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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. Next action(s): Complete paperwork on a major new grant. Evaluate a funding request for sponsorship of a developer workshop (Mozilla-related but not Mozilla-specific). Work with the Foundation board to make a decision on other new proposals. IP/legal issues. I’m responding to licensing-related questions to the Foundation while Gerv Markham is on vacation. I contacted a company about putting proper MPL, etc., notifications in the EULA and other material for their Mozilla-based product. Next action(s): Work with the SeaMonkey Council and others on appropriate policies for the SeaMonkey trademarks. Work more to get the contributors agreement moved forward. Web sites. David Boswell worked more on revising the Foundation section of www.mozilla.org. Next action(s): Continue this work. Other. Zak Greant worked on tying up loose ends from the Internet as a Public Good Symposium. Gerv was on vacation. Next action(s): Do a blog post on the issues discussed at the IPG symposium. ...

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. Grants and related activities. As part of our efforts to improve the accessibility of Firefox and the web, particularly on free and open source platforms, the Foundation will be funding improvements to the GNOME AT-SPI accessibility API on Linux and enhancements to the Orca screen reader for Linux. Also, Eitan Isaacson completed his Foundation-funded work on the Accerciser accessibility test tool for GNOME on Linux. Last but definitely not least, Aaron Leventhal was one of five winners of the 2007 Google/O’Reilly Open Source Awards, for his work on Mozilla and Firefox accessibility; please join us in congratulating Aaron! Next action(s): Evaluate a funding request for sponsorship of a developer workshop (Mozilla-related but not Mozilla-specific). Work with the Foundation board to make a decision on other new proposals. IP/legal issues. I’m responding to licensing-related questions to the Foundation while Gerv Markham is on vacation. Next action(s): Work with the SeaMonkey Council and others on appropriate policies for the SeaMonkey trademarks. Work more to get the contributors agreement moved forward. Web sites. David Boswell created a Foundation page on wiki.mozilla.org for Foundation-related work in progress, links to staff blogs, etc. Other. Along with Mitchell, David, Zak, and I participated in the Internet as a Public Good symposium at Harvard. Thanks go to Zak for his work in getting the symposium organized! Next actions: Do a blog post on the issues discussed at the IPG symposium. ...

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. IP/legal issues. I worked on some internal legal and licensing issues. Next action(s): Work with the SeaMonkey Council and others on appropriate policies for the SeaMonkey trademarks. Work more to get the contributors agreement moved forward. Other. Gerv attended the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). Zak has been working to help get the Internet as a Public Good symposium organized. David has been working on various tasks related to donations to the Mozilla Foundation. ...

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. Next action(s): Evaluate a funding request for sponsorship of a developer workshop (Mozilla-related but not Mozilla-specific). Work with the Foundation board to make a decision on other new grant proposals. Do a blog post summarizing our accessibility-related efforts (done), as well as a brief meeting report on CSUN and G3ICT. IP/legal issues. With the help of Smokey Ardisson and Samuel Sidler, I tracked down some additional information needed by our lawyers to initiate trademark registration of the Camino logo. Next action(s): Get the Camino logo trademark registration formally submitted (done). Work with the SeaMonkey Council and others on appropriate policies for the SeaMonkey trademarks. Work more to get the contributors agreement moved forward. Other. I spoke at the National Federation of the Blind in Computer Science meeting in Atlanta GA, about the nature and importance of open source, our Mozilla and Firefox accessibility efforts, and how open source might affect the assistive technology industry. I also cleaned out the queues for various Mozilla mailing lists that I moderate, and wrote responses to any relevant non-spam emails. ...

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. Next action(s): Evaluate a funding request for sponsorship of a developer workshop (Mozilla-related but not Mozilla-specific). Do a blog post summarizing our accessibility-related efforts, as well as a brief meeting report on CSUN and G3ICT. IP/legal issues. I asked our lawyers to initiate trademark registration of the Camino logo. Next action(s): Work with the SeaMonkey Council and others on appropriate policies for the SeaMonkey trademarks. Work more to get the contributors agreement moved forward. Other. I took a day of vacation. ...

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.) Next action(s): Evaluate a funding request for sponsorship of a developer workshop (Mozilla-related but not Mozilla-specific). Do a blog post summarizing our accessibility-related efforts, as well as a brief meeting report on CSUN and G3ICT. IP/legal issues. I worked more on internal legal issues. Next action(s): Work with the SeaMonkey Council and others on appropriate policies for the SeaMonkey trademarks. Work more to get the contributors agreement moved forward. Other. While we were out in Mountain View last week David Boswell and I met with a number of different people; thanks to all who took time to talk with us. Topics discussed included the Foundation and Corporation grant programs, the various mozilla.org web sites, the Mozilla Store, and other areas the Foundation is involved in today or might be in the future. More on these in future. ...