# Meeting Mitchell Baker

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2005-05-13T22:00:03Z



I don't think I've written a "yay I just met so-and-so" post in awhile, but today I met Mitchell Baker the president of the Mozilla Foundation. I'm a huge fan of Firefox and amazed by the Spread Firefox campaign. It's fun when someone turns out to be what you thought/hoped they would be like and it was this way with Mitchell. She has the excitement and the look of someone who is doing something great and proving many people wrong. People said browsers were dead, people said open source software couldn't be popular with average users. At 8:58 AM PST April 29, 2005, Firefox was downloaded 50,000,000 times. I am really interested in what has enabled Firefox to be so successful both as an open source project and as a grassroots campaign for adoption. I'm also interested as to why Firefox hasn't taken off as strongly in the Japanese public and what we might do to get it going in Japan.

It was also interesting talking to her about software licenses. I am trying to learn everything I can about the licenses for my role with OSI and I am finding that the narratives around the licenses are as important as the technical details of the licenses themselves. Mitchell is the author of the Mozilla Public License.

Mitchell spends time at the OSAF offices where Creative Commons is also currently based so I hope I'll get a chance to see her and learn more from her. In the meantime, I'll start reading  Mitchell's blog.

UPDATE: IBM backs Firefox in-houseTechnorati Tags: Firefox, open_source, OSI





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Software