Ben Goodger says you need perseverance and a lot of patience to make your mark in open-source software. Picture / Martin Sykes

Ben Goodger says you need perseverance and a lot of patience to make your mark in open-source software. Picture / Martin Sykes

Open-source software is an open door to a career for New Zealand programmers who are prepared to pit themselves against the world's best. For Ben Goodger, who completed a computer systems engineering degree at Auckland in 2003, his contributions to the Mozilla project led to Silicon Valley and now a job at search-engine giant Google.

For Robert O'Callahan, Mozilla was a way to return from the United States to New Zealand.

Goodger became involved with Mozilla in 1999 when his university studies led to his becoming interested in the way users and web developers interact with web browsers.

Netscape had just lost the first browser war to Microsoft's Internet Explorer and it published its source code on the internet in the hope volunteers would contribute to its development.

"My interest is in making usable, attractive software that helps people accomplish what it is they seek to do," Goodger says.

He proposed a new feature for the interface toolkit used by Mozilla - the XUL language - and wrote a proposal which was implemented by Netscape engineer David Hyatt. "Based on that, and some other work I'd been doing to try to make Mozilla software more aesthetically solid, David recommended me for a job at Netscape.

I worked as an intern at Netscape in Mountain View through most of 2000 on the ambitious but poorly received Netscape 6 project." Goodger took on a larger role as the Mozilla network tacked the creation of the Firefox web browser.

He moved to Silicon Valley two years ago to work for Netscape, then to the Mozilla Foundation.

"I don't consider myself on the whole better or worse than anyone else on the project, and while I write a bunch of code I think the best thing that I have to offer is my focus on user interaction, which runs the gamut from actual user interface issues with client software itself to other maybe less interesting areas that people tend to overlook, such as optimising the download and install process of the software itself, choosing good milestone nomenclature - basically the 'little details'. My abilities in that area probably make up for my shortfalls in other areas.

What he will be doing for Google is still under wraps - his move brought speculation that Google might make a browser - but he will continue to work on Firefox.

"Google always struck me as a place populated by intelligent, motivated people and it's hard not to want to be in an environment like that."

Goodger says that working on open-source is good training for any technology career.