Mitchell Baker (born 1957) managed the transformation of Mozilla from a Netscape corporate project into an independent open source foundation and consumer software organization — one of the FOSS movement's most significant institutional transitions.
Baker joined Netscape as a lawyer in the late 1990s and became the primary drafter of the Netscape Public License and the Mozilla Public License (MPL) — the licenses under which Netscape released its browser source code in 1998 (see netscape-source-release-1998). The MPL was designed as a compromise between the strict copyleft of the gpl-v2 and the permissive licenses preferred by business — a "file-level copyleft" that became influential as a template for corporate open source licensing.
Baker became Mozilla's general manager in 1999 and was appointed president of the mozilla-foundation when it was created in 2003 from the AOL-held Mozilla project. She then led the establishment of the Mozilla Corporation (a taxable subsidiary of the foundation) in 2005 and served as its CEO, navigating the tension between the foundation's nonprofit mission and the corporation's commercial Firefox browser development.
Baker's tenure demonstrated that FOSS could compete in consumer software markets — Firefox broke Internet Explorer's browser monopoly in the mid-2000s — and that a foundation governance model could sustain large-scale FOSS product development. The mozilla-foundation structure, with a nonprofit foundation owning a commercial subsidiary, became a reference model for FOSS sustainability in the mainstream-adoption-and-corporate-embrace-2005-2014 era.
Baker stepped down as Mozilla Corporation CEO in February 2024, following years of controversy over the organization's direction, executive compensation relative to its nonprofit mission, and questions about whether Firefox remained strategically viable. Her departure coincided with significant layoffs at Mozilla and renewed debate about maintainer-sustainability-crisis in FOSS organizations.