Interview with John Lilly on Read/WriteTalk
January 15, 2008 – 5:51 pmRead/WriteTalk, the podcast arm of popular blog Read/WriteWeb, has a wide-ranging audio interview with newly minted Mozilla CEO John Lilly. The first and most interesting topic is the nature of Mozilla as a commercially funded non-profit and the influence it is likely to have on other organizations:
John Lilly: A lot of times, people don’t know whether to compare us to very, very commercial organizations like Google and Apple and Yahoo! and Microsoft, compared to whom we look very small. Whether the comparison is with those or a comparison against the Red Cross or a soup kitchen and Amnesty International — more traditional non-profits, — I think that either type of comparison isn’t quite right. I think we’re more of a third way. And so I think that as the organization’s emerged, we’re all finding language to talk about it. And as we find the language, we’ll start to do it more and encourage it more in the States and of course all around the world.
I don’t think that nearly enough has been said and written on these topics. How did Mozilla get to where it is in terms of being an economically sustainable open-source business? What are the risks and opportunities inherent in its current structure? Where it is going to need to be in the future in order to continue to compete effectively? Does it represent a trend that is likely to be picked up by other organizations or is it just a highly successful aberration? This podcast is a great contribution to the discussion.
The interviewer, Sean Ammirati, clearly did his homework. He touches on a number of other subjects, including mobile browsing, Mozilla’s Weave project (and its relationship to dataportability.org), web censorship and, of course, Firefox 3.