I just delivered the Keynote at Posscon in Columbia, South Carolina talking about the history of Mozilla, open source now and how Firefox OS is ready to disrupt a very closed market. <h2>Abstract</h2> In the open source world we know why we put our time and efforts into the larger goals we try to achieve. We successfully showed that the barriers and lock-ins of the past don’t hold up in the test of time and got even the enemies of old to release their code. This made us lax and we can be seen as hard to talk to and deal with. We seem to have quite a strong lack of empathy for people who don’t “get” open and our behaviour can lead to a lot of opportunities to go wasted. Times change and the new mobile computing world and closed app markets give end users an incredibly alluring world of simplicity – a world that is built on lock-in, afford-ability and making the user the product. A world that the open alternatives to date can not match when it comes to simplicity and shininess. Mozilla, amongst others, is battling this change by offering a truly open alternative called Firefox OS. In this keynote Chris Heilmann will show how open can still win the minds and hearts of the main market and what we as an open source community can do to avoid the future to be behind shiny and yet sturdy bars and locks. So we went the extra mile and built Boot2Gecko. This was a new operating system for mobile devices based on the same Linux core as Android. On top of that we have a stack of drivers and open, standardised APIs to access the hardware via JavaScript. The rest of the phone is Gecko – the engine that powers Firefox. Every single thing in the phone’s interface and in the apps you build for this platform is HTML5. It is the hardware platform and OS the standard deserves. We showcased B2G last year at Mobile World Congress – the biggest mobile event and a cut-throat sales show. We had some success. We went home, did our work and came back – and this year we owned the show. In two days I gave 54 interviews to all kind of media about Firefox OS as the final product is called now. Everybody wanted to know about that open source thing that managed to attract 18 mobile provider partners and 4 hardware partners to bring phones to emerging markets where other approaches have failed. Firefox OS is the open answer to all the problems I mentioned. We are not trying to compete with Android and iOS on the high-end. Instead the aim is to bring highly affordable phones to a market that wants to go online on their terms – with billing to the carrier and apps that can be tried out before you download them. Let me quickly show you what that means. {demo} The great thing about all this is that Mozilla built this system over the course of two years. Not as the open source deliverer for mobile providers but with them – a lot of the code has been written by partners. The beauty of all of that is that when you write apps for Firefox OS, you write them on your own terms. You can publish them outside the market, bill your users with a payment API instead of having them sign up for a marketplace, and above all – your apps will also run on Android, iOS, and desktop browsers. You will not get all the goodies you get in Firefox OS across the board, but nothing stops you from using PhoneGap to, well, bridge that gap. We bet on open and we won a massive battle. Now we are ready to roll out enjoyable mobile experiences for the masses without them having to be part of an arms race between two large corporations. This is about getting people online, not about getting them as consumers. And that, to me, is a massive opportunity. So here’s to an open future of the mobile web. Come, join us. <img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/chrisheilmann/~4/xXOU7xKeop0" height="1" width="1">