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This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending April 14, 2006. The major news for this week is the mozdev.org grant. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending April 14: mozdev.org. The Mozilla Foundation board approved a $60K grant ($30K/year for two years) to the Mozdev Community Organization to support their efforts to improve the mozdev.org site for third-party developers of Firefox extensions and other Mozilla-related software. Next action(s): Up to the mozdev folks. Mozilla history project. The Mozilla Foundation is making a small grant to the Center for History and New Media (at George Mason University) to help fund oral history interviews for their Mozilla/Firefox history project. Next action(s): Work with CHNM further as appropriate. GPLv3. I participated in another GPLv3 conference call and started writing formal comments on GPLv3 license compatibility issues. Next action(s): Continue drafting comments document, with goal to finish in plenty of time for the May 15 deadline for comments. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending April 7, 2006. A lot of what went on last week won’t be announced until subsequent weeks; of the other stuff the most notable activities related to the Mozilla Foundation web site and a PKI conference I attended. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending April 7: ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending March 31, 2006. Besides the usual internal administrivia and related matters, the big activities for the week related to the Mozilla relicensing project, the National Federation of the Blind, and the OpenBSD project. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending March 31: CSUN conference. I posted a full CSUN 2006 conference report. We also had some follow-on activities from CSUN, as noted below. Next action(s): Continue working on activities resulting from this year’s conference, and plan for next year. Mozilla relicensing project. Gerv Markham made the final set of code changes needed for the Mozilla relicensing project. All Mozilla source code going into the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird is now available under LGPL or GPL terms in addition to MPL terms. For more information see Gerv’s blog post on relicensing. On behalf of the Mozilla Foundation I extend our thanks to all the copyright holders who provided the permissions necessary for relicensing to occur, to Scott Collins and Trent Mick for their work on the relicensing scripts, and of course last but certainly not least to Gerv himself, for his dedication in seeing this project through to completion. Next action(s): We need to update the Mozilla relicensing FAQ to reflect the completion of the relicensing project. National Federation of the Blind. On March 30 Aaron Leventhal of IBM and I visited the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore to discuss Mozilla-related accessibility issues with various people there. It was a good meeting overall. The people at NFB are appreciative of the work that the Mozilla project has done in improving Firefox accessibility. We discussed further possible projects, in particular to evangelize the accessible DHTML technology implemented in Firefox. Next action(s): Work with Aaron to follow up with NFB as appropriate. WebAIM. As another CSUN followup, I had a brief phone conversation with people at the Web Accessibility in Mind (WebAIM) project (at the Center for Persons with Disabilities at Utah State University) to talk about the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and Mozilla-related accessibility efforts. Next action(s): None at this time.. OpenBSD project. The Mozilla Foundation made a $10K donation to the OpenBSD project in support of development of OpenBSD, OpenSSH, and related activities. The OpenBSD project does great work in the area of creating a secure Unix-like operating system (which runs Firefox, of course) and developing related security technologies. In particular the Mozilla project uses SSH extensively for various purposes, including securing connections to the Mozilla CVS repository. The OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects have been experiencing some financial difficulties, and based on their importance to the Mozilla project and to the wider open source and free software world we felt that it was well worth showing our support for them. Next action(s): None at this time. Administrivia. I finally got the problem sorted out where my blog posts weren’t showing up on Planet Mozilla and feedhouse.mozillazine.org. In case anyone is interested, the problem appeared to be that my blog was generating its feeds in Atom 1.0 format, whereas Planet Mozilla and feedhouse appear to support only Atom 0.3. I fixed the problem by having my feeds be published through FeedBurner, with redirection used to have the old feed URLs still work; FeedBurner’s SmartFeed service then makes sure that Planet and other feed aggregators get a format they can handle. All in all I’m very happy with FeedBurner thus far and would definitely recommend the service to others. ...

Last week on behalf of the Mozilla Foundation I attended the 21st Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, sponsored by the Center on Disabilities at California State University, Northridge, better known to all and sundry as the CSUN 2006 conference or just plain “CSUN”. The CSUN conference is the premier conference for people interested in the topic of software accessibility and “assistive technologies” in general. This was the first year that the Mozilla project had a formal presence at the conference, and it turned out to be a “coming out party” for the Mozilla project’s accessibility activities in general and for accessibility support in Firefox in particular. This post provides an in-depth report on our CSUN experience. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending March 24, 2006. Besides the usual internal administrivia and related matters, the big activity for the week was the CSUN conference. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending March 24: CSUN conference. I’ll post a more in-depth report separately, but the bottom line is that being at the conference was an “over-the-top success” for us (to use Aaron Leventhal’s words), with lots of interest in Firefox, its current accessibility features, and new initiatives like accessible DHTML. Next action(s): Do final accounting for conference expenses. Make booth reservations for next year. Work with Aaron to plan follow-up activities. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending March 17, 2006. Much of the activity this week was related to internal administrivia and related matters; other than preparing for the CSUN conference, significant topics were Mozilla project governance and discussions with CAs. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending March 17; as I did previously, I’ ve omitted the “next action(s)” comments because they were out of date: ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending March 10, 2006 (almost caught up now! ). Significant topics for the week included the Mozilla Foundation board meeting and a post mortem on Mozilla projects done as part of Google’s “Summer of Code.” Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending March 10; as I did previously, I’ ve omitted the “next action(s)” comments because they were out of date: ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending March 3, 2006 (still catching up). Significant topics for the week included FOSDEM, CSUN, and an interesting possible new project to record Mozilla and Firefox history. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending March 3; as I did previously, I’ ve omitted the “next action(s)” comments because they were out of date: ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 24, 2006. (I’m still catching up after a delay.) Significant topics for the week included FOSDEM, CSUN, and relicensing. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week of 24 February; note that I’ ve omitted the “next action(s)” comments because they were out of date: ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 17, 2006. (My apologies, I got behind on posting these.) Significant topics for the week included FOSDEM, “intellectual property,” and press releases. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week of 17 February; note that I removed the “next action(s)” comments because they were out of date: ...