will give you leadership and authority based on what you do.
I'm excited about mobile; clearly that's important. Mobile devices are kind of at the opposite end of PCs, in that PCs are pretty open and you can do a fair amount with them, but many mobile devices aren't. We're excited at the idea that we can make the same kind of contribution in the mobile space. So that's one thing coming down the pike.
Usually, you know, you're at a table and you're the only woman, you've got this idea, you finally speak up - I mean, I've been in some settings where every head turns toward me and then they all turn away as if I've never spoken. Which I think happens when whatever I said was so out of the blue, or so awkward, that they just didn't know how to respond.
We're also looking a lot at graphics and video. We've done a lot on a deep technical level to make sure that the next version of Firefox will have all sorts of new graphics capabilities. And the move from audio to video is just exploding. So those areas in particular, mobile and graphics and video, are really important to making the Web today and tomorrow as open as it can be.
What's been most helpful to me is realizing that those times when all the heads in the room turn and look at me as if I was crazy, reinforce my own leadership capability. Because I've been in a number of those settings where I've been right. And I've been right often enough that now when it happens I don't automatically think, "Oh, my, what's wrong with me?" or "Ohhh, I must not be ready for this role," or "They know so much more than I do."
But most of us who aren't models aren't models, right? And so, you just have to get used to that and sort of read right past it. So. On the sex symbol piece, I don't get that piece. On the personality piece, that people are excited to meet a leader from Mozilla - maybe there's more about meeting me personally than I give credit for, but I find that people are excited about what Mozilla is, more than 'Oh my god, there's Mitchell, look, her hair,' whatever.
Our sense of "open" is that the authority to make decisions about that gets distributed based on merit and understanding and participation and leadership, not solely on employment or a title or a business plan. Technical colleagues will define "open" as "open standards," "interoperable" - you can find it, search it, cut and paste it, view source, mix and match - all those things that we associate with text on the Web, that you can continue to do that with audio and video and whatever's next.