A lot of people start in the testing and quality assurance area because it's an easier way to get familiar with the project.
And eventually, since our development focus was here on Firefox, I thought I really ought to be a Firefox user as well.
And the standards process can slow down development and implementation of new things.
But I think it's always difficult when a product that you're using and accustomed to changes.
But very often people ask us if we're in this for revenge or to go after Microsoft or if that's what we think about, and the answer is no.
I mean, we're here to try and do something useful and help keep the Internet something fun and useful for us and have a good time while we're at it.
I mean, who wants to live waking up... at least I don't want to live waking up everyday about revenge.
I spent five or six months as a foreign student in China many years ago and so going back in the new era was really exciting.
In addition to that, there has always been a very active volunteer community and an active set of people employed by other companies.
It is an effective model - more effective and certainly more disciplined and structured than many people realize.
Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks.
Money tends to make people suspicious, if there's any money floating around.
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.
Over the history of the Mozilla project, it turns out that the product browsers exists on many different kinds of machines.
People notice it and they help you participate and see your work included in this project and when we ship our browser, you and millions of other people get to see the fruits of your efforts.
Some people are really drawn to technology and I liken them to artists.
The goal of Firefox and Thunderbird is a new architecture which allows those products to be built separately, to remain separate products.
The Mozilla Foundation is an independent, nonprofit organization.
The Mozilla project has always been a project trying to bring together open source developers with commercial software developers and distributors.
The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity.
The organization is a way for people to find us and deal with us and know how we operate.
There are dancers and painters and writers who pursued that whether or not they are paid for it. There are a lot of technologists who are the same.
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.
We actually have a real community of people doing useful things.
We get hundreds of thousands of downloads off of any milestone and our last FireFox download was in the millions.
We have a very active testing community which people don't often think about when you have open source.
We worked very hard to make extensions very simple.
We're just over a year old but the Mozilla project has been around for a long time.
We've always been the development project that lived in a time pressured setting and always where commercial entities were relying heavily on releases in a certain time frame.
We've broken the code base into logical chunks, called modules, and the foundation staff delegate authority for the modules to people with the most expertise.
Well, there actually is a real effort underway right now with the development effort and a fair amount of planning and thinking.
Within that several-year time frame, if customers are interested in new features and maintenance, they should look at the new products and think about a migration strategy.
You have to raise funds somehow. And once there's money in the picture, money is great because we all need it to live on.
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