We are no 'Frankenstein'

By Munir Kotadia, and Scott Mckenzie, ZDNet Australia

The Mozilla Foundation is no "Frankenstein," haphazardly thrown together in open-source development, CEO Mitchell Baker said this week.

Baker, speaking at CeBit Australia 2007 in Sydney, also challenged the perception that open-source vendors are just ad hoc organizations and took the chance to bang the security message home, claiming that Microsoft's Internet Explorer was vulnerable to attack for 285 days last year, compared with just 9 days for Firefox.

In a separate interview with ZDNet Australia, Baker took a swipe at Microsoft and the software giant's definition of collaboration.

"I don't think you should let a word or concept as important as 'collaboration' be defined by Microsoft to mean calendar and e-mail integration. Collaboration, especially for millions of people on the Web is about many other things," she said.

Baker said she believes that the creation of the Mozilla Foundation and the Firefox Web browser are living examples of what collaboration can produce.

While she wasn't dismissive of e-mail and calendar integration, Baker said the level of collaboration that Mozilla and other open-source projects demonstrate dwarf the interaction between those two pieces of software.

The Mozilla CEO also acknowledged that competition is heating up in the browser space. According to Baker, Microsoft is taking notice of Firefox and "is back investing in the browser".

"It is very clear that IE will have a least one nice feature that we don't. That I think we should take as a given," she said. "Most people like Firefox and they trust Firefox, and that is because of the way we build it. We don't have anything to hide behind. We can't hide behind our mistakes because they are all out there in the public," she added.

Munir Kotadia and Scott Mckenzie of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.