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.

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 2, 2007. As in previous weeks, we’ve been working on projects not yet ready for public announcement; also I lost a lot of time dealing with medical issues and system problems. 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. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 26. 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 published a blog post on Mozilla Foundation grants and related expenditures for 2006. Legal/IP issues I’m still waiting on more feedback on the proposed corporate contributors agreement. Other We posted the Mozilla Foundation 2006 Form 990 and 2006 consolidated financial statement to www.mozilla.org along with an accompanying FAQ, as noted in Mitchell’s blog post. I attended FSOSS 2007 and met with representatives from various Mozilla Foundation grantees, including Seneca College and the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto. (I’ll blog more about this soon.) Upcoming activities I’m not planning any out-of-town trips in the near future. ...

As noted in a blog post by Mitchell Baker, yesterday we posted various 2006 financial documents for the Mozilla Foundation, including our 2006 Form 990, a 2006 consolidated financial statement for the Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and a FAQ on 2006 finances. The 2006 financial FAQ in particular contains some figures on Mozilla Foundation grants and related expenditures for 2006. In this post I wanted to describe in a bit more detail what activities the Mozilla Foundation funded in 2006. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 19. I spent almost all of my time working on internal projects and projects not yet ready for public announcement; some of these will be announced soon. 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. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 12. Last week we had a Foundation board meeting, and we’re working on some internal (for now) initiatives coming out of that. 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. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 5. As with last week, I spent a lot of the week preparing for an upcoming board meeting and working on other internal projects; some of these will be announced in due time. 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. ...

As noted by Digital Audio Insider, lots of economists seem to think that what Radiohead is doing is analogous to working for tips; Bob Lefsetz thinks so too. Folks, let me ask you something: When you last went out to dinner, did your waiter or waitress ask for your name, email address, postal address, telephone numbers, and for permission to contact you with information about other services they could provide to you? And will they use this information to create a customer database to do targeted direct marketing to you and all the other people they’ve served, using the amounts of your tips to tailor their marketing appropriately? I’m guessing that they didn’t and they won’t. ...

Now that the hubbub about Radiohead’s new release has died down, there are a couple of things worth adding to the analysis from various sources I’ve read, including Hypebot, Bob Lefsetz, Digital Music News, and Contentinople. (I haven’t of course read every commentary on Radiohead, so it’s possible that someone has said these things before me and better than me—I don’t do this for a living, you know.) First, I think people are missing a crucial point about Radiohead’s “name your own price” strategy. It is not all about giving listeners what they want, namely DRM-free music that’s free (or nearly so); it is also about giving Radiohead something it apparently wants (and that it could not get working through a major label): deep information about its listener population beyond the hard-core fans (i.e., those who’ve already joined the Radiohead fan club), including in particular information about which listeners are good candidates for up-selling strategies aimed to move more Radiohead merchandise, tickets, and other Radiohead-related products and services. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending September 28. I spent a lot of the week preparing for an upcoming board meeting and working on other internal projects; some of these will be announced in due time. 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. ...