More Awesome Than Money (12 page)

For certain hackers, encryption was a fundamental tool. But it was also a pain in the neck. The easiest part was the creation of lengthy encryption keys, which could be automatically generated. From there, it got complicated. Both sides on an encrypted message had to have the same key in order to unlock it, and the key had to be shared by trusted correspondents, generally in face-to-face encounters.

The guys couldn't find a way to make it feasible for Diaspora, and settled for SSL, a form of encryption used by banks for transactions with customers. “It makes me ideologically sad,” Ilya said. But he knew that to succeed, what they would present to the world in September had to be something that ordinary people would be able to use without breaking a sweat. Their project could not be tailored to software obsessives.

“We have to have girls if we are going to succeed,” Max said.

“Between now and October,” Ilya said, “we need to get actual girls and say, ‘What would get you to use this?'”

“Chocolate,” Dan mused.

—

It was well and good to be programming at all hours of the days, but what about the T-shirts they had promised their Kickstarter supporters? They owed thousands of them, in specified sizes, to people who had contributed; other donors were owed stickers or various doodads. The DVDs with the code would have to wait until they'd finished a full draft. The most vexing problem was the microswag.

Max had an aunt in the T-shirt business; and his high school buddy Dan Goldenberg, who had spotted the girl on the bus after the NYU graduation reading the Diaspora Kickstarter pitch, was moving out to San Francisco and didn't have a job. For three months, Dan found himself serving as the head of the Diaspora fulfillment department—getting all the stickers and stuff out the door.

T
wice every hour, Caltrains departed from the station at King and Fourth Street in San Francisco, heading south down the peninsula. It is a trip known to many young entrepreneurs: a ride of less than an hour that would bring them to the gleaming offices of venture capital in Silicon Valley. On the twentieth of August, three of the Diaspora Four boarded the train and headed south; Dan had gone back to New York for a family wedding.

Unlike thousands who had traveled this path, they were not going to one of the celebrity success stories of the valley, or to the vaults of venture gold.

They were headed for a building in Mountain View that, by the summer of 2010, housed one of the most potent forces in modern cyberspace: the headquarters of the Mozilla Foundation. No organization had been more successful at bringing to life the values that inspired the Diaspora project. When it came to long-shot, popular, valorous digital causes, Mozilla just about wrote the book. It began, roughly, six years earlier.

—

A winter day in 2004 in Mountain View, California. Winifred Mitchell Baker walked around to the back of an office park, to an ordinary set of glass doors.

Two men were standing at the entrance.

“Hi,” Baker said. “Can I help you?”

“We're here to see Mozilla,” one of the men said.

Mozilla was where Baker worked. But it was far too early in the day for appointments in this obscure corner of Silicon Valley.

“Seeing anyone special?” she asked.

“No,” the man said. “Just Mozilla.”

“Well, why are you here? What are you doing?” Baker asked.

“I'm a Firefox supporter, and I came here to see the Mozilla offices,” he said, stepping toward the door, “and there's my name—there.”

Taped to the door was a two-page spread from the
New York Times
. It was an advertisement. One of the pages introduced Firefox 1.0 as “the free, open source web browser from the Mozilla Foundation that lets you surf faster and more efficiently and helps avoid annoying pop-ups and spyware.”

The other page, where the man was pointing, was a gray blur; on close inspection, one could see names, in tiny print, running down its full length.

At the bottom was an explanation for the cloud of names.

“
This message has been brought to you by the thousands who contributed to the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet.”

Baker smiled.

“Let me open the door,” she said, “and then you can come on in and wander around. Until you feel full.”

Three years earlier, Baker—known universally as Mitchell—had stood up from the wreckage of a company called Netscape, dusted herself off, and come back to finish what she and others had started. In its earliest days, Firefox was just a postscript to a saga that embodied the genius and folly of the early Internet age like no other.

In time, though, it would emerge as the single most powerful defender of the World Wide Web as a public commons, a bulwark whose growth was essentially uncharted in the business news pages but that was a defining force in the digital ecosystem.

