 Anyways, thanks for having me here. It's kind of weird to be here on the stage at Fozdem. Certainly, it's a huge honor. But it's also something where I've watched from a distance for years, watching talks on video and that kind of stuff, watching a bunch of people who are way smarter than me come up here and talk, and certainly who have done way more than me to kind of build free software and build open source, and I've learned a lot from this. And so it's kind of a big, huge honor to be up here. And what I want to talk about today, when Phillip and others have kind of asked me what the subject would be, is really just a little bit about the future, and the future of free software and open source and beyond that. And, you know, really when I kind of sat down, you know, it's a funny thing when you're proposed titles for talks, you don't know really what you're going to talk about. When I sat down to think about it, really it was just, I want to talk about the things that I've been thinking through since starting at Mozilla the last little while. And, you know, I need to come out and say, I'm not a programmer, I'm not a coder, I'm kind of like an organizational nerd. I think about how foundations work and how all these kind of things fit together. And so, you know, this actually may end up being a bit of a boring talk for you, because it's the stuff I've been thinking through as I think through my kind of organizational nerd phase of starting up at Mozilla. So bear with me if it's a bit boring. And I want to just set up some context in terms of what that stuff is I've been thinking about. I spent a lot of time in the last few months thinking what is Mozilla for? And, you know, I probably came in a little bit with the assumption that a lot of people have is that Mozilla's there to build Firefox, or Mozilla's there to build SeaMonkey, or Mozilla's there to build Thunderbird or Bugzilla. But interestingly enough, when you go and you start as an executive director at a foundation, you go back and you read really boring things like the incorporation papers. So five years ago, when the Mozilla Foundation was set up, the mission statement was basically this, that Mozilla is there to guard the open nature of the internet. And it also says, and so this is actually basically a photocopy of the mission paragraph of Mozilla's incorporation papers. And it also says that Mozilla is there to build open source software that helps people have free access to the internet. And it also says Mozilla is there to promote innovation and give people technologies that they can reuse and make the internet better. But ultimately it comes down to helping guarding the open nature of the internet. And it's a pretty broad mission. And part of the job that we have is thinking through what that means. And how some of this came up is that Mozilla spent a bunch of time in the last three months figuring out what its goals are for the next two years. I now see that I'm being cut off on the edge a little bit. And so, you know, that was a good discussion. It came up with four goals. You know, some broad goals about promoting openness and participation on the internet. Obviously a continued focus on Firefox. A new focus on mobile, which is quite critical. And a continued focus on keeping people's data safe. And so, you know, that was an interesting discussion. Some of it was hard. Most of it was fairly straightforward. Some of it ties back to that broad goal. But, you know, I also started thinking if that's really the mission, guarding the open nature of the internet and doing that with other people, because certainly Mozilla can't do that alone and doesn't presuppose to do so, that's a long-term mission. It's a 50-year or 100-year mission. And certainly I think openness and participation will be a part of that mission for a long time to come. But I don't know whether building a web browser 50 years from now is what Mozilla needs to do or any of the other things. Hopefully the mobile space will be fixed. So, you know, those goals will change. So that's sort of stuff that I've been thinking a lot about. And it's really just the context for the talk I want to give. And the talk I want to give is kind of much broader about where's the future going, but also a little bit of where this group of people in particular have come from and what it means in terms of me thinking about that broader Mozilla mission. Actually, can you, let me just, I'll get it myself, get my water. I thought Simon was there. So, I want to make one point first in terms of going through this talk. Hopefully it's not a controversial point. Maybe it's a boring point that free and open source software have been a huge success story. And I want to talk a little bit about what I think that means or one of the things that that means. But then I want to dig into two questions. One is how far can free and open go? In particular, can the ideas that have brought us as far in software go beyond software? And if we can go beyond software, what's next? What immediately is ahead of us? So, let me get first into that point. So, I think we actually just had an interesting year behind us. If you think about the broader world, what happened in 2008, a bunch of things that you probably remember, like the Olympics, you may not have known as an international leader of the potato, but according to Wikipedia, it was. And it was a Spice Girls reunion tour last year. Did anybody here attend the Spice? No. Okay. There's also a really interesting year for free and open source software. I think a very successful year. Not that there haven't been successful years before, but three statistics of which I could pull many, many more are WordPress is running 32% of the top blogs on the web. And if you look at other free software that runs blogs, it's much bigger than that. It's well over 50%. Firefox passed 200 million users, and I get different reports all the time, but it sounds like it's sort of 230, 250 right now. So that's huge. And I actually think one of the biggest surprise successes of 2008 was about, I mean there's different numbers flowing around, four and a half million Linux netbooks. And that was a huge breakout in terms of people who hadn't thought about using free software, having access to a lot of flexibility and great software on Linux netbooks. And I guess the point about all those last three statistics is that those pieces of software, and when