Last week, I was talking with someone about my role as a Technical Evangelist: the person was quite surprised that I went from Microsoft to Mozilla. Of course, the company structure, and culture are really different, but I never quit the Open Source world. Part of my role for my previous employer was to help the company become more Open, educate people inside of the company, change the perception of developers about Microsoft, and help Open Source developers to be successful on the Microsoft platform. Of course, we can have a longer discussion about the role, the goal of Microsoft, and how all these things were approached, but for me, I was there to make a difference, to continue to open the Web as I always did as a developer.
The same person was quite impressed that the evil empire was paying me to talk about them, like I just did with these pejoratives terms, as to show the stuff that we did with Open Source, and apologize for errors of the past. That make me think I had a recording I never published online from a presentation I did two years ago at the Make Web Not War DevCamp in Vancouver: it’s annoying to see old presentations you did, but for the sake of this post, let’s do it!
The big picture changed (and my English as presentation skills too), but you get the point: my goal was to help people understand that it’s not perfect, far from it, but it’s going in the right direction. Do you still use Micro$oft with a dollar sign? I hope not…
P.S.: Thanks to Matthew Potter who enhance the quality of the video as the recording size was so bad.
