Why Radiant Core Is Involved With Firefox

Given recent news from “Radiant Core” I decided to ask Jay Goldman, the agency’s President, “1.5 Questions” about the Firefox win.

One Degree: Jay, what impact do you expect your involvement with Firefox 2.0 will have on Radiant Core and do you feel that other companies can use Open Source project involvement to their advantage while helping the community?”

Jay Goldman: It’s hard to imagine a better way to help the tech community than to contribute to an Open Source project, especially one that so strongly shares and embodies our beliefs. Working with “Mozilla”: has been an opportunity for us to collaborate with some of the people who are responsible for building the community that we get to enjoy and it continues to be an incredible privilege to be involved. I hope that “our contributions to the Firefox 2 release” will help to make the industry as a whole more aware of the value of good design and of continuous evolution and measured improvements rather than the need to make revolutionary changes with every release. There’s been a lot of talk lately about changing the way that software is built — from the old “release early/release often” saw to “37Signals’ Getting Real” — and I think there’s a lot of value in those statements. We’ve try to follow a similar approach in all the work we do for our clients, including the Firefox 2 theme. A lot of our time on the Fx2 release has been spent on the small details of what makes a good browser experience and I think it will show when people have a chance to try Beta 2 in a few weeks.

Hopefully, it will also highlight the value in hiring Radiant Core to make those improvements! Participating in an Open Source project is a win-win situation for everyone involved — the contributors get the satisfaction of building (hopefully) great software, and the benefit of exposure at a level that is sometimes difficult to achieve in the Closed Source world. Although I don’t suggest that other companies get involved in the Firefox project for building default themes (Ha! Take that competitors!) — the Mozilla community is huge and filled with all kinds of exciting opportunities for people, be they designers, coders, documentation writers, or even volunteers to test things. And Mozilla is only one of the thousands of similar projects, all of whom are looking for hands and eyeballs. So you — yes, the person reading this on One Degree — get out there and do some good! And maybe plant a tree too (you can think of the environment as the ultimate Open Source project if it helps).


Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on July 25, 2006.