you look at Linux, all of the pieces that are rolled up inside of it are touching tens, small hundreds of millions of people. We're talking about free software being a mass consumer phenomena, something that is touching huge, huge numbers of people. And how it got to that place, obviously is a lot of hard work, but it's partly that there was a clear conceptual map that hundreds of thousands of people, small millions of people around the world can all turn to to figure out how they do this stuff, even if they disagree, even if they've got different things that they're trying to build. And the map is pretty clear that it's those four freedoms. And I guess the thing that is interesting when you look back at getting to that success and then when you look into the future, those started out as something about copyright, but they become something much more. They become something which is kind of like a design framework that helps people think about the values that they're putting into software that they build. It becomes, as it says on the screen, a bit of a map, and it's easy for lots of people to get to the same place if they've got a map. And what's interesting with the mass consumer success of those and many other free software products, it means that many millions more people have access to those freedoms. They may not use them, but it really is something that has reached out and touched huge numbers of people. And from my perspective, what's important about touching those huge numbers of people is that that's moved the market. It's moved the market in a way that other people who aren't building free software have to pay attention to fact that those values are built into mainstream products that people are using around the world. And I hope, and this is a little optimistic, it's moved the market to create a world that's a little bit more hackable. So products, even if people aren't using those freedoms in terms of actually hacking the code, are more bendable, configurable, and I think reflect the values of the people who built them, and then people are able to do things with their software that they weren't able to do before, and certainly that a lot of lockdown, commercial mentality people making software wouldn't have thought to let them do. And so I think that's a good thing. And the question, which should be pretty obvious, is who did this? Who got us to this point where there's a mass consumer phenomena of a more hackable world, or we have the seeds of that at least? You did. This is the group of people who built that. And if you think back nine years ago, or you think back even further, 25 years ago, it was pretty hard to imagine that a Microsoft monopoly and a web that wasn't clear if it was going to be open or closed would actually start to have some cracks put in them. And you guys put those cracks in that foundations and built those huge successes of free and open source software. So you should actually give yourselves a huge round of applause for that. And I don't know who Joseph is, but thank you for that picture. So you're credited on the side, but if you're here I'd love to meet you and thank you for that picture and buy you a beer. So that was when we were supposed to clap when it said celebrate. But let's go on to the first question. So the first question I wanted to ask is, how far can we take free and open? And I'm asking particularly about software, and I'm going to talk a little bit about what are the values that are in free and open source software mean for the web? So let's actually now step back a little bit in history. 2003, five years ago, not that far back in history. You may remember some of these things, although it's a little bit hard to remember that was when the first European Constitution was drafted. You probably didn't know it was the International Year of Fresh Squatter, probably a little bit more important than the Year of the Potato. And unless you're from Britain or one of its former colonies, you probably didn't know that the Cricket World Cup happened in 2003, but in fact, according to Wikipedia, it did. 2003 was also a year that the web was in danger. It was a year where the web was very different than what we can remember right now. So here's one reason the web was in danger. Here's market share statistics for Internet Explorer in July 28, 2003. So I don't know if people in the back can see these numbers, but they don't quite add up to 100%, which makes them a little suspect, but 97.34 for IE6, a bunch of other little stuff for IE5, and then little tiny bits for Mozilla Opera and Netscape. We were very clearly, and I don't think there's any dispute in this room, in a very different situation of monopoly on the web in 2003. And as recent events on this continent indicated, the monopoly is still having effects and is still a concern. And what are some of the things that monopoly was leading us to in terms of what the web would be? This is something that you probably haven't seen very much of for a while, blow it up so you can see the back online application only available for Internet Explorer. You used to see a lot more of this, or things like it, pages that didn't work if you weren't using Internet Explorer. Interestingly enough, you can tell from the domain name, this is a South Korean government website. And South Korea made a decision that its authentication for secure sites would be done by ActiveX and not using a public open certificate system. And it's still the only country in the world that works that way. So if you go to any banking site in Korea, or you go to any government, kind of e-government secure site, you're still going to get this message. I got this message three days ago when I tried to pretend to apply for a visa on a current government website. That's where the web was going. It was very clearly going in that direction. And there's another thing if we think back sort of what the common experience of the web was in 2003. We're starting to see kind of websites that were a little bit more interactive. If you went to this site, you could see what kind of menus that popped up and all that kind of stuff. And I didn't pick this because I like baseball, by the way. I picked it because it's one of the few examples of the thing I'm going to show you that I could still find live on the web. So it's a nice, clean-looking website. I wondered how they made it, so I went and hit View Source, and that's all I could