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The Economist on Mitchell Baker

Posted by Zonk on from the lizard-wrangler-and-fox-driver dept.

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."

2 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Amazingly socially unsophisticated. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is not a troll. And, I agree it is unfortunate. However, I saw Mitchell Baker being interviewed by Charlie Rose. She was amazingly socially unsophisticated. She said she had no technical knowledge, but is a lawyer. She gave the impression that she needs to be replaced by someone more capable.

    She gave such a poor account of herself that Charlie Rose was visibly embarrassed. That's the only time I've seen Charlie Rose embarrassed in the many years I've watched his interviews.

    Don't think you are being loyal to Mozilla by supporting someone who is so obviously not suited to be a leader.

  2. So many posts, so little thought by CodeShark · · Score: 3, Interesting
    About what the article actually points out. The fact is that the Firefox browser has been well guided, is a superb open source tool that forced M$ to begin investing in web-related innovation again.

    Other main fact is that I have not had one browser based attack succeed on my main computers (work or home), compared to the M$ fiascos that cause a significant amount of our company's IT budget to be consumed in "silly patchwork" fixes, and it doesn't matter to me what Ms. Baker looks like or how much code she has/hasn't written.

    What matters is that Firefox and Thunderbird have been well guided, to the extent that there needs to be enough profitibility in a related enterprise to defend both against corporate, copycat, or cracker type attacks.

    Sure, Mozilla is our pet lizard, but wouldn't you rather have a good chief lizard wrangler than nobody?

    --
    ...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...