More Awesome Than Money

by Jim Dwyer

  Later, in November 1998, Netscape was bought by AOL, one of the curated gardens whose walls had been rendered moot by the emergence of the browser. Even in Netscape’s diminished state, the initial deal, based on stock values, was $4.2 billion. It made no sense. Four months later, when the sale closed, the stock prices made it worth $10 billion. Helium was keeping Netscape aloft. Its prime assets were in the hands of what was then known as the Mozilla Organization, the skunkworks project that was developing the browser. The 1s and 0s of the code by then were openly available on the Internet for anyone to see and fiddle with.

  Mitchell Baker had been with Netscape nearly from the outset, and was sent to oversee the Mozilla project. She wrote the license agreement that spelled out the terms of the barter between those who contributed elements of code and the company that was assembling the intellectual property of multiple intellects. Declining to name herself chief executive officer, she chose the title “Chief Lizard Wrangler.”

  The contributions from the open-source community were brilliant, banal, and all points in between. The disputes over the finer points veered toward the deranged, flaming wars on chat sessions. Jamie Zawinski, the same developer who came up with the name Mozilla, characterized the process as “mass nonconsensual psychiatric care.” The level of vitriol online—not just the list-serve discussions for Mozilla—was so profound that Mike Godwin, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies. It held that “as an online discussion grows long, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches One.”

  In 2001, AOL merged with Time Warner, the publishing and entertainment conglomerate; by August, the new company had started layoffs of Netscape employees working on the Mozilla Organization project. Microsoft had won. Mozilla produced a single, crummy browser used by virtually no one anymore. But within Mozilla, a dissident project, distinct from the original skunkworks, quietly started to take shape. It, too, was a browser, but different from what the world had already seen. The internal name was Firefox.

  Two years later, by the summer of 2003, AOL decided that it was going to jettison the remnants of Mozilla. Yet Mitchell Baker, laid off in August 2001, was still there. Even though she had not been paid by the company in two years, she had been running the dissident project. How had that happened?

  On the day she was fired, it turned out, Baker had been on her way to a meeting of a foundation that was promoting the use of open-source programming and was run by Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus. Kapor had long thought that a Microsoft monopoly on access to the Internet was a poor state of affairs. But he knew, too, from his own work that Microsoft’s dominance had created an investment vacuum, with venture capitalists tremulous about funding inventive people trying to gain ground in any of the areas controlled by a monolith. Open-source development, Kapor reckoned, might be a way around that vacuum. The intriguing lesson of Linux had shown it was possible. So he started the Open Source Applications Foundation to develop a few pet projects.

  Mitchell Baker, who had never met him, arrived at the foundation meeting in 2001 fresh from being fired.

  “What are you going to do next?” Kapor asked.

  “I’m going to keep going back,” Baker said.

  Kapor put her on the payroll of his foundation to subsidize her. Baker simply kept showing up at the Mozilla Organization as the volunteer Chief Lizard Wrangler. Somehow, this state of affairs continued for two years. In 2003, Baker told Kapor that Firefox was actually making good progress, but it was clear AOL was not going to sustain it. There was no reason for a Mozilla–Netscape–AOL–Time Warner.

  Kapor, an éminence grise of Silicon Valley, suggested to senior people at AOL that the company should avoid the embarrassment of being seen putting the splinters of Netscape out with the trash. It could do this by setting up a Mozilla foundation to take over the development of the browser. This idea took hold at AOL, which agreed to do that and stake the new foundation to about $1 million, scarcely a rounding error on the books of the new corporate behemoth. Kapor goosed them, and it went to $2 million. Kapor also donated several hundred thousand dollars of his own money.

  The Mozilla Foundation was created. Jettisoned from its corporate Frankensteins, lost to the sight of the venture capital markets, the Mozilla project called Firefox continued its ridiculous journey. In the saga of how the browser has evolved in the service of humanity, the free fall of Netscape, spectacular as it was, is not the most important part. The escape capsule bearing Firefox was far more significant.

  —

  At the time the Mozilla Foundation was created in 2003, Mitchell Baker was forty-four, and a strikingly egoless personality. A lawyer and a linguist, she possessed an emotional economy that kept her from burning up resources in needless conflict. After seeing a trapeze performance in a park where she’d brought her son, she decided to give it a try. She spent weeks smothering her fears, then began lessons. At an age when most people have gotten very attached to standing on firm ground, she was flying three times a week.

  Mozilla existed in a crevice of Silicon Valley that she found comfortable, outside the demands of the normal investment markets, but able to move quickly and nimbly, like the best start-ups. It was obvious that there was a need for what they were doing. The world’s dominant browser, Internet Explorer 6, was plagued with infernal pop-up ads. Worse, a tool within its code could turn Explorer into a vector for viruses. All in all, it was widely and deservedly hated. With a de facto monopoly, Microsoft had little incentive from the market to improve it, and, in fact, had essentially disbanded its development and sent the programmers off to different projects. Because the Explorer code was closed, people from outside the company could not look at it and identify the problems. They could only experience them. And yet, as Baker told Wired magazine: “There was no interest in the venture capital world in funding another browser. Netscape had died trying to fight Microsoft. Who would ever try and compete in that space, especially after the browser had been done away with as a separate product and combined with the operating system? So in that setting, many of us were eager to interact with the web but the only available tool for doing so was low-quality, poor-performing, and a security risk.”

