Earlier this year, I interviewed Mitchell Baker in London for an article in the Technology section of the Guardian. We chatted on too long, and because she was so interesting, I thought I'd put a rough transcript of the rest online for Mozilla's 10th anniversary on March 31. Ahem. But Mitchell said the idea was to celebrate the anniversary all year, so it's still timely....

There's around 3,000 words on why Mozilla doesn't want to get into a death-spiral with Microsoft, and has more important things to do than chase market share, such as moving the whole web forward. Also, why Mozilla isn't using Firefox to plug Thunderbird more heavily, and why Firefox is finally taking a serious look at the mobile business.

A bit of background: Mitchell Baker joined Netscape's legal department in 1994, and has been involved with the browser ever since: at Netscape, at AOL, and at Mozilla, which she helped set up. She became chief executive of Mozilla Corporation in 2005 -- a job she's just passed to her chief operating officer John Lilly -- and she's now chairman of both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation.

Knowing of her involvement with the legal side, I started by asking her why they'd created a new license for Firefox instead of using the GPL like, for example, Linux.

MB: We released it under the Mozilla License, which I wrote between January and March in 1998. That was early. It was the first one I know to take a middle ground between the GPL and a do-whatever-you-want license [like BSD]. We were in the middle, and we were clear that it was an open source project that had to work with commercial organisations and their wholehearted involvement was required and therefore the GPL was a non-starter. That was definitely true then.

JS: But you have people who take a more stringent view, who are essentially forking Firefox...

MB: [Laughs] Yeah. We do. The question of trademark is pretty unsettled in the open source world. The trademark is important in a consumer product, but there are a few groups who feel it's a restriction they can't live with. If you have their assumptions, their conclusions make sense... it's just that their assumptions don't match the real world. We've had these horrendous emails come in with heartbreaking things like "I like Firefox but I don't really want to pay $30 a month for it. Will you stop charging my credit card?" So they've run into some fake site that puts Firefox out and charges for it. When you get a lot of those, trademark makes a lot more sense.

JS: So what defence do you have?

MB: Essentially trademarks. The name Firefox is not part of the open source licence, and that's why it's important to us. We have some trademark enforcement programs: when we find these sites, we try to shut them down.

JS: But if you are a platform, which you are -- clearly people are building on Firefox, with extensions and so on -- then you need to sponsor that kind of outside activity. You can't do everything yourself.

MB: Yes, we actually don't want to. We're still building client software, which is increasingly less common in the world today, and we are increasingly at the slower end of the software cycle, especially at scale. People who have only lived in the web world, it's hard for them to understand that we're dinosaurs but we're constrained by the nature of the software. Having add-ons is increasingly important.

JS: Localisation is an important part of the software cycle, and Microsoft puts out dozens of languages, which is a commercial cost....

MB: We have 40 or 50 groups around the world that not only create local versions, they do it as part of our development cycle. They're volunteers but they are dedicated to shipping professional software, and the deadlines can be brutal, but.... It's a lot of work to have an infrastructure that supports 50 or 60 languages on three platforms all QA'd and checked out on the same day. Most companies don't do it. We do. The majority of the people who use Firefox are not in the United States.

JS: Shouldn't you be paying people to do that sort of work?

MB: We're not hearing that message back from our community. We've actually been told by a number of open source projects that they feel we shouldn't inject any money back into the community, and that the danger of using money in a community of people who volunteer for other reasons is very high. Some of them won't do this at all because they worry about damaging their community.

We spend a lot of time worrying about what they actually want -- do they want to be employees? What would help them keep doing it? A lot of people participate because they want their experience to be a certain way in their local language, and having money appear isn't what they want. We have a community program and a grant program that's very small. Figuring out how to spend money is not so clear.

What we've gotten back is [things like] "we want a server to stash stuff", so we do those things. They can be loud, if the systems are inadequate. It's not always nice. So we spend most of our money on employing a core of people full time,

JS: It didn't used to be a problem because Richard Stallman [founder of the Free Software Foundation] didn't have any money. You've got a very big bank balance! Relatively to open source project standards, not to Microsoft.

MB: Yeah. There's a bunch of commercial entities in open source, a development structure. It's very funny in that we sit in the middle of many things. By open source standards we're giant, and we have an unbelievable amount of resources, but compared to the competition, we're a gnat. It's true in a lot of different ways, but finances are clearly one of them.

