Many of us know what it’s like to work at an open source company. About 6 weeks ago I started my job as a Senior MySQL DB Admin/Architect (DBA but the “A” stands for both) at Mozilla. And I have to say, working for an open company is a lot different from working for an open source company.
There’s so much more that’s, well, open.
I can point to the Bugzilla bugs database, where all our ticket tracking is done. It’s open to the public, although on the systems side we mark a lot of bugs private because they contain important information like hostnames and IP addresses and what ports are open vs. not.
Or I could point to my director’s quest to make the IT department more open – one that I think is possible, although it does make our legal team try to figure out exactly what constitutes an employee and what does not (or rather, what could be argued in a court of law if it comes down to that).
The greatest example that I have seen of how open the company is came from a coworker’s blog about our anti-SOPA/PIPA efforts – the blog points to an etherpad document used to collaborate on what needed to be done. You can see that it was a lot of work, but the part that stands out to me is this:
You can see it.
It’s amazing to me how open the company is, and how very little suffers from it. Plans are divulged, there are very few secrets — most of those are required by the folks we work with, not by Mozilla itself.
Many of us know what it’s like to work at an open source company. About 6 weeks ago I started my job as a Senior MySQL DB Admin/Architect (DBA but the “A” stands for both) at Mozilla. And I have to say, working for an open company is a lot different from working for an open source company.
There’s so much more that’s, well, open.
I can point to the Bugzilla bugs database, where all our ticket tracking is done. It’s open to the public, although on the systems side we mark a lot of bugs private because they contain important information like hostnames and IP addresses and what ports are open vs. not.
Or I could point to my director’s quest to make the IT department more open – one that I think is possible, although it does make our legal team try to figure out exactly what constitutes an employee and what does not (or rather, what could be argued in a court of law if it comes down to that).
The greatest example that I have seen of how open the company is came from a coworker’s blog about our anti-SOPA/PIPA efforts – the blog points to an etherpad document used to collaborate on what needed to be done. You can see that it was a lot of work, but the part that stands out to me is this:
You can see it.
It’s amazing to me how open the company is, and how very little suffers from it. Plans are divulged, there are very few secrets — most of those are required by the folks we work with, not by Mozilla itself.