Looking Inside Mozilla

On Friday, we looked at how Cisco was doing a great job of using their blog to talk about their side of a lawsuit. It’s amazing enough to see lawyers talking in real-time about a suit in progress, but it’s even better when an organization is open enough to have their President talk about the details of business.

But that kind of openness is what you’d expect from Mitchell Baker, President of the Mozilla Corporation and director for the Mozilla Foundation. Her post a few weeks ago offers a look at the organization’s finances that’s as open as Mozilla’s beloved Firefox and Thunderbird software.

The introduction alone is succinct, eloquent, and compelling:

Mozilla is a global community dedicated to improving the Internet experience for people everywhere. We do this by building great software - such as the Mozilla Firefox web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird mail client - that helps people interact with the Internet. We build great software by building communities. Our software is “open source software.” The source code is available to everyone; as a result people are able to work together and we all share the results of the combined efforts. The Mozilla project has been building software and communities since 1998. The Mozilla Foundation recently completed its financial audit and filed its tax returns for 2005. The tax returns should appear on Guidestar shortly, and in any case these materials are available directly from the Foundation. Because the steady revenue stream is so important to our long term sustainability I’ll give an overview here.

We’re thrilled that so many members of the Mozilla team use Six Apart platforms like Movable Type to help tell their stories to the world. (And of course, many of us here at Six Apart use Firefox, which is one of our preferred browsers for all of our services.) We’ve also tried to help out in a few different ways, ranging from contributing patches to Firefox or by designing to web standards when we make our applications.

But the kind of success that Mozilla has had doesn’t happen without an extraordinary community, and exceptional posts like Mitchell’s show how blogs can be a key part of growing a supportive, successful community.