Dr. Winifred (Mitchell) Baker

Born in Berkeley, California, and trained as a lawyer, she is the Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and Chairperson and former Chief Executive Officer of the Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser developed for Windows, OS X and Linux, with a mobile version for Android. She coordinates business and policy issues and sits on both the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors. In 2005, Time magazine included her in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world and she has been affectionately given the title of "Chief Lizard Wrangler" at the Mozilla Corporation. She received a B.A. in Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979, achieving a Certificate of Distinction. She received her J.D. from the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley in 1987 and was admitted to the State Bar of California in the same year. From January 1990 until October 1993, she worked as a Corporate and Intellectual Property Associate at Fenwick & West LLP, a law practice that specializes in providing legal services to high technology companies. She then worked for Sun Microsystems as an Associate General Counsel from November 1993 until October 1994. In November 1994, she was hired as one of the first employees of the legal department of Netscape Communications Corporation. Reporting directly to CEO Jim Barksdale, she jointly set up the initial department. She was responsible for intellectual property protection and legal issues relating to product development, reporting to the General Counsel. She also created and managed the Technology Group of the Legal Department. She was involved with the Mozilla project from the outset, writing both the Netscape Public License and the Mozilla Public License. In February 1999, she became the General Manager of mozilla.org, the division of Netscape that coordinated the Mozilla open source project. In 2001, she was fired during a round of layoffs at America Online, by then the parent of Netscape. Despite this, she continued to serve as the ?Chief Lizard Wrangler? of mozilla.org on a volunteer basis. In November 2002, she was employed by the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF), helping to guide the group's community relations and taking a seat on OSAF's Board of Directors. From the outset, she also had part of her time assigned to working on mozilla.org issues. However, the division of her hours gradually became more and more weighted towards her Mozilla work at the expense of her OSAF duties, leading to her decision to return to Mozilla full time in January 2005. She retained her seat on OSAF's board. She was instrumental in the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, an independent non-profit that was launched on July 15, 2003 as America Online shut down the Netscape browser division and drastically scaled back its involvement with the Mozilla project. She became the President of the Mozilla Foundation and was appointed to the five-person Board of Directors. When the Mozilla Corporation was launched as a taxable subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation on August 3, 2005, she was named the CEO of the new entity. In addition, she joined the Mozilla Corporation's Board of Directors, though she also kept her seat on the Mozilla Foundation's board, as well as her role as Chairperson. On January 8, 2008, Mozilla announced that she, while retaining her role as Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, would no longer serve as CEO of the Corporation, and that MoCo's Chief Operating Officer John Lilly would take over this role. The reasons cited for this change was Mozilla's rapid growth, which made it difficult for executives to continue to wear many hats. Public records indicate she received $500,000 USD in salary and benefits for her work in her multiple roles with Mozilla in 2007. She was listed among the 2005 Top 100 by TIME Magazine, in the "Scientists & Thinkers" section. In 2009, she received the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Social Impact and in 2012, she was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. She is married to Casey Dunn and has one son. As a hobby, she is a skilled trapeze artist, "flying" two or three times a week. She can also speak conversational Mandarin Chinese. She is known for her unique hair style, with her hair cut in a bob on the right side of her head, and very short on the left. Her hair coincidentally bears a resemblance to the Firefox logo.