For me, open source is a moral thing.
A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.
I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.
Now, if someone tries to monopolize the Web, for example pushes proprietary variations on network protocols, then that would make me unhappy.
We fully expect our competitors to join us in embracing open standards with their next redesigns.
If someone had protected the HTML language for making Web pages, then we wouldn't have the World Wide Web.
I think HTML5 is one area where Mozilla has done very poorly at actually communicating what we have done.
I think open source is an evolutionary idea for humanity, this idea of transparency. It played out for us in the technology world, but it also played out with the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission and Wikipedia.
Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web as a set of protocols for transferring, linking and addressing documents to send over the Net. Without the global reach and open technical standards of the Internet, the Web could never have proliferated as it did.
The ability of our people to think quickly and create great products in this whole new world of Internet open standards is not only essential to our success but is also one of the things that impresses me most about Netscape.
When I helped to develop the open standards that computers use to communicate with one another across the Net, I hoped for but could not predict how it would blossom and how much human ingenuity it would unleash.
Making things open-source brings the cost down.
The basic technical protocols that have enabled the Internet to work in such a globally interconnected way are developed and shared openly by a community of engineers.
The dynamic with social is you tend not to have products with 30% market share. It's all or nothing. Email works because we have open standards that let you communicate across any email client.
I want to avoid locking people into solutions that work only with Postfix. People should have a choice in what software they want to use with Postfix, be it anti-virus or otherwise.
If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%!
Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability, and web property ownership.
The Adobe flash plug-in is non-free software, and people should not install it, or suggest installing it, or even tell people it exists.
As an open system, Android is not under the tight control of its creator, Google.
I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.
The web's strength lies precisely in its unique position as the world's first universal platform.
A vendor neutral, standards-based approach must be adopted
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.
Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agencies or corporate operations centers.
I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.
