This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 23, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Grants and related activities. I’m working with Aaron Leventhal to prepare an overall plan for Mozilla-related accessibility work in 2007 and 2008. Regardless of how this plan gets funded (and some work may not get funded at all), I think this will be a useful exercise to pull together all of the accessibility-related Mozilla activities into one vision and connect them with the wider world of open source accessibility. Next action(s): More preparations for the CSUN conference. CA certificates. Gerv Markham has been working away on updating the status of the various bugs for including CA certificates. Next action(s): I need to work with Gerv to make sure we have bugs filed for all current requests from CAs. Other. I met with David Boswell to discuss the Mozdev Community Organization and how we could work together in future activities to support the Mozilla project. I also talked with some folks working to build a XUL-based application and discussed how the Mozilla Foundation might support the community of people working with XUL. ...

As chance would have it, I was inspired recently to try to start blogging again about eMusic, after a few months during which I was busy with other things and just didn’t feel the urge to expound on things eMusic-related. Appropriately enough, this post is about how eMusic can bring a little excitement back into our relationship. As a download (as opposed to streaming) subscription service eMusic relies on the fact that a lot of subscribers aren’t necessarily that active in using the service: They don’t use their full download quotas, which raises eMusic’s revenue and profit per track and in essence subsidizes eMusic’s low prices for everyone else. At the extreme end of the spectrum eMusic no doubt has subscribers who (for whatever reason) don’t download anything at all, but just let eMusic continue to bill their credit card. Wouldn’t it be great for eMusic’s business model if everyone did that? ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 16, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Grants and related activities. This was a big week for Mozilla Foundation-funded projects. Charles Chen finished up his project to create test cases for WAI ARIA live regions; this work promises to help advance the cause of enhancing accessibility for web-based applications that make heavy use of dynamic updating, and is receiving some good feedback. Shortly thereafter Alexander Surkov finished his project to improve XForms accessibility, and we approved a new project in which he’ll work on implementing the IAccessible2 accessibility API for Windows in Mozilla code. IAccessible2 is an extremely strategic technology from the point of view of accessibility; for a more in-depth discussion see the newsgroup message by Aaron Leventhal and blog posts by Rich Schwerdtfeger of IBM and Peter Korn of Sun. We also approved another project for Gijs Kruitbosch to improve the accessibility of the ChatZilla IRC client; this is important for present and future Mozilla developers who use screen readers and other assistive technologies and who want to participate more fully in developer discussions. Finally, in non-accessibility news Henri Sivonen will be presenting at XTech 2007 on his Mozilla Foundation-funded work to create an HTML5 conformance checker. Next action(s): More preparations for the CSUN conference. CA certificates. We’re making some progress on creating a published list of CA certificates in Mozilla products (bug 333272). Next action(s): I need to work with Gerv to make sure we have bugs filed for all current requests from CAs to have their root CA certificates included in Mozilla products. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 9, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Grants and related activities. Same as last week: I worked on grant proposals already received, and also prepared for our Mozilla Foundation presence at the 2007 CSUN conference. Next action(s): Have the board consider a new accessibility-related grant proposal. CA certificates. Gerv Markham continued working on processing CA requests. We also had a public discussion in the mozilla.dev.l10n newsgroup on the merits of including CAs for regional government CAs (i.e., below the country level). Next action(s): I need to help Gerv out with publishing an expended set of information on CAs (bug 333272). Legal issues. We’re looking at the possibility of creating a standard contributors agreement for use by corporations interested in contributing code to the Mozilla project (bug 369879). Separately Gerv Markham has proposed revisions to the existing CVS contributors form to bring it up to date and make it more general (e.g., remove CVS-specific references) (bug 342029). Next actions: Decide on the preferred approach to creating a corporate contributors agreement and revising the CVS form. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 2, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Grants and related activities. Same as last week: I worked on grant proposals already received, and also prepared for our Mozilla Foundation presence at the 2007 CSUN conference. Also, Alexander Surkov is close to finishing up his Mozilla Foundation-funded work on XForms accessibility. Next action(s): Have the board consider a new accessibility-related grant proposal. CA certificates. Gerv Markham is taking over processing of CA requests for root CA certificates to be included in Mozilla products. He’s been closing inactive requests and opening new ones at CAs’ requests. Next action(s): As part of this work Gerv will be publishing an expended set of information on CAs (bug 333272). ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending January 26, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did these past two weeks: Grants and related activities. I worked on grant proposals already received, and also prepared for our Mozilla Foundation presence at the 2007 CSUN conference. Next action(s): One more grant proposal to consider, plus follow-up on stuff we’ve already funded. CA certificates. I continued work on updating the list of CA requests and related information. Next action(s): Now that he’s back from vacation, Gerv Markham will join me in working on CA-related stuff, and hopefully we’ll make more progress. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending January 19, 2007. Note that this was an abbreviated week because I had to take some vacation time to handle matters related to our new house. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did these past two weeks: Grants and related activities. I worked on paperwork related to the grants I mentioned last week. I also got one more accessibility-related grant proposal to consider, and started preparations for our Mozilla Foundation presence at the 2007 CSUN conference. Next action(s): More grant proposals to consider. CA certificates. I started work on updating the list of CA requests and related information; after thinking about the relevant security issues and consulting with others, I’ve tentatively decided to publish future CA-related information on www.mozilla.org (not wiki.mozilla.org). Next action(s): Start pushing CA-related information to www.mozilla.org. Other. Zak Greant attended linux.conf.au in Sydney Australia and represented the Foundation while there. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending January 12, 2007, as well as for the previous week ending January 5. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did these past two weeks: Grants and related activities. I’m pleased to announce that the Mozilla Foundation will be making a grant to the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre of the University of Toronto, to help support development of accessibility enhancements to the popular Dojo toolkit. For updates on other work the Foundation is funding, check out Alexander Surkov’s progress report on improving XForms accessibility, the improvements to the XUL Accessibility Guidelines being created by the folks at WebAIM, and Charles Chen’s work on creating test cases for accessibility of AJAX applications. Next action(s): More grant proposals to consider. CA certificates. Beginning in February Gerv Markham will be spending some time helping me reduce the large backlog of requests from CAs wishing to have their root certificates included in Mozilla-based products Next action(s): With Gerv’s help I’ll be creating an authoritative list of all current CA requests, to be published either at the current URL or somewhere else. (I’d really like to move to a wiki-based site if restrictions on page modifications can be put in place for CA certificate data and other CA-related information.) ...

Due to the holiday season my activities have been relatively light. I’ve therefore skipped doing a separate report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending January 5, 2007; see the report for the week ending January 12, 2007.

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending December 29, 2006, as well as for the previous week ending December 22. As with the week ending December 15, almost all of my time was taken up with internal matters. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did these past two weeks: Strategy. I did some over-the-holidays thinking about possible future Mozilla Foundation activities, and wrote up some thoughts for the board of directors. Next action(s): Do more discussion with the board about proposed plans for the Foundation. ...