  Mozilla, the foundation and its gestational-stage browser, needed a new home. Baker sublet office space in Mountain View from a tech company run by a Netscape alumnus whose business was contracting after the tech bubble sputtered. As necessary as another browser was, though, no one was paying much mind to the Netscape/Mozilla refugees who fought on, seeming like Japanese soldiers on remote Pacific islands after the end of World War II, unaware that their cause was long lost or unwilling to accept that reality.

  “The next big thing,” said John Lilly, who became a Mozilla executive much later, “is always beneath contempt.”

  The invulnerability of the incumbent big thing was not, it turned out, a permanent condition. In September 2003, the federal government created the Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a task force on cyber-security issues. In a series of communiqués over the next year, the Emergency Readiness group declared that Internet Explorer was dangerous because a portion of the code it used, called active X scripts, was especially vulnerable to exploitation. A hacker could secretly take over a computer, infect it, send millions of spam e-mails, break into bank accounts.

  This was bewildering news: Internet Explorer had 95 percent or more of the browser market. What could the average person sitting at a computer do? Steer clear of Internet Explorer, the feds said.

  “It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites,” the advisory said. But even if a different browser was used, the danger continued as long as Explorer was part of the operating system.

  At the same time that these dire findings were coming to light, the early versions of the Mozilla browser, Firefox, were getting ra
ves from test-drivers. It was lean and fast, offered tabs in the browser—then unknown, but which have since become a universal feature—and could stomp out the pop-up ads that were both irritating and potentially disruptive to the computer. The browser was built so that developers could contribute “add-ons”—handy features for any kind of task, from managing pictures to sending out an alarm. The Mozilla staff of fourteen—the lead engineer, Ben Goodger, was twenty-four—oversaw contributions from volunteer developers around the world who were making a browser that served the interests of the users.

  As the Firefox digital barn raising neared its end, there were calls to celebrate the moment publicly. Mitchell Baker was skeptical, perhaps from the same emotional tropism for reticence that, over the years, kept one of the most powerful forces in technology also one of its least known. But the quirk of a single person did not stop the community of quirky people who had created Firefox. They would put out an ad. Fine, Baker said, just don’t expect us to pay for it.

  Hardly anyone involved had experience putting together a newspaper ad. Chris Messina, a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon working as a volunteer designer for Mozilla, agreed to take on the job. Word spread among the legion of volunteers: anyone who pitched in would be named in the ad. They needed only $20,000. Within ten days, they had pulled in $200,000, much of it in $5 and $10 contributions.

  Like Diaspora’s startling $200,000 bounty in 2010, the Mozilla cup also ran over, almost to the identical dollar, in 2004.

  Instead of a single page in the Wall Street Journal, they would take out a two-page spread in the New York Times. One page would feature the Firefox logo and a message about the new browser. The other would display a list of every one of the thousands of donors. Messina crashed four or five computers trying to render the ad for print. It took consultations with Adobe, the maker of the page-making software, to figure out how to get that much type into such a small space. The ad ran on December 16, 2004. Firefox had arrived.

  “It was a lightning bolt to the world. We could build something usable,” Messina said. “This was the canonical fuck-you to Microsoft.”

  Launch parties were being held on six continents. Then an e-mail arrived at headquarters from a man name Ethan Dicks, whose signature automatically included the weather in his area. It was -66°F, with a windchill of -101.9°F, at his station in the South Pole. So a launch party was held there, too: Mozilla Antarctica made the seventh continent, completing the global set.

  Tech writers praised the speed of Firefox, its tabbed pages, the vanquishing of the pop-up plague, the more secure environment. It also had the whiff of rebellion. In the first month of its release, Firefox was downloaded 10 million times. Eben Moglen was fond of saying that when it came to free software, only one copy was needed. “We scale,” he said.

  It was a daring moment. “Open source is relatively well-known and understood today,” Baker said in 2010. “That wasn’t the case when we started. This is a pretty radical way of doing things. It means there is nothing secret about our product. You can take and use and reuse and copy the idea, any piece of what we do.” (In time, Google began to work that way, a move that delighted Baker.)

  People made Firefox better because they wanted to. A Mongolian expatriate living in Hamburg, Germany, translated the code into Khalkha Mongolian so that he could use Firefox to keep in touch with people at home. Volunteers translated it into sixty other languages, a global girdle stitched only with human capital.

