Sep. 25--John Lilly became chief executive of Mozilla Corp. in January, moving up from his role as chief operating officer. He's been with the company that created the open-source Firefox browser since 2005, the year Firefox 1.5 was released.

Before Firefox, Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the Web. Now Microsoft's share is down and Mozilla's share is 20 percent.

The size of the organization makes Mozilla's tremendous success that much more remarkable. Headquartered in Mountain View, it has fewer than 200 employees.

Using an open-source model, its code is published, and users everywhere are encouraged to improve it. Mozilla Corp., which Lilly directs, is a subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.

Mercury News reporter Pete Carey asked Lilly how an open-source company such as Mozilla works, and threw in a few questions about Chrome, Google's new open source-browser that was introduced earlier this month.

Q. In January you become the chief executive of a spread-out, thinly staffed, undercapitalized organization that has 200 million customers. You've been with Mozilla since 2005. How do you make it work?

A. Mozilla is this amazing thing. When I got here, there were maybe 15 employees and we had maybe 20 million users. Now, it's more like 180 employees and more like 200 million users. But that understates the size of the group. In Firefox 3, about 40 percent of code was not written by

people at Mozilla, but was written by people in different countries working nights and weekends.

Q. You've called Mozilla a "chaordic" organization. What the heck is that?

A. The idea is that you try to take responsibility and authority and decision-making and push it as far to the edges as possible. Lots of systems work that way, like the Internet itself. They tend to result in systems that are unpredictable at some level but also very strong, very robust, very tolerant of people coming and going and contributing, and tend to result in unexpected innovation.

We focus on building tools and systems that enable people to do their own stuff. If a group wants to do a Punjabi localization, we try to help them do that. More than anything else we think of ourselves as force multipliers.

Q. So is it fair to describe Mozilla as a democracy?

A. Oh, definitely not. We have people who are empowered to make decisions without consensus or votes. But along broader lines, the people who have done the code have authority to make decisions. It's very hard for me to override a product decision. It's not the way we work.

Q. For example?

A.