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? ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

For some time now the Mozilla Foundation has been involved in supporting efforts to make Firefox and other Mozilla products more accessible to people with disabilities; see for example my blog post on Mozilla and accessibility. This document builds on the ideas in that post to propose an overall vision and strategy for possible efforts to improve the accessibility of Firefox and other Mozilla-related software and the web in general. Note that the ideas expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Mozilla Foundation. It’s up to the Foundation board and to the new executive director to decide whether and how to implement this proposed strategy. Also note that my comments are primarily concerning the Mozilla Foundation; however the Mozilla Corporation has also taken some great steps to support accessibility (for example, hiring Tim Keenan to work full-time on accessibility QA and evangelism) and no doubt will do more in future. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 29, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. I approved funding for a project to enhance the NVDA open source screen reader for Windows to better support Firefox. This actually happened some time ago, but I forgot to mention it: WebAIM completed its project to produce revised XUL accessibility guidelines and create a XUL accessibility evaluation tool. Henri Sivonen completed the third milestone on his current HTML5 conformance checker project. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 22, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. Eitan Isaacson completed the intermediate milestone on a project we’re funding to complete development of the Accerciser accessibility test tool. (This work supports our efforts to improve accessibility for Firefox on Linux.) ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 15, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. I’m pleased to annouce that the Mozilla Foundation will providing some additional funding for Henri Sivonen’s work on HTML5 conformance checking. (Note that the code for the original HTML5 conformance checker is now available for checkout and build.) We’re also funding Scott Haeger to improve Firefox support in the Orca Linux-based screen reader. I also completed paperwork for a project for Leo Spalteholz to improve keyboard navigation in Firefox. (This was originally one of the Google Summer of Code submissions that we thought were worthy but for which we didn’t have slots). ...