Ebay's big launch this week was a Firefox add-in called the Firefox Companion for eBay . What? It's a sidebar in the Mozilla Firefox browser that lets buyers watch the status of all the items they are bidding for. Obviously, this news was big enough for the company to hire out a posh pub in Smithfield and get a couple of hundred people in for some free booze.
Not a bad life eh?
Well, I did have a good conversation with eBay's Jonathan Gabbai, who worked on the project. What struck me about the Firefox add-in is not the software itself but, the fact that eBay has had to work with Mozilla, and the open source community. This means the code for the add-in will eventually be made available as open source, under the Mozilla public licensing agreement.
