Mozilla has announced that chief executive Mitchell Baker is stepping down in favour of chief operating officer John Lilly.
Baker will remain as chairman of the open source non-profit organisation, but Lilly will take over effective operations immediately. Baker and Lilly outlined the move in separate blogs. Baker said on her blog that she will focus on issues like standards, interoperability and data management. Lilly will have to help launch Firefox 3 and the Thunderbird spin-off dubbed MailCo for now and set them as priorities on John Lilly’s blog.

"John Lilly is the right person to guide the maturation of Mozilla," said Mitchell Baker, Chairman of Mozilla Corporation. "John has been instrumental in developing an organization that is both embedded in Mozilla and open-source DNA and that can function at the extremely high degree of effectiveness that our setting requires."

As CEO, John will focus on the product, technology and execution of the Mozilla Corporation. Mitchell will focus on bringing Mozilla goals and mindshare to affect change in related aspects of Internet development, such as standards and interoperability, treatment of data, and use of market mechanisms to support public benefit organizations.



Lilly has good credentials. He has been a director at the Open Source Applications Foundation for the past seven years and has concentrated on building up smaller companies.

Mitch Kapor, board member and former chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, said: "I have worked with Mitchell and John for a number of years, and I strongly support these moves at Mozilla. It should allow the organisation to do more things than ever before, and to do them well."

The decision will be good news for those concerned that Mozilla might go public and cash-in on its success. Annual revenues have grown to over $50 million and the organisation is expanding to further develop its software.

About John Lilly

John Lilly joined Mozilla Corporation in 2005 as Vice President of Business Development, and, since 2006, has served as COO and a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to this, Lilly was the founder, CEO, CTO and VP of products for Reactivity, a software company acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007. Previously, he held staff positions at Apple, Sun Microsystems and Trilogy Software. Lilly has been an active participant in open source projects, serving on the boards of the Open Source Applications Foundation and Participatory Culture Foundation. He earned a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in computer science from Stanford University.