Firefox as a socially responsible product

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. ...

2006-12-09 · 8 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/12/01

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. ...

2006-12-04 · 3 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/11/24

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. ...

2006-11-27 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/11/17

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). ...

2006-11-22 · 3 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/11/10

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. ...

2006-11-13 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Adobe, Mozilla, and Tamarin

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. ...

2006-11-07 · 7 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/11/03

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. ...

2006-11-04 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/10/27

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. ...

2006-10-30 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/10/20

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). ...

2006-10-23 · 1 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/10/13

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. ...

2006-10-16 · 2 min · Frank Hecker