Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

via John's blog, I've now read several takes (including his) on the "Mozilla IPO" talk that's swirling around today. I've held off on posting most of the day while I tried to wrap my brain around this and how I'd like to think and talk about it -- what's the appropriate frame for this discussion.

(I've been with Mozilla since late 1998, first as a volunteer and full-time for the last 7+ years and something that's always bothered me is that so many public discussions that could be really productive and valuable for our community and our users get launched by people who don't really understand what Mozilla is about and so they frame the discussion in ways that more often than not lead to mostly unproductive discussion. Today's IPO talk seems to be a great example of this.)

All too often, people evaluate Mozilla, and other organizations, in terms of financial worth and opportunities to grow that worth. That is, a company's value is commonly so deeply entangled with its finances that in most media coverage, the financial situation becomes an easy proxy for describing the value of that company. That's sometimes a reasonable way to track things -- especially without having to think too deeply about the company and what it's actually doing. This is a pretty common frame for discussion of businesses in the US where so much of the media coverage is driven by and provided for investors, investors who often don't really care so much about what a company does as what a company can do for their portfolio.

But that's not always the right frame and it's definitely not the right one when thinking about Mozilla. Sure, Mozilla's financial health is an important piece of the pie. But in our case, using financials as a proxy for discussing the worth or the value of Mozilla is such a narrow frame as to be almost worthless. (Not that this has stopped people over the last few years.)

There are a couple of different frames I'd like to introduce that I think will help us talk about Mozilla and finances more openly, more honestly, and hopefully more productively. Now, these are just my personal opinions, but still think they're worth sharing.

The first re-frame is necessary because Mozilla's worth is simply not measurable in dollars. Mozilla's worth is much more inter-connected and entangled with its ability to benefit the Internet-using public (by creating public goods like Firefox, Thunderbird, and an Open and participatory Web,) than it is connected with it's ability to generate financial wealth. Therefor, our value should be measured as the extent we're able to create these public-benefiting goods. It's that simple. There are of course questions about how much and how fast, but the real value ought to be measured in the change we're able to produce, and not the tools (like cash) that we use to produce those changes. A perfect example here is the value that the Mozilla community provides. It's simply immeasurable (and, importantly, something that the entrenched forces cannot replicate.) We're able to drive change on the Internet to the extent we are because we have thousands of brilliant and passionate people writing code, testing our products, marketing Firefox, providing Firefox user support, evangelizing to developers, and more. That's our big lever right now, not cash, for dislodging stagnant behemoths that have until recently dominated most of the Internet.

The second re-framing is important because, it's completely reasonable, and important to talk about Mozilla's ability to benefit the public as being limited by Mozilla's financial situation. But, if we want to talk about things like IPOs, the let's talk about them as they relate to providing Mozilla the financial wherewithall to accomplish more of it's public-benefit mission. Yes, let's talk about money and let's not restrict our discussion to what Mozilla is doing and earning today. However, while it may be interesting to speculate what Mozilla could do with $1 billion dollars, and I'm all for thinking big, it seems to me that a better approach would be to discuss what Mozilla could be doing that it cannot do now because of a lack of financial resources. If we can come up with a set of activities, processes, or products that would be clear mission drivers and that we cannot do that now because of a lack of resources, then we should talk about what resources we need and the various ways we might get them. In discussions framed like that, I'm all for talking about the upsides and downsides all of the tools Mozilla might use, even an improbable one like an IPO.

Finally, I want to say something about community. There's speculation around the blogs that "the Mozilla community" wouldn't be happy or might even revolt if Mozilla were to have an IPO. While I'm quite sure that there's no IPO in Mozilla's future, I think that characterizing of the community's reaction is completely wrong and really just a result of the problematic framing of the discussion. I'd certainly react differently to the two questions, "What more should Mozilla be doing and how can Mozilla gather the resources to make that happen?" and "What do you think about the Mozilla Foundation raising $1B dollars in an IPO?" People who support Mozilla, paid and volunteer, have rallied behind Mozilla's mission to make the Internet better for people all over the world. Let's talk about how we can do more of that and how we can do it more effectively. Then let's talk about resources and the means to get those resources. I don't think there are many people in Mozilla's community who wouldn't be happy having those discussions.