Our expenses will go up, because we've hired people over the past year, but we do keep retained earnings in the bank to ensure our independence. A lot of people ask about the fact that we don't have a diversified revenue stream: it comes from Google, so what do you do about that? One of the things we do is keep a healthy bank account, so that if something should change, we have the resources to respond and figure out our next plan. Our community understands that. Google has been an extraordinary partner and does not try to tie the revenue relationship to what our product is, but I think everyone's pretty reassured that we're not living hand-to-mouth. If something were to go wrong, we have some savings.

JS How are you getting on with Microsoft, because you did go to the Vista workshop, didn't you?

MB: Yes we did. We did. [Pause.] We have some communications that's far better than in the Netscape era, and that's good. We are particularly eager not to have a repeat of the Netscape-Microsoft interaction of the 90s, which was: introduce a new feature and try to get as many developers as possible to use it, and have these competitive camps that ended up making life really difficult for web developers. It's hard enough just with the bugs that come up when you're all trying to implement the same specs. But we are not interested in having a features war. It's part of the reason that the web moves forward as slowly as it does. People think of us as very successful, but we're still 27% market share in Europe, so [most] people are using something else. So even when we have a good idea about the web, we need to implement it in a way that people using IE don't have a broken experience. It can be an experience that isn't as rich as ours, but it's still got to work.

We are still in the position of designing our product and our progress on the web in a way that ... works on the competition. We spend a lot of time on that. We're trying to move the web forward without getting into ... a Netscape-Microsoft spiral of breaking it for each other.

We spend a lot of time in standards bodies dedicated to interoperability. It's not glamorous and it's not the part of Firefox that the average consumer will see, but it's where the fundamental capabilities of the web will be decided. We are one of the prime voices for trying to build new features into the web platform, and those are discussions in which Microsoft is clearly involved. I'm not sure we see eye to eye on these things, as you might expect.

We don't spend our days thinking about Microsoft, or trying to get revenge on Microsoft, or do whatever to Microsoft. That's a really negative and backward way, and motivates some people, but there are tens of thousands of people who are motivated by a more powerful vision of the internet. I don't personally want to get up every day and say "What can I do to Microsoft?" That's not how I want to live. We try to look forward, but of course, since Microsoft had 90% market share when we started, most of our users come from them, so there's no question that there's competition among products.

JS: Didn't Microsoft just copy Netscape? It implemented Netscape's features....

MB: Sometimes faster than Netscape could get them out in the final product!

JS: They implemented standards and they implemented compatibility with what you were doing. It's just that after they won, they then took five years off ;-)

MB: When there was some market pressure, yes. When the market pressure died away, they took five years off. IE7 has some standards stuff, but Firefox's standards compliance is just so much better... Some standards are complex and it takes a long hard slog to get them right, which we do. Firefox is still ahead. They do have difficult business problems to work through.

JS; What's your current thinking on the whole suite issue, which was central to Netscape?

MB: We think the market has spoken, and that when we separated the browser and made it a browser and not a suite launcher, and when we made it as lightweight a browser as we could, that's when people responded. We see that validated. There's a bunch of people around the world who don't use an email client, they use web mail. Or they don't have a home machine. I feel I need a desktop client but a number of people use webmail so... We remain interested. We've launched a sister company to do the mail and communications for the internet, to continue to develop Thunderbird, and to address the integration with webmail and what-else-besides-email.

The web space is huge and takes 150% of the mental energy anyone ever has, so we've split it out to have separate people thinking constantly about it. There are some things I miss about the suite, but the suite project is still alive as SeaMonkey, and it has its own set of community developers who do a phenomenal amount of work. There's still four or five million people using the product, and that's pretty successful as an open source project. But we're trying to do something even more than an open source project, and that's move the internet -- including the commercial industry in it -- towards to a more open place that it's been. That requires being a vibrant open source project but also having industry impact.

Identity and security are areas that we're just at the beginning of, and I think it will get worse as the amount of data goes up, and who if anyone could you rely on. Do you care about your privacy? This is an area we spend a lot of time thinking about, and we don't have an answer yet, but we're trying to figure out. Is there a place for the browser in this, and if so, what would it be? This is one of those areas where an answer derived from openness might be different than what a commercial organisation would come up with.

JS: The browser is now the main target for malware, and practically every exploit now works through the browser...

MB: An OS exploit that comes through the browser, yes. But the browser has to be semi-permeable: it's got to be open. If it's not open to everything you want, you aren't going to use it. Since the web is changing quickly, so there are new possibilities for exploits as time goes on. Even if we had the perfect piece of software today -- which of course is impossible -- who knows about tomorrow?

