Mozilla

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 12, 2006. This week I worked on a number of different projects, with no major theme standing out. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending May 12: Accessibility grants. Håkan Waara has been working on the project to create an implementation plan for accessibility on Mac OS X, and has published some work in progress: a comparison of accessibility architectures on our three major platforms. Next action(s): Still trying to get another accessibility grant under way. CA certificates and Mozilla. I tracked down some more background information relevant to the application from StartCom to have CA certificates included in Mozilla-based products (bug 289077). Next action(s): Complete action on StartCom’s application, start working on other pending CA applications. Mozilla history project. I visited the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University to discuss their planned Mozilla history project. I reviewed the current state of their online site (still in development) and did an interview for the oral history portion of the site. Administrivia. I set up VOIP phone service for my Mozilla Foundation work and fax numbers, and added the new numbers to my contact information. Next action(s): None at this time. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 5, 2006. This week I worked on a number of different projects, with no major theme standing out. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending May 5: Accessibility grants. The Mozilla Foundation will be making two more accessibility-related grants. The first to improve the accessibility of the optional XForms extension; Alexander Surkov will be doing the work for this. Although XForms is not part of the default Firefox build, XForms technology is of interest to corporate and government users, and corporations and governments typically have rather stringent requirements for accessibility (e.g., the U.S. government’s Section 508 requirements). Improving XForms accessibility is therefore (among other things) an investment in promoting future adoption of Firefox in enterprise environments. Next action(s): Get the second accessibility grant under way. Encryption export control. I updated all the export control notices on the *.mozilla.org sites to make them consistent (bug 336205). Next action(s): Correct any notices on *.mozilla.com, plus other follow-up activities as appropriate. CA certificates and Mozilla. I worked on the application from StartCom to have CA certificates included in Mozilla-based products (bug 289077). Next action(s): Complete action on StartCom’s application, start working on other pending CA applications. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending April 28, 2006. This week I worked on a number of different projects, with no major theme standing out. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending April 28: XTech conference. Gerv Markham will be attending the XTech conference in Amsterdam May 16–19 representing the Mozilla Foundation. Next action(s): Work to ensure that all necessary arrangements are made for conference attendees being sponsored by the Foundation. NetSquared conference. I registered for the NetSquared conference May 30–31 in San Jose. I also had a phone conversation with a couple of representatives of CompuMentor (the organization sponsoring the NetSquared conference) to discuss the goals of the conference. Next action(s): Make travel arrangements. CA certificates and Mozilla. I had some email correspondence and a phone conversation regarding how Certification Authorities involved in academic grid computing initiatives might get their CA certificates included in Mozilla-based products. (For some background on this topic see the proceedings of the recent NIST PKI R&D Workshop.) Next action(s): If it’s warranted I might schedule a meeting later this year to discuss this general topic with representatives of various academic networks working in this space. GPLv3. I provided detailed feedback to Discussion Committee A highlighting confusing language in section 7 of the GPLv3 draft (on license compatibility) and requesting clarifications if possible. Next action(s): Put together a final set of comments in time for the May 15 deadline for the first round of comments. Gerv Markham. Gerv’s surgery went well and he will be working on Mozilla stuff again soon. Next action(s): Pass back to Gerv various tasks I was doing during his absence. ...

I previously blogged about the Mozilla Foundation and the CSUN conference on information technology and persons with disabilities. As noted in the post, the Mozilla project and Firefox are really gaining traction with people concerned about web accessibility, thanks to the hard work of people like Aaron Leventhal. If you’re interested in this topic (and I think we all should be) then be sure to check out Aaron’s recent interview in the online publication Voice of the Nation’s Blind. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending April 21, 2006. The major news for this week is that we’re continuing to fund work to support improved accessibility of Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did the week ending April 21: Accessibility implementation plan for OS X. The Mozilla Foundation is making a small grant to fund creation of an implementation plan for improving the accessibility of Firefox and other Mozilla-based products on Mac OS X. Next action(s): Work with Aaron Leventhal to monitor the progress of the work. XTech conference. I’m working with Mike Shaver on having some Mozilla attendees at the XTech conference, May 16–19 in Amsterdam. Next action(s): Work with shaver to ensure that all necessary arrangements are made. NetSquared conference. I’m planning to attend the NetSquared conference on technology and nonprofits (among other things), along with Paul Kim of the Mozilla Corporation. Next action(s): Work with Paul to get registered. CA certificate policy. Nicholas Bebout did the work to get the official Mozilla CA certificate policy published to the mozilla.org web site (per bug 332517). Next action(s): Modify selected other pages to include a link to the policy. Gerv Markham. Last week Gerv had the first of two surgeries to remove some tumors in his lungs; I’ve haven’t heard from him yet, but as far as I know he’s recuperating now and hopefully should be up and around in a bit. His surgery went very well (his words) and he hopes to be back home later this week. (However don’t expect him to answer any emails for a while yet.) I’m sure I can speak for all of us in extending to Gerv our best wishes for a speedy and complete recovery. Next action(s): Gerv confronts his overflowing inbox . . . ...

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. ...