Posts

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 10, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Tamarin project. This was the major event of the week (alluded to in last week’s report) and accounted for the bulk of time I spent on Foundation-related tasks. I did a Tamarin blog post, an Adobe-internal webcast for Adobe employees, lots of press interviews, and other writing and responses related to the announcement. ...

By now the press release has gone out announcing Adobe’s contribution to the Mozilla project of open source code for their ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), and Brendan has blogged about it. I’m not directly involved with the project itself but have spent a few days reviewing press materials and doing press interviews, so I’ve had a chance to think about the significance of this announcement and what it means for the Mozilla project and for the web at large. Here are some of my thoughts. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 3, 2006. Note that a lot of the stuff I did this week was for a project not yet ready for announcement, hence the skimpiness of this report. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: IP-related issues. With others, looked into the possibility of relicensing the Rhino Java-based JavaScript engine under the MPL. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 27, 2006. This was a partial week for me as I had to deal with various home and family issues. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Mozilla Foundation vision and strategy. One of the things I’ll be doing over the next few months is working with the Mozilla Foundation board to create a more defined vision and strategy for the Foundation to guide our efforts in 2007 and beyond, in support of our overall mission to promote choice and innovation on the Internet. If you have your own thoughts on what the Foundation should be doing, please feel free to send me an email and I’ll take your suggestions into account in my own planning activities. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 20, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Board meeting. A big chunk of my time last week was spent preparing for and following up from a Mozilla Foundation board meeting. Next action(s): More follow-up from the board meeting. IP-related issues. I did some work for Daniel Glazman relating to finding an official name for his new HTML/XML editing application (which he refers to as “Composer” for now). ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 13, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: IP-related issues. I had some more discussions with folks about how to handle the SeaMonkey trademarks. Next action(s): More discussions about creating trademark policies for SeaMonkey, Sunbird, and other non-Corporation products. Grants and related activities. I attended the Mozilla accessibility summit in Cambridge MA to talk to the various people we’ve funded to do accessibility-related work, and get an update on accessibility-related development activities. It was a great event; for more information on what went on see Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility summit blog post. As noted in Mark’s post we also completed paperwork on funding XUL accessibility work by WebAIM; I’m glad that got done and we’re able to announce it to everyone. Finally, I’m happy to note that the Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the W4A conference on accessibility next year. ...

By now many if not most of you reading this will have seen the news about the next version of Eudora being open source and based on Thunderbird’s technology. You may also seen some of the analysis of the announcement. I thought about writing up some analysis of my own, but rather than listen to me I think it’s better to let the Eudora developers speak for themselves. For my own part I’ll simply say that that’s it’s great to have the Eudora developers join the Mozilla community and the world of open source (in particular, I’m glad to see more developers with deep experience in the email space join the project), and I wish them the best of luck as they develop the next Eudora release. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 6, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: IP-related issues. I did some trademark-related work for SeaMonkey, plus various other items. Next action(s): Look at creating trademark policies for SeaMonkey, Sunbird, and other non-Corporation products. Grants and related activities. I finished up paperwork for funding some more accessibility-related work, and will announce it soon. There’s also another grant proposal we’ve received for an unrelated area, plus we’ve gotten expressions of interest from a number of other organizations regarding applying for grants. ...

Here’s a weird one, perhaps even weirder than the eMusic deal with Westin Hotels: “Johnny Rockets Expands Music Initiative with Local Market Campaign.” For those who aren’t familiar with it, Johnny Rockets is a faux-retro hamburger chain, and now an eMusic business partner: Johnny Rockets will be expanding its branded music to bring the classic Johnny Rockets music experience to consumers and music fans in new ways. ...

My apologies for not posting in recent days; work has taken precedence. Here are two quick items to help fill the void for now: First, Pioneers of the Inevitable, the folks behind the open source media player Songbird, have just gotten $1M in venture funding. They’re also about to release version 0.2, but you knew that already, right? Second, since this is Swindleeeee!!!!! we have to have an eMusic tie-in, and fortunately Erik Staats came through for us, announcing his new eMusic extension for Songbird. The extension eliminates the most annoying (at least to me) feature of the eMusic web site, namely that listening to the 30-second track samples requires launching an external application (in my case iTunes for OS X). The extension still has a few rough spots (as noted in my posts to the eMusic message board thread linked to earlier), but it’s definitely full of promise. ...