February 26, 2008

Yes, this is more shameless self-promotion because it’s an interview with me.

I did an interview a little while ago with Tina Gasperson and it’s up on linux.com. I spent some time talking about building success with a product instead of a project plan in open source, Mozilla’s revenue model, Mozilla’s commitment to transparency and some technology stuff – XULRunner in particular, and what it means for people who want to build something quickly that’s cross platform and leverages web development skills and technologies.

I also like the message that Tina pulled out of our interview for a title – that we are advocating on behalf of our users. Firefox as a product has become more than just a great browser. It’s become a great platform for Mozilla as an organization to do things on behalf of people who use our products, and even for people who use other products. (What we do influences other products all the time – it’s pretty neat to be dragging the web forward indirectly as well as directly.) I have started to think of this kind of experience as “tangible empathy.” We see things that can be improved and we create that change. For vast swaths of people all at once.

Anyway, it’s a decent interview. I like how it came out.