O'Reilly Network: Mozilla Interview: Brendan Eich and Mitchell Baker | Linux Today

O’Reilly Network: Mozilla Interview: Brendan Eich and Mitchell Baker

Written By
Web Webster
Web Webster
Mar 15, 2000

[ Thanks to S.Ramaswamy for this link.
]

“Remember the dark days of the Mozilla project about a year ago?
America Online had acquired Netscape, and many people were
predicting that AOL, with its very minimal interest in the Open
Source community, would let the project wither and die. Soon after,
one of the project’s leaders, Jamie Zawinski, left the team with a
damning indictment online, expressing his severe dissatisfaction
with an invasion of suits and a project that seemed to be going
nowhere.”

“But Mozilla’s star is rising again. Milestone 14 will
probably be the last alpha before a beta release suitable for the
masses to begin playing with. But there are other reasons for
renewed interest. One is XUL, the Extensible User-Interface
Language that builds user interfaces in standards-compliant web
languages. Another is that the project is something of a poster
child for the Open Source movement.
More people have a vested
interest in its success than those who are actively debugging the
browser.”

“We recently talked with Mitchell Baker, the self-described
‘manager, problem arbitrator, and speaker to suits,’ and Brendan
Eich, JavaScript creator and the main architect of Mozilla, about
the browser, its place in the open source movement, and XUL. We
started by asking when they hoped to have a beta out for end
users.”

Complete
Story

Web Webster

Web Webster

Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.

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