find out about how it operated. There's one flash file. And it's not that flash is not a dominant and problematic force right now. It still is. It's much bigger than it was in 2003. But one thing that is different is people generally don't try to build whole websites in flash and whole sets of applications in flash in the same way that things were going. And there were other technologies as well that were taking away the ability of people to see the source code of web pages, which was an incredible force in terms of innovation and how the web grew. And so you're getting to the point where people couldn't study, copy, modify, or share the web. Well, you couldn't see the source code of a web page and how the web was operating. And there was a real risk of that, and I think that particular part of the risk has diminished. So the point of that is that freedoms matter. They certainly matter for software. But I think not just for software, I think also for the web. They don't necessarily, that framework doesn't necessarily exactly map to why the web has become more open, but I think it has a lot to do with it. And I think the fact that the software and now often the software that people use to access the web is written by people who believe in those freedoms has something to do with how the web is getting better. And I guess, you know, that's the question. Is this enough of a conceptual map? I think quite naturally it has become a part of the conceptual map of the web being open. And some people kind of say, well, open web, what the hell is an open web? We maybe don't have a specific definition, but I think it is an important concept and it's something that we see and maybe we need a more clear conceptual map for that. But I think we've actually gotten there in part because all our ideas. So it's clear now that things are getting a little bit better. If you go, I grabbed this off Wikipedia, but it's from NetApps. And you can see, actually, this is definitely something I'm very happy to see. Internet Explorer has dropped under 70% for the first time ever since its dominance in the last few months. Firefox is over 20%, which is great. I guess what's more important is that there's a diversity of browsers in there and that's how the market has moved and that there are people playing in a way that is pushing innovation and pushing standards. And that's a good thing. I guess another way that things have gotten better is one of these things that we take for granted now, right? Is that we're in a world where the possibility of how you experience the web is really common and common for mainstream users of the Internet who aren't programmers. Firefox Add-ons is one example, WordPress Plugins is another example, but there's lots of other things that basically we're getting to the point where the ethic of letting people bend and manipulate and control their experience that I think comes from free software is there in how we set things up for mainstream users to access the web and add-ons in some ways, I don't think people may not agree with this specific statement, but in a way, letting people, giving consumers who don't necessarily have those technical skills, the ability to control their experience more, brings them closer to being able to hack that experience. They get more choice and freedom over what the web feels like for them and that's something which isn't just in Firefox, that's something that I think is becoming the mainstream of how things work. And I think it's the mainstream that we expect the web to feel like in terms of content. And so obviously WordPress is something that somebody with no technical skills can do a lot to change because of the plugins, because of other things. Creative Commons licensing is quite common now in terms of what the free content is on the web. Wikipedia obviously is another example of that. And even Flickr, which is a kind of closed proprietary web service, is the biggest repository of open photographs that has ever existed. And if you include all CC license photographs on Flickr, I think it's like over 20 million. If you take away non-commercial and attribution only and just look at free licenses, it's still in the kind of 5 to 8 million range. And so the mass of consumers has come to expect and is taking advantage of those freedoms and their ability to manipulate information and to some degree manipulate their experience of the web. So, you know, my answer to the first question I just asked is how far can free open go and be on software I think is far. I think that the values, the conceptual map that comes over for freedom have really infected society through the success of free software in the market. So my second question, what's next? Not necessarily so rosy. Let's look at 2009. Can't totally predict the future. Some things we're pretty sure are going to happen. Some things you can guess about. I guess there's a European election this year. We hope that Guantanamo Bay gets shut down. This is the international way of natural fibers, so happy to see everybody's wearing cotton, or most people are wearing cotton here in the room. And as a rumor, Smith's reunion tour, although it has been hard to confirm. But you can, it is there somewhere on the web as a rumor. And this is weird about that this is cut off because what it says at the bottom is 2009 I think, and I think it's almost impossible that this wouldn't happen, is that this is a big year for free software and mobile. It's certainly something that Mozilla is interested in, but it's something a lot of people have been working on for a long time and a lot of things happen in late 2008 or just over the last five weeks. So many things further. And I guess it's good that 2009 will probably be a big year for free software and mobile. I think there's a bigger, more epic battle that we're about to enter into around mobile that goes beyond just whether the software that runs on your phone is free. I have this lovely Android phone that I've come to like and it's great, but there's a lot of things about it that are still really, really closed. And those things that make up the mobile ecosystem that we're going to talk about in a second mean that we're essentially in a battle over whether the mobile space and especially mobile computing and the mobile web, mobile internet, become more like this telephone which has a single purpose, is incredibly prescribed, I can't hack or can't hack to