The Economist on Mitchell Baker

Sara Chan writes "The Economist has a story about a trapeze artist who, in her spare time, is the Chief Lizard Wrangler at a non-profit. You perhaps know her as Mitchell Baker, leader of Firefox." From the article: "Ms Baker gradually found herself the leader of this project. Perhaps this is because she is a somewhat unusual member of the Netscape diaspora. For a start, she is a woman in a community populated, as one (male) colleague puts it, by geeky males with 'spare time and no social life'. Ms Baker herself has never even written code. She studied Chinese at Berkeley, and then became a lawyer--her role at the old Netscape was in software licensing. On all technical matters, she defers to Brendan Eich, her chief geek."

Comments

Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[headkase]

I think she's proven as a decision maker and project manager although.

Re:GOD DAMN SHE'S UGLY

[tobiasly]

@ AC and Erebus: please post pictures of your handsome selves for comparison.

Re:GOD DAMN SHE'S UGLY

[sammy baby]

Jesus. How many male geeks are there that look like shit. Why you would even bother posting something as insidiously stupid as "God damn she's ugly" is beyond me. You give fire to people who say our industry is sexist. Give the feminazis amunition and they will use it. Moron.

I'm not sure which is sadder: the troll saying that she's ugly, or the rebuke of the troll in which the word "feminazi" is used unironically.

Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[ajnsue]

That is the best thing I have heard in a long time. A person who is not slick or commercial - becoming an effective leader of a succesful project. Makes you think that competency had something to do with her accomplishments rather that self-marketing.
This and the sentencing of Ebbers and other CEO's makes me think that maybe the Earth is slowly being returned to its correct ethical axis

Re:Never written any code

[theodicey]

Thanks for filing Mozilla bugs, but no need to rant. You've made a lot of wrong assumptions and assertions.

David Baron is, in fact, writing enormous amounts of code. He is close to being finished with rewriting the entire reflow system of Gecko (= progressive page loading).

Mozilla Foundation is no longer developing future versions of the (1.7) suite. A different team of developers has taken it over, and renamed it SeaMonkey. So complaining about their inability to fix a Suite-only problem is fairly pointless. If it's a problem with the Core (shared between Firefox and Suite) then reproduce it in firefox and let Mozilla know. Otherwise, get in touch with the Seamonkey developers by email or IRC or whatever, it's not hard.

And if you have a problem with your bug being auto-resolved, just go ahead and reopen it again. The auto-resolver was supposed to clear up rotten bugs that weren't real or were fixed by other code changes, not actual replicable bugs.

Friday is troll day!

[mspohr]

Let's see... The Economist posts a complimentary article on a woman who is heading the Mozilla org saying nice things about what she has done to help revive competition in the browser world.

So far we have...

- she's ugly

- she's socially inept

- she's a lawyer

- she has a bad hair cut

- she's obviously "not a leader"

- she's not a geek (this was posted as a bad thing)

- she doesn't care about the code

- she only cares about marketing

- Mozilla never fixed my pet bug (several times).

- the software crashes on me every day

Back to your basements, little boys, or your mother will spank you.