Walking with Dinosaurs – Mozilla’s Pascal Finette on WebFWD

What is your other current project?

Sure, the other project is very, very different, but nonetheless very exciting. They are called CASH Music. It is founded by a couple of independent musicians, who just saw that the music industry is in a weird state (obviously as we all know) and if you are not Lady Gaga, your label doesn’t do a lot for you any more. So as an independent musician you suddenly need to manage all these aspects which your label used to handle for you. Anything from your digital sales, to managing your tour calendar, staying in touch with your fans through to how you represent yourselves on the web. They were so frustrated by the lack of good solutions out there which cater to this specific market, so they set out to just create something.

Its like a ‘WordPress for musicians’. It’s a very easy-to-install package, it’s open source, it allows you to set up your website as a musician and to put all these very musician-specific modules in there. So, you can manage your online music sales on the full range of platforms that are out there. You can use Apple Calendar or produce an email mailing list which allows you to stay in touch with your fans. [The developers] themselves are musicians and they also worked a lot with other musicians while building this. So they do some great really interesting stuff like technologically enabling people to say, ‘Tweet about this and I will give you a song for free’. They have got some really interesting mechanics in there that allow musicians to handle representing themselves and building up a fan base on the web.

So is there a business model in this? Are you as WebFWD looking for companies with a strictly cash bottom line, or are you interested in the greater value of things as an open source project and in what they can deliver to society? Would you take on not-for-profit or dual bottom-line organisations?

I am very glad that you asked the question. First of all we are not making decisions based on profit or the prospect of profit. We are not choosing projects based on their ability to earn money. Having said that, you will know from Mozilla, we are not ‘anti-commerce’, we are not against people making money. I am very interested in supporting projects which have the ability to be sustainable.

There are a lot of projects, probably more in the technology side of things, where there is no business model, they will never have one. It’s a bit like when you think about jQuery. jQuery doesn’t have a business model. They are in the fortunate situation that they have a couple of benefactors (including Mozilla by the way) who say ‘your work is so important that we will financially support you’. I am perfectly happy and fine with these types of projects.

At the same time, I think when you look at projects such as OpenPhoto and CASH Music, they do have the ability to be both an open source project and at the same time be financially sustainable. In both cases it’s very easy to imagine that they could build a hosted solution. Exactly like the WordPress guys are doing. Interestingly enough, CASH Music is actually a non-profit organisation. They said, for numerous reasons, we want to be non-profit, to make a stance in this music industry and make people totally aware of the fact that we only have their best interests at heart.

Is there any restriction around licensing of the projects you are taking on? Are you insisting on projects being released under the MPL (Mozilla Public License), are you insisting on them being sharealike licences, or are you open to more permissive, Apache-type licensing?

The basic stance we are taking here is to say that we are not religious in any form about the licence. We want to make sure that the licence is open enough to allow meaningful community contribution and the creation of community assets. So if you take a licence which is overly restrictive, we will try to steer you towards a licence which is less restrictive. But if you want to work with an Apache licence, an MIT licence or a BSD licence, one of these very liberal licences, that is perfectly cool with us.

If I have project which I think meets your selection criteria, what are the concrete services which WebFWD can offer? And how would you differentiate yourselves from the services that other foundations can offer?

We designed this programme very specifically around the idea of accelerator programmes, as they are found more predominantly in the start-up world. We were talking to a lot of projects before we launched, to understand what their needs are, and we identified that there are a couple of common themes that we heard over and over again. We are trying to be a little more structured.

Obviously, you have access to the Mozilla people, which in itself is a very nice asset. There is a bunch of very smart people at Mozilla. We have a huge array of very, very good mentors from all walks of life. Anything from development, people like John Resig, through to user interface design – where we have Kevin Fox, who designed the Gmail interface – to business people, venture capitalist and marketing experts. Literally, whatever your project needs, we have at the very least one expert for you. And we match them up to you very closely.

So what we do is, we sit down with you as a project and identify what are your most urgent need right now, and we match you with three mentors, so you have a very close relationship with them. Then, as your needs progress, we swap mentors out. The other thing we do is that we find that people in the projects have a very specific skill set. They lack certain skills.

For example, you have a bunch of coders who are developing the project, but they don’t know how to do marketing, PR or community marketing. So for them we actually run regular workshops. Every week we have a bunch of experts who are presenting on these topics. Then, there are a couple of nice benefits. We can give you access to infrastructure. You need hardware or software – we can cover this. If you are close to one of our offices, you can drop in and work from there.

Then, surely not unimportant, is the access to the Mozilla brand. You are partly under the Mozilla umbrella and we really try to do a lot to raise awareness of your project. Lastly, this is kind of an interest benefit, and one which we heard over and over again that is very valuable to these projects: just the fact that you are part of a community. A lot of these projects are not doing the ‘get rich fast’ start-up thing – they want to change the world in a positive way. They really crave a network that is doing the same thing. So we created this network and obviously Mozilla is embedded in this. For us it is about helping these projects to be successful, with as much or as little hand‑holding that is wanted by the teams.

Is there a payback which WebFWD is looking for from the projects, because you are a part of the Mozilla Corporation?

There is no payback. We are not looking to take any equity. The main reason for us doing this is because it fits extremely well into the Mozilla mission. Our goal is to promote innovation on the internet. This allows us to multiply our innovation output by working with these people; this is the core motivation. Teams don’t give up any control or any equity in their company or anything.

How do our readers get in contact you and WebFWD? If they have something that they think is relevant, what is the first step?

The website is there at www.webfwd.org and we have a web application form on there. By all means, they can find me on Twitter – I am @pfinitte – and they can send us emails at WebFWD(at)mozilla(dot)com.

In terms of the web form or email, what are you looking for? What is going to really capture your attention when it comes through?

What you want to do is explain why your solution matters. I think that is the most important thing for us. We see some solutions where they do a good job of explaining what the thing does, but you just don’t grasp why it actually matters. I think this is a great litmus test even to just do internally. When you come to the next kind of ‘social-photo-mobile-media-sharing’ thing, most of the time you will not have a really good answer to that question.

Click here to see the latest posts from Linux User

Follow @LinuxUserMag