Josh Aas recently found his answer to the predicament all seniors fear: what to do after graduation.
Aas wrote his first computer program—a game—-when he was 12. It was distributed over AOL and allowed players to shoot down “little airplanes.” Aas said that he has always known he wanted to work with computers, and during high school he focused on graphic design. It was in his senior year of high school that Aas decided he wanted to do programming.
The Mozilla Foundation, makers of the popular Firefox web browser, recently hired Aas to improve the Apple version of their software. While there are hundreds of programmers working with the foundation, Aas said he is only the sixteenth paid employee of the foundation itself.
Aas got involved with the Mozilla Foundation during his first year at Macalester, working on the web browser’s code in his free time and submitting “fixes” for problems in the code on the foundation’s public forum. Aas said that as he got more involved, he took on a leadership role in some sections of the work, and the “whole thing snowballed” from there, until Mozilla offered him a job two weeks ago.
Aas is a computer science and English major from Duluth, Minn. He will be working for Mozilla part time until graduation this spring, and will then start working full time.
The nonprofit foundation started in 1998, when Netscape turned over all of its intellectual property, including computer code, to the public domain before selling the company name to AOL. This meant that other individuals and companies were free to use Netscape’s code in their own projects.
Netscape spent $2 million to start the Mozilla Foundation, named for the code name used for the technology before it was made public. Aas said the goal in creating the foundation was to ensure that the code would keep being developed, and the foundation now receives most of its funding from tech companies who make use of this public code, such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Google. Firefox is a web-browsing program that can be downloaded free off the foundation’s Web site, Mozilla.org.
|