JS: But you still have to make trade-offs for security reasons....

MB: We've made some of those trade-offs. ActiveX was one of the things Microsoft added into the browser to make it easy to make system calls, which we did not implement, and it's the reason that many many intranets even today don't run Firefox well. Even some public parts of the internet would not work with Firefox. We suffered for many years because we would not implement it, but we knew we couldn't make it safe. We paid the price of incompatibility for a long time. That's hard to do.

JS: And now we're entering the Flash age where the browser is just a vehicle for Adobe... Is that a fair comment?

MB: I don't think the browser will become just a vehicle for Adobe. I think it's more likely that openness will come than that Flash will take over. Certainly Flash is almost ubiquitous, and there's an array of content that Flash is the answer for. 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. We spent a bunch of time working on video alt tags so that video can be treated as content for the browser. The biggest issue with that is probably patents. We know how to display video on the web but the patents and licensing fees surrounding some of those implementations are high. It's not a technology challenge.

JS: You're now at 17 or 18% globally, so to get to 80%.... If you could grow at 1% [one percentage point] a month, that's only five years, isn't it? We could say 10 years, but these things have tipping points!

MB: [Laughs] And we've been linear for a while.... First of all, we're not really aiming for that kind of market share. And we're able not to, because we're looking for revenue to sustain ourselves but not that hockey stick that investors typically need. We aim for enough market share to be able to move the industry towards openness, to be able to bring new things into the platform in an open way and have people be able to adopt them, enough market share to be able to speak with authority. We don't exactly know what that number is. In parts of Europe, we're there; worldwide, we're not so sure.

I think if you tossed a number like 80% around even inside Mozilla, probably most people don't see that as a goal, and some people would start to worry, because that market share even in the hands of Mozilla might be high enough that if we behaved poorly, it would affect the industry in bad ways.

We want to show why having openness is useful, so the market share enables us to move the industry towards a better place. and also to experiment with the new things that are coming on the web.

JS: You may not have a choice! If you look at history -- WordStar, WordPerfect, Word, for example, were serial monopolies. Network effects are independent of other things.

MB: That is possible. The one thing that's true of us is that we try to figure out what implementation means to users of the competitive product, and I suppose in a tipped market you don't spend much energy doing that; if you have 80% or 85% maybe you don't do that. But as a project, we have values and there's a core for who Mozilla acting as a tyrant is no better or only slightly better than somebody else acting as a tyrant.

JS: Everyone has always used power in one market to build market share in allied markets. Clearly that's a driver for Microsoft. Advantage Mozilla, as long as you're not in the suite business!

MB: That's a really interesting question, because a lot of people have been angry at us for not using Firefox to promote Thunderbird aggressively. Some of them say: "The money comes through Firefox, you only care about the money, you don't care about Thunderbird because it's not generating money." The answer is much more as you suggested. People come to Firefox because they want a browser, and cross-marketing may be good for your products but it may not be what the users want. Of the 150 million using Firefox and maybe 10m using Thunderbird: how much are you going to market a mail product to a bunch of users who don't want a mail product?

So we made a decision: if people come to look for Firefox, that's what we give them. And yet that has caused some angst and anger and conspiracy theories and concern about financial corruption from Google because we don't do that. Certainly we're the same mission with the same goals, but we've specifically not done that.

JS: So what's the next big thing?

MB: I think data. And mobile: the full power of the web on that device.

JS: You haven't been as active in the mobile space as Microsoft and Opera ... and more recently Apple, with the iPhone. You're not the leader on mobile!

MB: Not yet! We think we'll be there. We've waited for a couple of reasons, one of which is that Firefox is hard, and the temptation to lose one's focus on the desktop is too easy. The other thing is that devices have reached the point where it makes sense for us now. We can see devices like the tablets that are shipping today are adequate for a real experience. We have an effort under way and the reception has been quite good. We think the next wave of mobile will be the right time and place for us.

Opera has done a good job of working with handset manufactures and carriers and providing custom versions, but that's not Mozilla's DNA. We're not an enterprise software provider: our community doesn't work that way. If we had tried to do that we would have failed. But mobile is changing. You can imagine if you had something like the iPhone that was open, and you had more options and innovations, you could start to see the possibilities. We're pretty active now.

JS: With Android?

MB: I don't know so much with Android: we'll see. There's a bunch of people who want a Firefox experience, something that's looks and feels like Firefox, that's customisable and has extensions, that I can take things from my desktop and have a good combination between the two. That's really our focus.

(ends)