Brendan Eich: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right, which of course 99% of people who could use the software are immediately out right away because they're not going to compile on their local machines. Of course, once you build the software and release it, you're getting people who don't know which end of the internet is which. They'd give you good feedback and there's a whole sort of layer of the onion from your lead users or your actual hackers who do know software up to let's say web savvy but less experienced folks, out to the average people who don't know the difference between a search engine and a browser. We started growing Mozilla even before Firefox in a way that I think kind of shamed and threatened Netscape, but Netscape was also getting these annual decapitations. By 2003, we learned through our IBM friends that there were going to be curtains from Netscape division. Through an enormous stroke of luck, Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus 1, 2, 3 and has his own experience with Microsoft's tricks, was friends with Ted Leonsis, one of the AOL executives. Ted is a very nice guy, not technical, owns the Capitals. They ran into each other at the very first D Conference, Walt Mossberg. Ted said, hey, Mitch I've got this thing—Mozilla—that I don't know what to do with. It turns out Mitch was doing something called the Open Source Applications Foundation. He had hired Mitchell Baker who had been fired under cover of a layoff, I'll say it, in 2000 by Netscape management because they didn't like Mozilla. It was a thorn in their side, maybe Mitchell was, Mitchell was expensive, so they had a layoff. Suddenly Mitchell was gone and I was on the phone saying, did you quit? She said no, this was not my choice, and yet the next week on the Mozilla community call, there was Mitchell doing the governance leadership [...] tech leadership. The Netscape management that tried to get rid of her were grinding their teeth at this point. They couldn't kill Mozilla, they couldn't decapitate it as Netscape division had its head taken off annually. When we learned AOL was going to shut down Netscape, Ted—to his credit—asked Mitch what to do and Mitch had hired Mitchell Baker, who had been the Mozilla manager for eight months into the founding up until she was laid off. That was just huge good fortune because Mitch then told Ted what to do. In spite of some sniping by a VP at AOL nobody liked—he really wanted to stick the knife in and then twist it—Ted did the right thing and gave us $2 million over two years to spin out the Mozilla project. I think Mitchell wanted to do it as a nonprofit. They thought there'd be some good basis for Mitch himself. I didn't want to do VC funding and didn't want to do a commercial thing. I just went along to try to keep the code alive. We knew what to do in 2003 (summer) because Firefox had already started in 2001 if you can believe it, but it became known as Phoenix by 2002. Firefox was completely rebuilt from the ground up, right?…

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