do much, and certainly is not something that is sort of generative or encourages new kinds of creative, innovative uses versus the computer which has obviously done that. And so we have those two paradigms, I think fighting it out and ahead of us in terms of where mobile is heading, and given I guess I should have put some graphs up here that people have probably all seen about what mobile growth looks like in the world especially in emerging economies, but it's pretty clear like that's where the action is, right? Most people are going to access data, do their banking, all the kinds of things that we do on desktops through mobile. I don't think that's even debatable. It was probably a good thing to argue about over beer. So question is how can open win in this environment? How does the generative free computer hackable model win in mobile? And the thing is that there's a lot of different factors. So we probably got to figure out hardware and obviously open mocha is a leader in that space also in software but that has such a pretty device I had to use it as my hardware picture. We got to figure out free software which I think a lot of progress is being made and has been made on already in mobile. We got to figure out the web and this is the logo for Fennec which is the mobile Firefox product that's in alpha now. The thing about the web is it really easily or think about mobile in the way it really easily can go back to where computers were in the mid 80s where there are different applications written for each platform because the web sucks so badly on mobile. And we actually need to get to the point where the experience of mobile on the web is the same as the experience of mobile on the desktop and there's one unified web that moves across all of our devices and we're not there and that's not actually necessarily either in the interest of people who make popular mobile browsers like Apple on the iPhone nor is it necessarily where they're focused. They're focused on making a group of mobile apps and if you use all the kind of separate applications and not the web who cares, what we need to do is make sure there is one unified web across all platforms. Obviously the network needs to be open for mobile to be something that actually works in the way that we want it to work and for the telephone model not to emerge and the kind of net neutrality debates around throttling bit torrent are nothing compared to how nasty mobile providers are in terms of controlling what you do on their networks. So those are probably the obvious ones. The other things that the other three things I would think about is until we actually figure out what we mean by an open cloud and I'll talk about the Franklin Statement later figuring out what openness means in mobile is going to be impossible because there's no question like for me once I got this thing that talks to the cloud really nicely from Google that my computing has moved more into the cloud and there are problems with that and dangers with that and lots of things we haven't thought through and until we think those through and the technologies reflect that thinking open and mobile are not going to go together. Pricing is also a huge issue, right? The way that mobile carriers price network access basically limits certain kinds of applications whether that's bandwidth caps or just userious data charges or whatnot and the last thing that would need to be opened up is permissions, right? Here's a kind of everybody's seen these posters especially if you live in North America which is a hellhole for mobile of getting your locked contract phone unlocked and the fact that people get into contracts where their device actually the permission to do things with it like put in a different SIM card and it is controlled by a carrier and certainly is a huge barrier to kind of an open mobile ecosystem and failure at I don't know if somebody can probably explain how this works even with Android and certainly with the iPhone certain kinds of applications are difficult or impossible or illegal to run and so that's a lot of stuff to think about if we care about mobile being free and open and we care about the fact that that is the platform that billions of people in the world are going to experience digital life through and so I think we need to shape for and it's a kind of jargonese kind of thing is an open mobile ecosystem but doing that means looking at all those things and it's basically a spaghetti right? It's not that we can win on four of those things and still lose and so my sense is the foundations of thinking that through and thinking through what we want to do start with this conceptual map has gotten the world a long way but I guess the question is do we need more than that conceptual map to move across all of those things? I don't know that this conceptual map is going to help us figure out, maybe it will, how to disrupt the mobile companies and get rid of their pricing models I don't know certainly it's a part of the picture but I think as we look at that spaghetti we start to think about what's next and what else is on our conceptual map of the future so the answer as we move into trying to figure out this space is we don't know what extra goes on that conceptual map but somebody asked me the other day what does it look like for kind of free software open products to take 20% of market share in mobile in the same way that Microsoft has been able to do in web browsing I don't know I work with a lot of really smart people and Mozilla has hired some amazing people new people who know the mobile industry and I don't think we know what all the pressure points are to get past that closed spaghetti system and the important thing is to underscore I'm just using mobile as an example it's just the start we're moving into a place where there's going to be more forces trying to stop the progress that free software and free culture have had and figuring the matter is probably going to involve new pieces of the map you know examples or video where patents are clearly a part of the picture or where things are going in the cloud and so on so I think what we know at this point is partly what I'm kind of calling out for here is help and fellow map makers and through spaces like mobile we need better and in particular bigger maps, I don't know if people are familiar with this kind of old map there's dragons over here on the side of the sea where we