This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 30, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Steve Lee provided a report on his participation in the RAatE conference. (Steve’s Jambu project has received funding from the Foundation.) I received some new grant proposals for the board’s consideration. CAs and related issues I worked on the applications for inclusion from SwissSign and TÜRKTRUST, as well as on the EV applications from VeriSign and QuoVadis. I made updates to the pending list to reflect the current status of CA applications. I created a wiki page to track recommended practices relating to CA applications. Web sites David Boswell posted a proposed new Mozilla Foundation page mockup for comment. Upcoming trips and events I’m planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 (afternoon only) and 12.

For the most part I resist writing about the actual music on eMusic, because I’m really not a very good musical critic. However from time to time I do feel the urge to recommend something, and this is one of those times. Courtesy of eMusic I’ve been listening to a lot of “contemporary classical” music (or “new music” to insiders), a taste I came by through listening to electronic music (techno, ambient, etc.). The most well-known and influential movement in classical music over the past half century is of course minimalism, and I think everyone interested in either classical music or (especially) modern electronic music should have an acquaintance with the classic works of minimalism. I’m referring here not to Nixon in China-style “minimalism” but rather to hard-core “let’s play that phrase a few dozen times and then introduce a new element or two” minimalism—or as suggested by someone in response to a Kyle Gann rant, the-music-formerly-known-as-minimalism. ...

No, Alex Ross (of “The Rest is Noise” fame, both blog and book) isn’t being mean to eMusic; in fact to my knowledge he’s never mentioned it, at least on his blog. What I mean is that several of the releases on Ross’s list of recommended CDs (CDs? how last century!) can be found on eMusic: ...

I know it’s only marginally eMusic-related (though it does include a quote from David Pakman, as noted below), but I can’t help commenting on the recent Wired interview with Doug Morris of Universal (not yet online, but excerpted in a blog post on the New York magazine site). Two points struck me in particular: First, the willful cluelessness of Morris and associates about technology and its effect on the music business; as New York magazine notes, it’s “like if your grandfather were accidentally hired to run Google.” Second, Morris’s claim that the major labels are just poor innocent victims in all this, comparing them to Al Capp’s famous Shmoo: ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 23, 2007. Note that this was a short week for those of us in the US due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures I did a blog post describing Mozilla Foundation grants and related expenditures in 2007. David Humphrey pointed us to a press article about Mozilla activities in Toronto and at Seneca College. (Seneca is a Mozilla Foundation grantee.) Donations I did a blog post on the new Mozilla Foundation directed giving program. David Boswell published a FAQ about donating to the Foundation and a new page describing Foundation activities, and coordinated updates to the main Mozilla Foundation donation page and the per-project donation pages for Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and Mozilla accessibility to people with disabilities. CAs and related issues I worked on the applications for inclusion from SwissSign and TÜRKTRUST CAs, announced my intent to approve TÜRKTRUST’s inclusion, and started a two-week comment period on TÜRKTRUST’s application. Other Gerv helped resolve some licensing-related issues. Gerv provided detailed feedback on Alex Faaborg’s UI mockups. Upcoming activities I’m planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 (afternoon only) and 12.

Yesterday I posted information on the Mozilla Foundation’s grants and related expenditures in 2007 to date, and concluded by briefly mentioning our intention to fund projects in more areas as we move into 2008. In connection with that, today we’re announcing what I call a “directed giving” program for the Mozilla Foundation that allows you to donate to the Foundation and designate your donation for any one of a set of Mozilla-related projects. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 16, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Scott Haeger completed milestone 3 on his work to implement rich document browsing in Orca with Firefox. I wrote a blog post about Seneca College and open source education. (Seneca is a Mozilla Foundation grantee.) CAs and related issues I worked on the applications for inclusion from SwissSign and TÜRKTRUST CAs, announced my intent to approve SwissSign’s inclusion, and started a two-week comment period on SwissSign’s application. Upcoming activities I’m planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 (afternoon only) and 12.

I previously posted some information on the Mozilla Foundation’s grants and related expenditures in 2006. Since then I’ve been expanding our internal database of information about such expenditures, and have now gotten to the point where I can provide the same information for 2007. I’ll continue updating this post in the remainder of the year as we add new projects. Background In my previous post I provided information important to understanding the Mozilla Foundation’s grant and grant-related activities. See the post for the full details; here’s a brief recap of the two most important points: ...

I spent October 25 and 26 in Toronto attending the FSOSS 2007 conference put on by Seneca College. I didn’t attend the conference primarily to hear the conference presentations; my main aim was to talk with the people associated with two projects that the Mozilla Foundation has funded, namely the Mozilla-related educational activities at Seneca College and the Mozilla-related accessibility work at the University of Toronto’s Adaptive Technology Resource Centre. However as it turns out some of the presentations I saw had interesting connections with my Seneca and ATRC discussions. In this post I’ll give my thoughts on how Seneca’s efforts relate to the broader world of business and education. (Note that these are my personal opinions only, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Mozilla Foundation or Seneca College.) ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 9, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures The Mozilla Foundation made a grant to the Perl Foundation to support Perl 6 and Parrot development. We’re funding some work by Eitan Isaacson to follow up from his project to migrate the Orca screen reader for Linux to the pyatspi library, including in particular improving the performance of Orca with Firefox. This project also includes work covered by GNOME bugs 448848, 446277, and 491862. We’re also funding Codethink Ltd to do a study to evaluate the feasibility of porting the GNOME AT-SPI accessibility interface from ORBit to D-Bus; we’re looking at this because ORBit is being deprecated, and we want to make sure that the accessibility infrastructure used by Firefox on Linux is as up to date as possible. Dojo 1.0 was released last week with lots of accessibility-related enhancements, including those developed by the University of Toronto Adaptive Technology Resource Centre with funding from the Mozilla Foundation; for more information see the final report on the project. CAs and related issues Last week I published version 1.1 of the Mozilla CA certificate policy; this new version formalizes our policy for considering requests from CAs to have their certificates marked as capable of issuing Extended Validation certificates. Note carefully: This does not guarantee that you’ll see EV capability enabled in Firefox, particularly for every CA that claims to issue EV certificates; this is just a policy revision, and actual EV support will depend on the work of the NSS and Firefox developers. I did some work on CA applications from SwissSign and VeriSign, and will continue working on other CA applications this week. Other Gerv did some work on Mozilla community activities in the UK. Zak delivered a keynote address at the International PHP Conference. David was on vacation all week. Upcoming activities I’m tentatively planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 and 12.