Mozilla's Open Innovation and New Challenges

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"We don't have an idea of what the end goal is but...we feel we are successful if the Internet feels vibrant, fun, and exciting and still feel relevant to you as an individual. An oddity at Mozilla: our mission is to bring choice and innovation so having dominant market share is not a success condition by definition... so being the monopoly browser is not in the cards for us...but being able to shape the future of the Internet is."

-Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer, Mozilla Corporation in 2009.

"The Web standards Mozilla long advocated are now ascendant, though not without a lot of chaos as they’re developed. Yet Mozilla in a way faces more challenges now that many of its ideals have prevailed. That's because browsers are more competitive than ever--and the rising use of Safari and Chrome, along with IE’s starring role in Windows 8, mean browsers from commercial interests are waxing in influence."

-Stephen Shankland, Technology Editor at CNET News¹ in 2011.

In February 2012, US-based Mozilla Corporation (Mozilla), makers of the Firefox web browser, launched a new open source mobile platform called the Open Web Devices2 (OWD) in partnership with Spanish mobile network operator Telefónica Digital3 . Based on Mozilla's open-source based mobile Operating System (OS), Boot2Gecko4 (B2G) , the OWD platform would launch HTML5-based mobile devices with smartphone-like capabilities that could be built at low cost and sold at the price of a common feature phone. Mozilla announced that the device would be launched by the end of 2012 or the beginning of 2013. Experts said that the project, which was entirely open source, would help Mozilla gain market share in the rapidly growing smartphone industry.

According to Brendan Eich (Eich), CTO, Mozilla, "It has long been our mission to deliver advanced Web technologies that eliminate roadblocks for users and developers. We did it first with Firefox, and now we’re doing it again in creating the first Open Web Devices. By providing the missing links, Mozilla is now unlocking the power of the Web as the platform for creating and consuming rich content everywhere."

According to experts, Mozilla had launched the OWD platform as part of its philosophy to foster innovation on the Web, open up new opportunities for application developers, and promote open Web standards like HTML5. Since its inception, Mozilla had been a pioneer of open Web technologies as it created and promoted open standards that enabled innovation and advanced the Web as a platform for all. The organization's mission had always been to promote openness, innovation, and opportunity on the web and make it more people-centric. Mozilla provided Internet solutions and promoted open source⁵ innovation on the web. Rather than limiting innovation to within the organization and its employees, Mozilla's open source model proposed that a large community of individuals be involved in various activities related to product innovation.

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1] CNET News is a computing and technology news service focusing on tech product.
2] The Open Web Devices are built entirely using HTML5 and other web APIs running on top of a Linux kernel.
3] Telefónica Digital is a global business division of Telefónica, one of the world's leading integrated operators in the telecommunication sector, providing communication, information, and entertainment solutions. It is headquartered in London with regional centers in Silicon Valley, Sao Paolo, Spain, and Israel. As of March 2012, Telefónica's total number of customers was 309.4 million.
4] Launched in July 2011, Boot2Gecko (B2G) is Mozilla's open mobile operating system running on Gecko, the HTML rendering engine that was used in the Firefox Web browser.
5] Open source software refers to generally free programs that provide access not just to the executable program, but also to the source code. With an open source software product, the code is made available to anyone interested under several licenses unlike the proprietary software, wherein the company owns and controls all intellectual property. In an open source model, the proprietors place the software in the public domain and invite free/ libre and open source software (FLOSS) developers to volunteer their expertise and improve the source code.

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