  A feature devised by a man in the Middle East also quickly became popular: a privacy setting. When it was turned on, no record was left on the computer of the websites visited. Makers of other browsers, including Internet Explore, Safari, and Chrome, all eventually developed versions of it. The privacy setting became known throughout Silicon Valley as “porn mode,” even though the browser makers had suggested that users of the setting could have entirely wholesome purposes for furtivieness, such as shopping for surprise presents for family members. But a study by researchers at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities found that far more time was spent by private browsers on what it called “adult” sites than on, say, gift-shopping sites.

  Snickering aside, the mode had not been devised as a way of covering the tracks of porn gawkers. John Lilly said the Firefox volunteer who had created the privacy setting lived in Teheran and was concerned that if his computer was seized by the authorities, they would have a record not of any interest in smut sites but in political ones, which would be far more transgressive.

  Even a free platform, supported by the sweat equity of thousands of people, costs money to build, improve, refine. The going-away money that AOL had given Mozilla would not last long, and Lilly, brought into the project by Mitch Kapor, made financial sustainability his mission. The solution emerged from a box at the top of the browser screen. It turned out that the search companies were willing to pay to be listed there. To capture that money, the foundation set up the Mozilla Corporation, a for-profit subsidiary that pays taxes and uses its proceeds to support the foundation’s work. Before long, a burgeoning company called Google was paying Mozilla Corp. about $100 million a year to make a Google query box the default for searching from Firefox browser pages; other search engines were listed below it in the same drop-down box.

  In one year, a not-for-profit foundation whose sole asset was a browser that had been created by volunteers would realize more revenue than Netscape, its for-profit ancestor once valued at $10 billion, had in its entire existence. By 2012, Firefox’s annual revenue had climbed to nearly $300 million.

  The net proceeds went into the foundation to continue developing new releases of Firefox, and advancing its mission “to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet.” The Mozilla manifesto declared the Internet to be a “global public resource,” and said the foundation was committed to protecting the public benefits.

  When Firefox was launched in 2004, Rafi, the youngest of the Diaspora guys, had not yet started high school. The web had changed every day since then. What had been, in essence, millions of connected libraries was transformed into millions of theaters where every man, woman, and child could perform, a collaborative space of infinite flexibility for sharing video, music, data streams, multimedia graphics—and also to run applications. But during the early years of the twenty-first century, the absence of standards left that space completely up for grabs: companies created proprietary systems where, for instance, they could share video, but no one else could. Baker and Mozilla were potent forces in driving for a new open-source web language, HTML5, along with standards that baked in the interactive features. Before the decade was out, the new language became the foundation of the web. Faster than anyone could calculate, Baker realized, it expanded the rewards and the dangers of being connected to the web.

  “The hidden cost of admission is this data about ourselves that we give up, and it’s painless at the moment you give it up,” Baker said.

  “Some people say, ‘I don’t care, it’s never going to be painful for me—I don’t care if everybody knows all about me or if they’re monitoring, I like the highly personalized ads. You know where I am at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, because you’re a website or you’re tracking me? That’s okay with me.’ Then there are some people who are truly appalled by that.”

  Firefox offered users ad-blocking mechanisms and a tool called Lightbeam, allowing them to display in mesmerizing detail the tracking bugs active on a computer. “We’re trying to build a certain kind of Internet where each human being is sovereign regarding their technology,” Baker said.

  Inevitably, the Diaspora team would end up at the Mozilla offices that summer. Aza Raskin, the twenty-six-year-old creative lead at Firefox, was eager for their visit. “We are the open-source organization most aligned with them,” he said.

  —

  At the Mozilla podium, Max clicked through slides to illustrate his talk. “People all
over the world were talking about a project that we were doing in a closet at NYU. We actually hit our goal in ten days.”

  Seated in the front row, Rafi winced. He knew what was coming next. Max continued: “Then Wednesday, May 12, the day I graduated from college. I was sitting in Yankee Stadium in the rain. I started to get texts.”

  Rafi didn’t want to hear the creation saga yet again. It was something that happened to them, not anything they had done. Plus it was already August, and they were due to release their code in September. They were working all hours to hit that. Going back over the events of the spring, dazzling as they were, would not help them get the thing done.

  Still, it was important to lay out how modest their plans had been, especially now that they were taking a different turn. They had initially thought, Max said, “we’re going to make some software that other people are going to hack on.”

  Instead of two hundred contributions from friends and family members, the donations had come from more than six thousand people, most of them not members of the tribe of techno nerds. “A lot of normal people,” Max said. “We’re getting e-mails, ‘When can I sign up?’ ‘When can I use Diaspora?’”

  They were rescaling their ambitions. Diaspora would be available beyond the cloistered world of free-software developers. “We want to make something for everybody, for the average user,” Max said. “Something that Firefox has done an amazing job at, really reaching an average user, someone who is not technical, and making them understand why it is the superior browser. People need that. Not just hackers.”

  This was a drastic shift in their ambition, but one that would be little appreciated by the public, which simply expected that they would be able to sign on and sign up.

  Their goal was to build micronetworks that mirrored those in real life. “Public networks facilitate weak ties; we want to focus on building stronger ties,” Max said. “Privacy is not about not sharing. It’s about control. It’s to enable sharing.”