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Firefox Maker Battles to Save the Internet -- and itself

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http://www.technologyreview.com/featured...nd-itself/

EXCERPT: Mozilla and its open-source projects have been crucial to Web security and other key aspects of the Internet. In Silicon Valley, most pioneers pursue big ideas and giant personal fortunes with equal zeal. Then there’s Mozilla, an innovation dynamo that refuses to get rich.

More than 500 million people worldwide use Mozilla products. The company’s Firefox Internet browser is the top choice in countries ranging from Germany to Indonesia. But the company has no venture capital backing, no stock options, no publicly traded shares. It hardly ever patents its breakthroughs. Instead, Mozilla has a business model that’s as open and sprawling as the World Wide Web itself, where everything is free and in the public domain.

For a long time, it seemed as if Mozilla’s idealistic engineers understood the future better than anyone. By building the Firefox browser with open-source software, Mozilla made it easy for all kinds of people to cook up improvements that the whole world could use. Independent developers in dozens of countries pitched in, creating add-ons that speeded up downloads, blocked unwanted ads, and performed other useful services. Firefox rapidly became the browser in which state-of-the-art development took place–on shoestring budgets.

Suddenly, though, the Internet looks nightmarish to Mozilla. Most of the world now gets online on mobile devices, and about 96 percent of smartphones run on either the Apple iOS or Google Android operating systems. Both of these are tightly controlled worlds. Buy an iPhone, and you’ll almost certainly end up using Apple’s Web browser, Apple’s maps, and Apple’s speech recognition software. You will select your applications from an Apple-curated app store. Buy an Android phone, and you will be steered into a parallel world run by Team Google. The public-spirited, ad hoc approaches that defined Mozilla’s success in the Internet browser wars have now been marginalized. Developers don’t stay up late working on open-source platforms anymore; instead, they sweat over the details needed to win a spot in Apple’s and Google’s digital stores. Rival operating systems offered by BlackBerry and Microsoft Windows have largely fallen by the wayside as well.

“Many of the principles we associate with the Web–openness, decentralization and the ability of anyone to publish without asking permission from others–are at risk,” declared a lengthy blog post written in November 2014 by Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit vehicle that serves as the company’s ultimate owner.

No matter that users and software developers seem to be thriving in this more structured new milieu, with nearly one billion Apple iOS and Google Android smartphones being sold each year. From Baker’s perspective, “frankly, this direction for the Internet sucks.”

Baker’s antidote: Firefox OS, a totally different operating system for smartphones, built on the same collegial, open-source principles that make the Firefox browser such a success. Mozilla has entered this battle with financial resources less than one-hundredth those of Apple and Google. And the organization is even shorter on time: the incumbents have enjoyed nearly a decade’s head start in some crucial markets. Is it too late for a radical attempt to crack the mobile duopoly?...


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