Time to say goodbye to Foxy. Mozilla, Open Source, and Community are changing. And yes, it’s about more than a retiring mascot. 🦊

I recently spent 5 days in Barcelona, mostly in the company of former Mozillians. Alumni networks can take on a lot of shapes and forms, and none of us knew what this one would hold. For most of us, it had been years since we left Mozilla. Still, there was trust and genuine value-alignment.

Today though, Mozilla is a very different organisation. In fact, it is a multitude of entities: apart from Foundation and Corporation, there are mozilla ai, Mozilla Ventures, Thunderbird (MZLA), Mozilla Data Collective, and an incubator. Volunteers and community members now have different pathways to engage, with a slate of products, but also diverse cultures and governance structures.

Open Source still guides most of it. But it no longer happens on GitHub — which is Microsoft-owned. At a time when ‘digital sovereignty’ is the political buzzword du jour, open source and the communities that come with it, have to organise and engage differently. People must choose between several coding platforms. Finding your niche and building up a profile may require more research and curation. It’s a different kind of work. And a different community.

But — and this is an honest hope — it may just be the kind of decentralised answer that Open Source needs to build a meaningful alternative to the dominant market powers at play. Open source products won’t compete with Big Tech, not financially, not in reach. But if they delight users and build with community at the centre, they might just fuel our ambition to design technologies that serve people, not profit. Localised, targeted, resource-aware.

So whatever mascot comes next, let’s hope it delights.