Mitchell Baker Quotes

In true open source development, there's lots of visibility all the way through the development process.

The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.

The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.

In open-source in general, the power lies in connecting the author of the software directly to users, eliminating the middleman.

One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there's nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.

There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.

The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity.

We have a rule that if you check in code, you have to maintain it. So I mostly code on the side. I don't check in code anymore.

I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.

I work on OpenBSD fulltime, as the project leader. I set some directions, increase communication between the developers, and try to be involved in nearly every aspect of the base system.

Companies have been trying to figure out what it is that makes open source work.

I personally think of Linux development as being pretty non-localized, and I work with all the people entirely over e-mail - even if they happen to be working in the Portland area.

Huge open source organizations like Red Hat and Mozilla manage the collaboration of hundreds of people who don't know one another and have spent no time hanging around the water cooler.

When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.

There are two main methodologies of open source development. There's the Apache model, which is design by committee - great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That's what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.

I started Linux because I wanted to see it on the desktop... I do hope that the desktop people would try to work together ... and work more on the technology than trying to make the login screen look really nice.

The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.

The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don't know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.

Mozilla has one foot in the Valley, Silicon Valley product technology, and partly one foot in the social enterprise space.

In open source, we feel strongly that to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved.

After releasing Mono 1.0, we started work on a new edition of Mono that will be released later in the year.

People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born.

What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.