
Mitchell Baker Named CEO of Mozilla - cpeterso
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/04/08/mitchell-baker-named-ceo-of-mozilla/
======
wodenokoto
If that name rings familiar it is because Mitchel has been the chief lizard
wrangler at the Mozilla foundation since forever.

I think they stopped with the wrangler title and changed it to chair woman
though.

She now sits as the head of both the foundation and the corporation.

~~~
kbrosnan
Mark Surman is the Executive Director (CEO)[1] of the Mozilla Foundation.

[1] - An executive director is a chief executive officer (CEO) or managing
director of an organization, company, or corporation. The title is widely used
in North American non-profit organizations, though many United States
nonprofits have adopted the title president or CEO.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_director](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_director)

------
TheDesolate0
Mozilla is quite dead as a company, sadly.

And I really LOVE using Firefox...when it works.

But I extra especially HATE building FF from source. I'll take chromium any
day for that.

~~~
mintplant
Uh, really? In my experience Chromium takes far longer than Firefox to build,
especially from scratch. Not to mention all the steps and bespoke repo-
management tools involved in just checking out the code and bringing up a
working build environment.

What problems did you run into building Firefox?

------
hutzlibu
Does anyone can tell anything positive about her?

I am not saying there isn't any, I don't know her. My limited knowledge about
her, is that while she was chairwomen and interim ceo, Firefox marketshare
dropped a lot, while her compensation went up a lot - and it seems she was
responsible for firing 70 people from the mozilla workforce, while she never
wrote any line of code of firefox.

[https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/13394-mozilla...](https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/13394-mozilla-
layoffs.html)

So from my limited understanding as an outsider: she does not really seem the
best fit, for the job.

~~~
wodenokoto
She created the foundation and has had a leading role in it since forever.

She’s not someone who came in left field as an interim and started firing
people left and right.

I’m not sure why you think a ceo should also be a programmer.

~~~
mjw1007
I think a programmer might well do a better job than a lawyer.

Some years ago, Mozilla decided to relaunch their browser under the name
"Firebird". That was a poor choice of name, because there was already a free-
software database using it.

There was a kerfuffle about it for some time before Mozilla switched to the
(much better) name "Firefox".

During that period, the Mozilla lawyer running the show (one Mitchell Baker)
was insistent that there was no reason to change because their legal advice
was that they weren't infringing on any trademarks.

A programmer might have realised earlier that trademark law isn't the only
relevant consideration in a situation like this (consider, for example, what
`apt-get install firebird` is going to do).

~~~
petercooper
You can go back a bit further too as Firefox was called Phoenix before being
called Firebird and Phoenix Technologies was not happy:
[http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=83507](http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=83507)

------
bobajeff
Seems to me like every year there's a new mozilla CEO.

~~~
aswan
Not sure why you have that impression. Chris Beard, the previous CEO served
from 2014 until December.

------
tpmx
I guess some people tactically flagged the post, it's 3-4 pages from the front
page now.

