This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 17, 2006. (My apologies, I got behind on posting these.) Significant topics for the week included FOSDEM, “intellectual property,” and press releases.
Projects for the week
Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week of 17 February; note that I removed the “next action(s)” comments because they were out of date:
FOSDEM localizers meeting. Our list of attendees at the localizers meeting at FOSDEM on February 25 and 26 grew to about about 30 people. Note that this didn’t count other Mozilla contributors who might be attending Mozilla-related meetings at FOSDEM.
Meeting on the patent examination process. I attended a public meeting at the USPTO in Alexandria VA discussing proposed changes to the patent examination process; this was related to the “open source as prior art” initiative supported by OSDL.)
GPLv3 process. I’m representing the Mozilla Foundation in the GPLv3 process sponsored by the Free Software Foundation, as part of Discussion Committee A. Besides participating on the committee’s mailing list, last week I participated in a committee teleconference. My main interest thus far is in trying to get clarity from the FSF regarding GPLv3 compatibility with the MPL and similar non-GPL copyleft licenses. I also did two press interviews regarding GPLv3 and how it relates to the Mozilla project.
Camino press release. I assisted the Camino project with preparing and distributing a press release announcing Camino 1.0. (Note that the press release itself was issued under the auspices of the Camino project, not the Mozilla Foundation proper.)
CA/browser issues. As I previously noted in my discussion of CAs, certificates, and the SSL/TLS UI, Gerv and I have been participating in informal discussions with CAs and browser suppliers, in particular relating to the possibility of future “extended validation” certificates that might be accorded special treatment in the browser UI. I participated in a conference call relating to these discussions, and talked to one of the CA’s about their proposals for validation procedures for extended validation certificates.
Mozilla (re)licensing. For quite some time now Gerv has been working to finish up the Mozilla relicensing project intended to make MPL-licensed Mozilla code available under GPL and LGPL terms as well. Recently Gerv assisted the developers of the new Songbird media player in getting the licensing straightened out for their product, which includes GPL-licensed code; see Gerv’s blog post and the Songbird licensing FAQ for more information.
This concludes the report.