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 December 22, 2006; see the report for the week ending December 29, 2006.
When I last commented on the subject of Amazon.com and digital music I had some rather scathing things to say"). Now, according to a Hypebot article Amazon is rumored to be rethinking its former idea of setting up yet another DRM-hobbled would-be competitor to the iTunes Store, and considering selling DRM-free MP3 tracks under a variable pricing model. Assuming that the rumors are true (not always a safe assumption), what conclusions can we draw from this? ...
How come I didn’t know about this before? Jon Strunk, a product manager at eMusic, not only has a blog (is he the only person at eMusic with one?), he’s also been doing some interesting (albeit unofficial) projects mashing eMusic up with other music-related services. His latest post is on mashing up eMusic and Pandora and is well worth checking out; as you play tracks in Pandora it displays eMusic content related to the track and/or the artist, including a link to download the track if you’d like. (Based on the “Radio” listing in the mashup, a mashup of eMusic and Last.fm is also potentially in our future. I’m looking forward to it.) ...
This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending December 15, 2006. As with last week, the report is very short because most 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 this past week: Grants and related activities. I submitted one major accessibility proposal to the board for their consideration, plus some other smaller proposals in other areas. Next action(s): Get resolved any outstanding issues relating to 2006 grants and grant requests. ...
This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending December 8, 2006. The report is somewhat skimpy because most of my time was taken up with internal matters with the board and related items. 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. Henri Sivonen is making good progress on his Foundation-funded project to prototype an HTML5 conformance checker; to keep track of what he’s doing, check out the conformance checking category on the WHATWG blog. Next action(s): Work on other non-accessibility proposals. ...
One of the more interesting magazines I read regularly is the Stanford Social Innovation Review, dedicated to (in their words) “strategies, tools, and ideas for nonprofits, foundations, and social responsible businesses.” The Fall 2006 issue of SSIR had an article “The Other CSR” (also available in PDF format with the original figures) that I found quite relevant to Firefox and the work of the Mozilla project in general, and I thought it was worth discussing its key ideas and their implications. ...
This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending December 1, 2006. This was another short week due to taking three days off for vacation. 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 happy to announce that the Mozilla Foundation is making a grant to the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto to help improve Thunderbird accessibility. Next action(s): Work on some other non-accessibility proposals. CA-related issues. I did a presentation to representatives of an academic research network to discuss the Mozilla CA approval process. (Being high-tech academics located all over the world, they wanted me to do the presentation using H.323-based video conferencing, which worked surprisingly well once I got Xmeeting for Mac OS X working. However as I complained at the Firefox summit, getting non-proprietary Internet-based videoconferencing to work is not for the faint-hearted.) Such academic consortiums are in an interesting gray area with respect to the Mozilla CA certificate policy: They are quasi-public organizations serving a public purpose and (at least to some extent) open to public participation, but it’s not clear if or when they would meet the threshold of our policy requirement to be relevant to typical users. Next action(s): Continue work on Trustis application for inclusion, and try to make headway on the other outstanding requests (at least a dozen or more). Other. I had a phone call with a representative of another open source project to talk about the applicability of the FIPS 140-2 and Common Criteria security-related standards to their project. (10-second tutorial: FIPS 140-2 applies to cryptographic modules, whether hardware- or software-based, while Common Criteria applies to general security functions of applications. Both are of interest to government customers, with some corporate interest as well.) This is as good a place as any to mention that the NSS Development team is working on FIPS 140-2 validation of the open source NSS cryptographic library used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products; please join me in thanking them for all their hard work on this over the years. Next action(s): None at this time. ...
This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 24, 2006. This was a short week due to the Thanksgiving holiday. 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. Håkan Waara has been working on a Foundation-funded project to improve the accessibility of Firefox on Mac OS X. The work has been difficult because of underlying problems with Apple’s accessibility infrastructure on OS X, so the Foundation is funding an extension of Håkan’s work to allow him to make some more progress. For more information on the current state of the work see Håkan’s report. Next action(s): Complete paperwork for one other accessibility-related proposal, and work on some other non-accessibility proposals as well. ...
This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 17, 2006. Most of my time this week was spent at the Firefox summit and traveling back and forth to the meeting. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Firefox summit. I don’t have much to add to what others have written about the Firefox summit, two days of which I attended last week; it was great seeing people in person, especially for someone like myself who works remotely and doesn’t spend lots of time at Mozilla HQ. For more in-depth discussions of the summit, see the blog posts by Mitchell Baker, Chris Cooper, Alfred Peng (part 1, part 2, and part 3), J. Paul Reed, Robert Sayre, and Justin Scott (day 1, day 2, and days 3 and 4). There are also at least two sets of summit pictures, from Jay Goldman and Justin Scott. Next action(s): None at this time. Grants and related activities. I’m happy to announce approval of Mozilla Foundation funding for two new accessibility-related projects: Steve Lee’s On-Screen Keyboard (OSK) proposal to improve Mozilla accessibility for people with physical disabilities, and Charles Chen’s proposal to create test cases and associated documentation for the W3C’s work-in-progress for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (aka the “liveregion” proposal). Next action(s): Complete paperwork for two other accessibility-related proposals, and work on some other non-accessibility proposals as well. IP-related issues. I talked with Chris Beard at the Firefox summit about how to coordinate our activities with regard to product-specific EULAs and trademark policies. (The issue here is that the Mozilla Corporation has formal responsibility for Firefox and Thunderbird, with the Foundation responsible for other products distributed under Foundation auspices.) Next action(s): Work with Catherine Brady on EULA issue. Help answer licensing-related questions sent to us while Gerv Markham is on vacation. Assist Daniel Glazman with selection of a name for his editor project. CA-related issues. I received a few more CA applications for inclusion in Mozilla-based products. Next action(s): Try to make some headway on the other outstanding requests (at least a dozen or more). Press-related. I did two final press interviews on the Tamarin project. Next action(s): None at this time. ...
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. Next action(s): Possibly one or two more press interviews, and then that should be it, at least for now. IP-related issues. Gerv Markham worked with others to relicense the Rhino Java-based JavaScript engine under an MPL/GPL dual license. Next action(s): Continue working on trademark-related issues. CA-related issues. I looked into an application from Trustis for root certificate inclusion in Mozilla. I also got up to speed somewhat regarding the current state of the Extended Validation certificate proposal; however Gerv is doing most of the work on this from a Foundation point of view, including leading a public discussion within the Mozilla project. Next action(s): Resume review of additional CA applications. Grants and related activities. I have some accessibility-related proposals that I hope to announce next week; I’m still working on getting a couple of other new grant proposals evaluated and approved (or rejected). Next action(s): Get decisions made on the various funding and grant proposals previously submitted. ...