—

The network of networks called the Internet had existed since the 1960s; the web, an entirely different creature, was brought to life in 1989 and 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, computer scientists
working at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland. The lab's researchers and data were spread around Europe and the rest of the world; vital information might be stashed in a computer and needed by people a floor, or a continent, away, and they would have no way to put their hands or eyes on it.

In an “act of desperation,” Berners-Lee would later say, he and Cailliau assembled existing pieces of technology, like protocols that let computers speak to one another, a technique of indexing called hyperlinking, and an address system known as URL—uniform resource locators—based around domains, like postal codes in the physical world. He called this collection of technology the World Wide Web.

When it was launched in August 1991, Berners-Lee said: “The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome.”

Collaborators arrived at a brisk pace, as Berners-Lee and Cailliau sought no patent for their WWW thing. Many wanted to expand the web beyond the bare bones arranged by Berners-Lee, a system of static, unchanging documents that one person could summon from a website. Brilliant as the first web was, the tools for sharing and looking at information were obtuse, nonintuitive. The web was little known.

Then came Mosaic. Working in a supercomputing center at the University of Illinois in 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed the code that made it easier to use the web to explore the world outside high-level research facilities. Seen through Mosaic's shimmering window, the web could be alive with pictures and graphics, a dynamic ecology of give-and-take, call-and-response, like human dialogue. Compared with the primitive techniques then in place that required typing hard-to-remember commands, Mosaic allowed the users to gaze on a panoramic wall of glass, instead of squinting through a peephole.
By October 1994, Mosaic had increased the traffic on the Internet dedicated to hypermedia browsing by ten-thousand-fold, Gary Wolf reported in
Wired
. Anyone connected to the Internet through a modem could use the browser. No longer did people need to subscribe for a fee to curated services like America Online, CompuServe, or Prodigy to surf the web, nor were they limited to e-mailing just between other customers of the same service. Mosaic
could be installed on any computer, instantly demolishing the walled gardens operated profitably by AOL and its competitors.

“Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information,” Wolfe wrote. “Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most
pleasurable
way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.”

The possibilities were vast: “Long-frustrated dreams of computer liberation—of a universal library, of instantaneous self-publishing, of electronic documents smart enough to answer a reader's questions—are taking advantage of Mosaic to batter once more at the gates of popular consciousness. This time, it looks like they might break through. Mosaic is clumsy but extraordinarily fun. With Mosaic, the online world appears to be a vast, interconnected universe of information. You can enter at any point and begin to wander; no Internet addresses or keyboard commands are necessary. The complex methods of extracting information from the Net are hidden from sight. Almost every person who uses it feels the impulse to add some content of his or her own.”

The word “browser” conveys its early function of thumbing through information, a tool for glancing. That term persisted, even as the tool known as the browser became the skin of the cyber age, a membrane that gave every person access to the Internet, and the Internet access to the person. The workings of the browser mirror existence: From the simplest amoeba to the great primates, life sustains itself behind cell walls, membranes, that use alignments of molecules, their + and – signs, to regulate metabolic transactions. They control what comes and goes, what the outside world gets and what it gives. In the online world, the browser, with its arrays of 1s and 0s, determines the points of equilibrium between an individual and the web, what data pours out when information is taken in. How that arithmetical membrane works, the conditions under which it is permeable and where the balance of power resides, is a matter of far more than technical, academic interest.

With Mosaic, the calendar of change in the human species, once measured in epochs, had been compressed to the pellet of a few months. The most social animal had evolved an entirely new way of playing and learning, fighting and flirting. Surely, there were businesses here. The
creators of Mosaic, Andreessen and Bina, partnered with the entrepreneur Jim Clark in 1994 to develop a commercial browser that they wound up calling Netscape Navigator, dodging legal issues with the University of Illinois over the Mosaic name.

On August 9, 1995, Netscape offered shares in the company for public sale, initially priced at $28. At the end of the day, they were selling for $58, making the company worth $2.9 billion in the market. By the end of the year, with the shares selling for $171, the value had more than tripled. But what was the business? Where was the money? Netscape sold the browsers to businesses and gave them away to individuals; when the browser opened up, it brought the user first to a Netscape home page, and it was thought that might be prime advertising real estate. In truth, the company had virtually no profits and no plan for getting any, but there was mesmeric power in sky-high piles of capital.

