This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending April 27, 2007.
Projects for the week
Here’s a partial listing of what I did this past week:
Grants and related activities. I completed paperwork on one of the new accessibility-related proposals. Henri Sivonen completed the second milestone on his HTML5 conformance checker prototype project. I took care of various items related to expenses for CSUN and the W4A conference.
Next action(s): Finish paperwork for a second new accessibility-related proposal, and get resolution on the proposals resulting from the Summer of Code submissions. Do a blog post summarizing our accessibility-related efforts, as well as a brief meeting report on CSUN and G3ICT.
IP/legal issues. I reviewed an internal draft of the proposed corporate contributors agreement (bug 342029) and provided comments. Hopefully we’ll soon have a public draft of this available for comment. I also worked with Gerv to confirm how we should be marking public domain files (e.g., test case input).
Next action(s): Work more to get the contributors agreement moved forward.
CA-related. Along with Gerv I participated in a Mozilla project conference call to discuss the latest draft guidelines on Extended Validation certificates.
Next action(s): As needed.
See also the blogs by Gerv and Zak for their own status reports.
Upcoming activities
- I have a house move scheduled for May 4, so I’ll be off that day and mostly unreachable until the chaos settles down.
- I’ll be in Atlanta on July 2 to speak at the annual meeting of the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science.
- I’m considering attending at least part of OSCON 2007 July 23–27.
- I’ll tentatively be in Boston on July 30–31.
Random notes
I spent way too much time last night reading the Comics Curmudgeon blog and laughing hysterically at its comments on some of the finer offerings from America’s newspaper comic pages. There’s a serious copyright-related point here too: Long copyright terms, work for hire contracts, and the limited amount of space for comics in newspapers combine to cause long-running comic strips to be “farmed” for the gain of comics syndicates and (in some cases) the authors’ heirs, until the soil of creativity is exhausted. (For an artist’s view of this phenomenon see the speech “The Cheapening of the Comics” delivered nearly twenty years ago by Bill Watterson.) In the end such comics retain interest only as fodder for ironic commentary and detournement.