Saturday, April 25, 1998 at Pacific

Angus Davis on Open Minds

From Angus Davis, angus@netscape.com, in response to Keep Your Eye On The Prize.

Angus Davis on Open Minds

Throughout February and March, I tried to envision what our world would look like after 3/31, the date we released source. At first, I pictured a community of C/C++ hackers taking time off from Perl, Apache and other projects to lend Mozilla a helping hand.

But it wasn't long before I realized that our new model of open development wouldn't just be about freely available open source code. It would be about open minds. With each passing day leading up to 3/31, I saw the company come alive with enthusiasm and passion for this concept. Then I got to see the Net turn it into an even more exciting reality.

On April 2, I noticed a very typical post in the Mozilla.Org User Interface discussion forum by Taylor at Hotwired: "What does everyone think of moving the Aurora buttons to the UI up top with everything else and not down the side?"

There were many responses, and discussion ensued among the active community of Netscape engineers, Net-based engineers, and people who just wanted an open mind to listen to their ideas. This content developer was but one of literally thousands of people, all of them sharing their ideas and getting caught up in something we all know is bigger than any single one of us: open development of Mozilla.

When I come into work every morning excited about what's going on inside Mozilla.Org, it's not just because there's a million lines of source code out on the Net. It's also because I know the entire development process has been opened, and that open minds will let Mozilla feed not just from the brilliant C++ hackers in our world, but from all the brilliant folks that have so many different types of contributions to make.

I encourage your readers to find others and share their ideas among our growing Mozilla.Org community.

http://www.mozilla.org/community.html

Together we'll accomplish so much, by keeping our eyes on that critical prize: open minds. Thanks,

Angus Davis
Technology Group
Netscape Communications

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