This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending March 31, 2006. Besides the usual internal administrivia and related matters, the big activities for the week related to the Mozilla relicensing project, the National Federation of the Blind, and the OpenBSD project.
Projects for the week
Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending March 31:
CSUN conference. I posted a full CSUN 2006 conference report. We also had some follow-on activities from CSUN, as noted below.
Next action(s): Continue working on activities resulting from this year’s conference, and plan for next year.
Mozilla relicensing project. Gerv Markham made the final set of code changes needed for the Mozilla relicensing project. All Mozilla source code going into the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird is now available under LGPL or GPL terms in addition to MPL terms. For more information see Gerv’s blog post on relicensing. On behalf of the Mozilla Foundation I extend our thanks to all the copyright holders who provided the permissions necessary for relicensing to occur, to Scott Collins and Trent Mick for their work on the relicensing scripts, and of course last but certainly not least to Gerv himself, for his dedication in seeing this project through to completion.
Next action(s): We need to update the Mozilla relicensing FAQ to reflect the completion of the relicensing project.
National Federation of the Blind. On March 30 Aaron Leventhal of IBM and I visited the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore to discuss Mozilla-related accessibility issues with various people there. It was a good meeting overall. The people at NFB are appreciative of the work that the Mozilla project has done in improving Firefox accessibility. We discussed further possible projects, in particular to evangelize the accessible DHTML technology implemented in Firefox.
Next action(s): Work with Aaron to follow up with NFB as appropriate.
WebAIM. As another CSUN followup, I had a brief phone conversation with people at the Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) project (at the Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University) to talk about the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and Mozilla-related accessibility efforts.
Next action(s): None at this time..
OpenBSD project. The Mozilla Foundation made a $10K donation to the OpenBSD project in support of development of OpenBSD, OpenSSH, and related activities. The OpenBSD project does great work in the area of creating a secure Unix-like operating system (which runs Firefox, of course) and developing related security technologies. In particular the Mozilla project uses SSH extensively for various purposes, including securing connections to the Mozilla CVS repository. The OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects have been experiencing some financial difficulties, and based on their importance to the Mozilla project and to the wider open source and free software world we felt that it was well worth showing our support for them.
Next action(s): None at this time.
Administrivia. I finally got the problem sorted out where my blog posts weren’t showing up on Planet Mozilla and feedhouse.mozillazine.org. In case anyone is interested, the problem appeared to be that my blog was generating its feeds in Atom 1.0 format, whereas Planet Mozilla and feedhouse appear to support only Atom 0.3. I fixed the problem by having my feeds be published through FeedBurner, with redirection used to have the old feed URLs still work; FeedBurner’s SmartFeed service then makes sure that Planet and other feed aggregators get a format they can handle. All in all I’m very happy with FeedBurner thus far and would definitely recommend the service to others.
Upcoming activities
Here’s what I’ll be doing and where I’ll be in the coming months.
- If time permits I’ll be attending at least parts of the PKI R&D Workshop at NIST on April 4–6.
- I’ll be in Mountain View in late May or early June for a Mozilla Foundation board meeting.
This concludes the report.