This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending December 7, 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 Ariel Rios completed his Foundation-funded project to add the Accessibility::Collection interface to the AT-SPI accessibility API for GNOME; for more information see GNOME bug 326516. Patrick Michaud produced a progress report on the Perl 6 work jointly funded by the Mozilla Foundation and the Perl Foundation. Zak and I worked on some new grant proposals. Licensing and legal Gerv worked on revising and updating the Mozilla license policy, to bring the document in line with current practice. CAs and related issues I approved the application for inclusion from SwissSign and filed bug 407396 to have the SwissSign CA certificates added to NSS. Web sites David Boswell worked on various changes to www.mozilla.org, including a new Mozilla Foundation home page and a new “Featured Projects” page (bug 393447). Miscellaneous We have a new #foundation IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org for anyone wishing to contact us real-time. Upcoming trips and events I’m planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 (afternoon only) and 12. A final note: We have just over two weeks left in 2007 for you to donate to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program and support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project. ...

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.) ...