don't know where things are we need to fill in that part of the map and know that those aren't dragons we need to move beyond that and we need bigger maps that go beyond the edges of what we can see right now so I think I'm doing okay on time so I'm going to go through my conclusion and I guess that the first thing to go back to my context is, you know, why does Mozilla care why is this guy from Mozilla up on the stage talking about the future and talking about mobile and talking about the four freedoms of where it's going to go and talking about maps and you know partly that's just because it's the kind of crap I'm interested in but partly it is because we've got this mission that 50 years from now and I don't know and I don't think most of people around me know fully what it looks like but I think we do have a set of values and want to refine and evolve those values that can get us those 50 years so we need a better map to do this there's a couple of things that I think are on that map and this is just me riffing and isn't any kind of thing that's been thought through with a lot of people one of them clearly we need strong values and already have them don't always agree in a group like this on exactly what they are but I think we agree much more than we do with the rest of the world and I think those values do need to go beyond just code we need to figure out a framework where we can test is that web service open is that carrier drives me nuts these carriers and all these mobile people organize things like the open mobile conference and it's all AT&T of these people who are like nasty nasty people who are closing everything down so how do you have a framework or you test whether what they're claiming they're doing is open or free and we don't have that in some of the terrain we're going in so I think we need to know what those values are how they map onto new spaces I think obviously continuing to build great free software is important but and I think in particular continuing to build great free software that people love to use is important it's important that impact of moving the market is something that continues because it impacts even the people who don't agree with us and I think a third thing which has happened really kind of naturally is to empower users more to control their own experience of computing and the web and all those kind of things let them hack more when you think about building software to the point where anyone can bend anything where really that distinction disappears a little bit more and I think that's happening naturally because I think the things that people who build free software like in terms of being able to control it are starting to naturally filter into the features that users get and that's a good thing so those are some pretty obvious things and I'll just kind of summarize what I said keep the flow of freedoms we want to make stuff that helps users hack, we want to keep building free software what else what can everybody here do those are pretty big conceptual things and I think the thing you can do is pick one piece of the map that interests you and go and start building it figure out where your future edge is in this space and for me it's pretty simple it comes from my days at the Shuttleworth Foundation I'm really interested in figuring out the edges of the map about how education and free software and open source connect and this is a meeting that happened yesterday there's Leslie all pixelated up there and a bunch of other cool folks talking about how we actually get participation in free software projects built into the curriculum of universities so I don't know what that map looks like I don't know exactly how that works but I personally want to push and actually this t-shirt says Cape Town declaration.org on the back that's something that I worked on with a bunch of people including Jimmy Wales when I was at Shuttleworth which tries to explain a little bit of the map in terms of where open education could go not so much in relation to free software and you can go and sign that declaration and this group of people could probably double the number of signatures so feel free to do so you know another one that I admire that I mentioned briefly earlier is this thing called the Franklin Street statement on freedom and network services and there's something that Bradley Coon and a bunch of other folks put together basically trying to ask the sort of question that I'm asking here is beyond the four freedoms we're talking about web services what's a framework we can use to say whether that thing is free and I think it could go even further than it has but I think it's a really good start to a piece of the map that's super, super critical if you haven't read that search for it now and go check it out and I think you can actually sign on to it but that's another example of a small thing you can do to start building out the map and I guess really the purpose of this talk was to kind of probe everybody here in terms of being fellow map makers saying what else is on your map what goes beyond what we're already doing and I guess the only real outcome and hope that I had for this talk is that that's something that people might take five minutes to talk about with each other over the course of the weekend and it might give you something good to argue about over beer and that's it that's all I got to say of course thanks to all the folks who gave me stuff for this so thanks happy to answer questions I didn't see the scary sign that I was worried about so I don't know how long we have for questions right there you can sit there where I'm looking at the people so we got five minutes for questions so questions about this stuff or Mozilla stuff I'm not in Unicode and where Mozilla doesn't know even recognize that those languages exist I don't know there's probably like 800 Mozilla people here who probably helped answer that question and I would love to know the answer to is there somebody who wants to answer that question from Mozilla oh sorry he doesn't have a microphone the question is how is Mozilla going to support character sets that aren't supported by Unicode languages that use character sets not supported by Unicode so I don't know if there's anybody from Mozilla who wants to answer that Seth or somebody pardon yeah so come to the Mozilla and Gandalf is happy to answer that question other questions that's easy no questions thanks