Mozilla Appoints John Lilly as Chief Executive Officer
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. - January 7, 2008 - Mozilla Corporation today announced the appointment of current chief operating officer John Lilly as its CEO, effective immediately. Concurrent with the appointment of Lilly, Mozilla also announced that Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s current CEO, would continue as Chairman and a full-time executive of the corporation.
“John Lilly is the right person to guide the maturation of Mozilla,” said Mitchell Baker, Chairman of Mozilla Corporation. “John has been instrumental in developing an organization that is both embedded in Mozilla and open-source DNA and that can function at the extremely high degree of effectiveness that our setting requires.”
As CEO, John will focus on the product, technology and execution of the Mozilla Corporation. Mitchell will focus on bringing Mozilla goals and mindshare to affect change in related aspects of Internet development, such as standards and interoperability, treatment of data, and use of market mechanisms to support public benefit organizations.
“I’m honored and excited to help Mozilla advance its mission of a participatory Web around the world. The Web is the single most important innovation of our lifetimes – it affects everything,” said Lilly. “With thousands of open source contributors, more than 125 million users, and countless organizations who rely on Mozilla’s community and technology, we're in rarefied territory.”
“I've worked with both Mitchell and John for a number of years now, and I strongly support these moves at Mozilla, which should allow the organization to do more things than ever before and to do them well,” said Mitch Kapor, board member and former chairman, Mozilla Foundation.
Background on John Lilly
John Lilly joined Mozilla Corporation in 2005 as Vice President of Business Development, and, since 2006, has served as COO and a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to this, Lilly was the founder, CEO, CTO and VP of products for Reactivity, a software company acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007. Previously, he held staff positions at Apple, Sun Microsystems and Trilogy Software. Lilly has been an active participant in open source projects, serving on the boards of the Open Source Applications Foundation and Participatory Culture Foundation. He earned a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in computer science from Stanford University.
For more information, please see the following blog posts from Mitchell Baker and John Lilly:
About Mozilla
Mozilla is a global community dedicated to building free, open source products and technologies that improve the online experience for people everywhere. We work in the open with a highly disciplined, transparent and cooperative development process, under the umbrella of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. As a wholly owned subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation organizes the development and marketing of Mozilla products. This unique structure has enabled Mozilla to financially support and cultivate competitive, viable community innovation. For more information, visit www.mozilla.com.