Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/08/24

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending August 24, 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 activities. Two new projects got approved for funding, details to be announced when all the paperwork gets done. ...

2007-08-27 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

eMusic and accidental release syndrome

Last Sunday night I happened to be reading the eMusic message boards when I saw a [new post][new pos]") announcing the availability on eMusic of the new album [Kala][] from M.I.A. The original announcement was quickly followed by those ominous words familiar to all eMusic regulars: “get it while you can.” I followed the advice, quickly downloaded the album, and the next morning woke up to read the latest comment on the topic: “And, now it’s gone.” In this case it’s not really gone from eMusic completely, it’s just “unavailable for download in your country” (another phrase dreaded by eMusicians). ...

2007-08-23 · 7 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/08/17

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending August 17, 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 activities. The Mozilla Foundation is making a second grant to the Mozdev Community Organization to support maintenance and enhancement of the Mozdev web site. (We made a similar grant last year.) Henri Sivonen completed the final milestone on his Foundation-funded conformance checker work. ...

2007-08-21 · 3 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/08/10

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending August 10, 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 activities. The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the 2008 W4A conference (renewing our sponsorship from this year). Henri Sivonen completed another milestone on his Foundation-funded conformance checker work. ...

2007-08-13 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Universal goes back to the future with DRM-free music

Reading one of Bob Lefsetz’s latest letters recently I found out about Universal’s plan to offer digital music in a DRM-free format (although not through iTunes). Lefsetz takes a somewhat jaundiced view of the situation, and in particular makes the point (which I mostly agree with) that the key issue for music buyers is price, not DRM. Hypebot takes issue with his pessimism and (among other things) sees abandonment of DRM as key to enabling more experimentation in music retailing. I agree with this too, but I also remember: Haven’t we seen an experiment like this before? ...

2007-08-12 · 5 min · Frank Hecker

To my remaining readers

If anyone is still reading this blog, my apologies: I’ve been preoccupied with work and family matters and haven’t posted anything since May. In fact, things got so bad in terms of distractions that I had not one but two months in which I even neglected to use all my eMusic downloads (the horror!). I can’t promise to resume the posting frequency of certain times past, but I do have at least one or two new posts coming up in the next few days, and hope to keep additional posts coming on a semi-regular schedule. ...

2007-08-12 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/08/03

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the weeks ending July 27 and August 3, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on the last two weeks; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Executive director search. The search committee had its first meeting; for more information see the meeting notes. ...

2007-08-06 · 3 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/07/20

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending July 20, 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 activities. Henri Sivonen completed another milestone in his HTML conformance checker project. Next action(s): Evaluate a funding request for sponsorship of a developer workshop (Mozilla-related but not Mozilla-specific). Make a decision on two new accessibility-related proposals. ...

2007-07-23 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/07/13

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending July 13, 2007. Projects for the week Note that starting with this report I’m going to be more consistent about making this a report for all Foundation-related activities, not just stuff I’m doing. For more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week. ...

2007-07-16 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/07/06

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending July 6, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. Steve Lee completed phase 2 of his Jambu project to enable Firefox to work with alternative input devices; for more information see his report; he’ll now be starting phase 3 of this work. Aaron Leventhal submitted two new accessibility-related grant proposals for our consideration. ...

2007-07-09 · 2 min · Frank Hecker