Mitchell Baker

Winifred Mitchell Baker, better known as Mitchell Baker ( born 1957 ) is the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation. The software company based in Mountain View, California, develops and markets such as the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the email client Mozilla Thunderbird.

Life and work

Baker received her BA in 1979 in Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1987, she graduated in law at the Boalt Hall School of Law there. In the same year she began working in the Bar Association of California. From 1990 to 1993 she worked for copyright protection in the law firm Fenwick & West LLP, where she worked as a lawyer for high-tech companies. From November 1993 to October 1994, she was employed in the legal department of Sun Microsystems. In November 1994, she was one of the first employees of the Legal Department of Netscape Communications Corporation. From 1999 to 2001 Baker served as manager for Mozilla, the former open-source project by Netscape.

Once AOL had stopped development of the Netscape browser in 2003, she supported this project further by helping to develop the free non-profit organization Mozilla Foundation. She was elected in the same year as President of the Foundation. In 2005 she co-founded the Mozilla Corporation. In early 2008 she resigned as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation and handed over the management to the Chief Operating Officer John Lilly. She remains committed to the areas of Web standards and security.

Since November 2002, Baker is a volunteer at the Open Source Applications Foundation.

Private life

Mitchell Baker is married and has a son.

Honors

  • In 2005, Baker was selected by Time Magazine as one of 100 most influential people in the world.
  • In 2010 she received at the DLD conference the Aenne Burda Award.
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