Short clip: Mozilla sets a vision and steps back

Dan Farber: You have a very challenging role as the CTO of a company that is open source. In fact, 40 percent of the code, I understand, comes from the outside and not your own staff people. So, how do you manage when you have thousands of contributors? Brendan Eich: Well, it is sort of like an Amish barn raising. We can't compel anybody in that volunteer cohort to do what they don't want to do. So, the idea is to set a vision, steer course, and let people decide at the finer levels of barn raising what wall goes where, what door goes where. And that's what I do, I delegate a lot and that's how open source really works. It is not a matter of me being the master controller. Dan Farber: Well, if there is no master controller, or someone not in charge, how does anything ever get done? Are you all just sitting around talking about, should the wall go here? Should it go there? Now, I know you've made a lot of progress because, you know Firefox 3 came out, Firefox 3.1 is on its way. So, there must be something more to it? Brendan Eich: There is. There is a basic floor plan. Barns all look-a-like, browsers still look-a-like, even ten years ago, but we've moved the needle forward with Firefox and there is competition. So, we are doing things like private browsing, we are making tabbed browsing work better, we are increasing privacy features, and we're increasing performance certainly.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====