Gervase Markham is one of only three employees of the Mozilla Foundation. Yet the ground-breaking technology group is threatening to topple the industry’s biggest players, including Microsoft.

After the events of yesterday – eBay scooping up Skype for up to $4.1 billion (£2.2bn) and Oracle’s $5.85 billion (£3.2bn) deal to buy Siebel Systems – it would be reasonable to expect to find such a figure powerbroking on Wall Street or brainstorming in Silicon Valley.

But the T-shirt clad, 27-year-old Oxford graduate arrives for our meeting in a café around the corner from his home in Enfield, north London, on his bike. The Mozilla Foundation, which is registered as a charity in the United States and is most famous for its Firefox internet browser, is full of surprises.

"Mozilla was founded to safeguard choice and innovation on the internet,"Mr Markham says. "We believe diversity is good and we believe in creating good products. We are here to make it more difficult for any one particular company to hijack the web."

At this point, Mr Markham anticipates the next question: "And no, it’s not just Microsoft that we’re talking about.

"If a company such as, say, Macromedia had its way, every website out there would run on its Flash animation software. There are a number of large companies that have their own future vision of the web. We don’t want one to blot out the others."

According to Mr Markham, the threat posed by any company to consumer choice on the internet and the general health of the web, "is, in every case, a function of intent and capability".

In these terms, and given Mozilla’s stated mission and range of products, it is hard not to suppose it is in fact picking a fight with Microsoft – the world’s biggest software developer, whose flagship Windows operating platform is used on 90 per cent of PCs.

Mozilla’s history gives weight to the idea. "Mozilla traces its roots back to 1998 and the team that developed Netscape, the internet browser," says Mr Markham. He joined Mozilla in 1999, when after two years of studying chemistry at university, he switched to computing, found Mozilla on the web and so volunteered for quality control work, working on a very basic version of a web browser.

Netscape had dominated the browser market in the 1990s, until Microsoft, led by its founder Bill Gates, crushed it by giving away its own rival product, Internet Explorer, with its Windows package. That Microsoft is now feeling the squeeze from Mozilla – and other opensource software companies that make a point of giving away their wares – has signalled to some that the process could have turned full circle.

Just how much of a bite Mozilla has taken out of Microsoft is debatable. Mr Markham is dubious about talking in terms of market share – "a very difficult thing to measure with any degree of certainty" – partly, it seems, because if Mozilla were one day to dominate the market, its software could become the prime target for hackers.

But Mozilla has launched two products in particular that have undoubtedly caught the PC-owning public’s imagination. The first, Firefox, the internet browser, is billed as a more secure alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The second, Thunderbird, is a rival product to Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail system.

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