Mozilla project, it’s very open, everyone gets a say. If you are a developer, you
get to vote on whether or not a feature gets implemented. Then we come along
and say, “We’re making a product for mom and dad. You still have a voice here,
but some of the features that you think we should add may not be the ones that
they want to use. So you have to take our word for it that, even though 500 of
you want something right now, you may actually be in the minority of a much
larger group that we’re pursuing that’s going to be silent during this phase of
development.”
It’s hard to convince 500 flesh-and-blood developers that their pet feature
may not be desirable to 500 million imaginary users, especially when you have
no hard evidence to back it up. In some ways, I’m glad it’s just the two of us
again on Parakey. We can work very fast and there are no politics.
Blake Ross 399
Livingston: So in open source projects, you have to listen to the opinions of
other developers.
Ross: Sure, they’re the ones building the product. We just have to be wary of
our inner geek voices and make sure we’re considering the needs of the world
at large. I don’t think Mozilla did that, and the project stagnated at a few million
users.
Livingston: Do you think Firefox has reached the mainstream because it is
better?
Ross: There are a million different reasons. Many people think it’s easier.
Others were just sort of weaned onto it when their children put it on their
computers.
Of course, we’ve also done plenty of legwork to reach the mainstream. It’s
all word-of-mouth marketing. We have a site called Spread Firefox that Asa
Dotzler and I started in 2004 when we launched Firefox. It’s basically a way to
leverage the talents of people who are not coders. We said, “Instead of just
being developer-only, like most open source projects, how do we leverage college
students and Toastmasters and people who knit—just every kind of talent
you have and every organization you’re a part of. How do we match you up with
other people in your region and give you tools to spread Firefox?” That was a
huge success. We’ve had over 250,000 people sign up.
We also did an ad in the New York Times. Ten thousand people donated
between $10 and $30 each to buy two full-page facing ads in the New York
Times when Firefox launched. Of course, that’s a couple hundred thousand
dollars, but we didn’t have a marketing budget. That was all communityfunded,
which is pretty unusual for any software project, let alone an open
source project.

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