“In 24 months, the Web has gone from being unknown to absolutely ubiquitous,” Mark Pesce of
ZDNet
wrote in “A Brief History of Cyberspace,” published in October 1995. With vast amounts of money, Netscape hired every smart person who walked through the door. All paths to the richness of the web ran through the browser. If people with money were treading those paths, there might be ways to extract some.

The rise of Netscape unleashed huge amounts of venture capital in pursuit of the next big thing, whatever that might be. Something with the web. Anything with the web. Hope-addled, lottery-playing, clueless investors surrounded this web thing, the core of a genuinely new world, with an atmospheric bubble of hallucinatory gases.

In Redmond, Washington, home of Microsoft, the last big thing, Bill Gates followed these developments. Until then, Microsoft had focused on writing the software that ran personal computers, and controlled how data was crunched and words were processed. All of it was done in glass and aluminum boxes that sat on desks. As those boxes could become portals to the Internet, the horizon was infinite. To get there, Microsoft created a browser called Internet Explorer, a descendant of the original Mosaic, under a license from the University of Illinois.

Thus began the browser wars. Microsoft wound Internet Explorer into the gears of its Windows operating system; Windows itself was bundled into personal computers that were being bought by the tens of
millions. So Internet Explorer was “free,” as long as you bought the two-hundred-dollar operating system inside the twelve-hundred-dollar computer.

Browser usage is an arcane subject, with many imperfect metrics, but all of them showed that after Microsoft entered the game with Internet Explorer, usage of Netscape dropped from more than 90 percent of web surfers in 1995 to around 60 percent in 1998. It was losing ground every minute.

As with any membrane, the browser's protective ability was an essential quality but its ability to fend off malignant hackers begins to erode on the day of its release. To keep up with security threats, not to mention adding new features, meant that browsers had to be in a constant state of rebuilding. Netscape fell behind. The steady rise of revenues stopped. It could not sell a Netscape browser if Internet Explorer was “free.” In time, Microsoft's tactics would be the subject of an antitrust lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Justice and regulatory responses from European authorities, but those cases would take years to resolve.

Meanwhile, Internet Explorer rose like a rocket. In response, Netscape, having rushed out flawed new versions of its browser, made a drastic decision in 1998. No longer would it develop new versions of Netscape in secret. The company turned over its browser code to an internal organization that would build new versions in an open process similar to what had been done with the creation of the Linux operating system, drawing on the contributed wisdom of programmers around the world. That internal organization at Netscape was called Mozilla. (The code name was created at a marketing meeting when someone mentioned crushing Mosaic, an Oedipal, or at least patricidal, act, considering it had been the direct ancestor of Netscape. But by then it formed the core of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
A developer named Jamie Zawinski fused the name of a Japanese movie monster, Godzilla, with the word “Mosaic.” The name Mozilla stuck.)

Later, in November 1998, Netscape was bought by AOL, one of the curated gardens whose walls had been rendered moot by the emergence of the browser. Even in Netscape's diminished state, the initial deal, based on stock values, was $4.2 billion. It made no sense.
Four months
later, when the sale closed, the stock prices made it worth $10 billion. Helium was keeping Netscape aloft. Its prime assets were in the hands of what was then known as the Mozilla Organization, the skunkworks project that was developing the browser. The 1s and 0s of the code by then were openly available on the Internet for anyone to see and fiddle with.

Mitchell Baker had been with Netscape nearly from the outset, and was sent to oversee the Mozilla project. She wrote the license agreement that spelled out the terms of the barter between those who contributed elements of code and the company that was assembling the intellectual property of multiple intellects. Declining to name herself chief executive officer, she chose the title “Chief Lizard Wrangler.”

The contributions from the open-source community were brilliant, banal, and all points in between. The disputes over the finer points veered toward the deranged, flaming wars on chat sessions. Jamie Zawinski, the same developer who came up with the name Mozilla, characterized the process as “mass nonconsensual psychiatric care.”
The level of vitriol online—not just the list-serve discussions for Mozilla—was so profound that Mike Godwin, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies. It held that “as an online discussion grows long, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches One.”