Mozilla Calendar Project

Okay so I am going to talk about the amazing stuff that I did during my summer vacations in 2011. I was involved with Mozilla. Yes ! Mozilla Corporation that delivers Firefox to your computers and the same Mozilla that started an open source war against Microsoft in the late 1990s. It became the model for open source years later. Anyways, so here's the stuff I did. I applied to a couple of organizations under Google Summer of Code 2011. Mozilla was one of the 3 organizations I applied to. And competition for Mozilla is tough. But I dunno why they chose me. I was placed under Mozilla Calendar project. And amazingly, the summer was amazing and I had the best times of my life, with a laptop, coding. It was creative, motivating and an enthralling experience. 

I wonder why an organization like Mozilla works and its the model, its based on which gives the necessary fuel. Open source is all around us. The real invention happens in the open. I used the term "invention" and not "innovation" since "innovation" happens within closed sourced communities like IBM and Microsoft and notably Apple. But, looking at the community, its amazing. People in universities, young people and dynamic ones, all get their hands dirty with code. It gives a great feeling. There is no separation of divisions, no notion of seniority, no notion of being left out. Even if you contribute an idea or a a single line of code or for that matter, point out a bug, You matter a lot. The community software, for the community and by the community. We have had great revolutions in the past. And most of them started small, grew big and then became a force to reckon with. Often the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs talk in the plural "We did this", "We did that" and we assume that they are hard working. No doubt they are, but softwares by Apple and Microsoft don't convey the sense of community that has been created by facebook, internet etc. 

Software is like music, and like music, it can flow, get itself consumed by the masses, and become the tune of the times, become the voice of their feelings. Like music, it can be mixed, mashed up, get modified as the need be. And Mozilla I think in my view promotes that, and it should keep doing it so that we don't forget that as human beings, we talk and exchange ideas, make things work and usher in a revolution together.

Steve Jobs, the former Apple CEO, while taking a digg at Android, said "Open platforms do not always win". But one may ask, do open platforms need to win? The question is open, and for discussion and one cannot measure the quality from the number of sales. Its amazing that Steve Wozniak and Jobs started from Open hacks in their garages. 

It is for you to decide.