Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/12/07

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending December 7, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Ariel Rios completed his Foundation-funded project to add the Accessibility::Collection interface to the AT-SPI accessibility API for GNOME; for more information see GNOME bug 326516. Patrick Michaud produced a progress report on the Perl 6 work jointly funded by the Mozilla Foundation and the Perl Foundation. Zak and I worked on some new grant proposals. Licensing and legal Gerv worked on revising and updating the Mozilla license policy, to bring the document in line with current practice. CAs and related issues I approved the application for inclusion from SwissSign and filed bug 407396 to have the SwissSign CA certificates added to NSS. Web sites David Boswell worked on various changes to www.mozilla.org, including a new Mozilla Foundation home page and a new “Featured Projects” page (bug 393447). Miscellaneous We have a new #foundation IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org for anyone wishing to contact us real-time. Upcoming trips and events I’m planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 (afternoon only) and 12. A final note: We have just over two weeks left in 2007 for you to donate to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program and support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project. ...

2007-12-11 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/11/30

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 30, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Steve Lee provided a report on his participation in the RAatE conference. (Steve’s Jambu project has received funding from the Foundation.) I received some new grant proposals for the board’s consideration. CAs and related issues I worked on the applications for inclusion from SwissSign and TÜRKTRUST, as well as on the EV applications from VeriSign and QuoVadis. I made updates to the pending list to reflect the current status of CA applications. I created a wiki page to track recommended practices relating to CA applications. Web sites David Boswell posted a proposed new Mozilla Foundation page mockup for comment. Upcoming trips and events I’m planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 (afternoon only) and 12.

2007-12-03 · 1 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/11/23

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 23, 2007. Note that this was a short week for those of us in the US due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures I did a blog post describing Mozilla Foundation grants and related expenditures in 2007. David Humphrey pointed us to a press article about Mozilla activities in Toronto and at Seneca College. (Seneca is a Mozilla Foundation grantee.) Donations I did a blog post on the new Mozilla Foundation directed giving program. David Boswell published a FAQ about donating to the Foundation and a new page describing Foundation activities, and coordinated updates to the main Mozilla Foundation donation page and the per-project donation pages for Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and Mozilla accessibility to people with disabilities. CAs and related issues I worked on the applications for inclusion from SwissSign and TÜRKTRUST CAs, announced my intent to approve TÜRKTRUST’s inclusion, and started a two-week comment period on TÜRKTRUST’s application. Other Gerv helped resolve some licensing-related issues. Gerv provided detailed feedback on Alex Faaborg’s UI mockups. Upcoming activities I’m planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 (afternoon only) and 12.

2007-11-26 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Directed giving to the Mozllla Foundation

Yesterday I posted information on the Mozilla Foundation’s grants and related expenditures in 2007 to date, and concluded by briefly mentioning our intention to fund projects in more areas as we move into 2008. In connection with that, today we’re announcing what I call a “directed giving” program for the Mozilla Foundation that allows you to donate to the Foundation and designate your donation for any one of a set of Mozilla-related projects. ...

2007-11-20 · 3 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/11/16

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 16, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Scott Haeger completed milestone 3 on his work to implement rich document browsing in Orca with Firefox. I wrote a blog post about Seneca College and open source education. (Seneca is a Mozilla Foundation grantee.) CAs and related issues I worked on the applications for inclusion from SwissSign and TÜRKTRUST CAs, announced my intent to approve SwissSign’s inclusion, and started a two-week comment period on SwissSign’s application. Upcoming activities I’m planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 (afternoon only) and 12.

2007-11-19 · 1 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation grants and related expenditures for 2007

I previously posted some information on the Mozilla Foundation’s grants and related expenditures in 2006. Since then I’ve been expanding our internal database of information about such expenditures, and have now gotten to the point where I can provide the same information for 2007. I’ll continue updating this post in the remainder of the year as we add new projects. Background In my previous post I provided information important to understanding the Mozilla Foundation’s grant and grant-related activities. See the post for the full details; here’s a brief recap of the two most important points: ...

2007-11-19 · 14 min · Frank Hecker

Seneca College and open source education

I spent October 25 and 26 in Toronto attending the FSOSS 2007 conference put on by Seneca College. I didn’t attend the conference primarily to hear the conference presentations; my main aim was to talk with the people associated with two projects that the Mozilla Foundation has funded, namely the Mozilla-related educational activities at Seneca College and the Mozilla-related accessibility work at the University of Toronto’s Adaptive Technology Resource Centre. However as it turns out some of the presentations I saw had interesting connections with my Seneca and ATRC discussions. In this post I’ll give my thoughts on how Seneca’s efforts relate to the broader world of business and education. (Note that these are my personal opinions only, and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Mozilla Foundation or Seneca College.) ...

2007-11-15 · 11 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/11/09

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 9, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures The Mozilla Foundation made a grant to the Perl Foundation to support Perl 6 and Parrot development. We’re funding some work by Eitan Isaacson to follow up from his project to migrate the Orca screen reader for Linux to the pyatspi library, including in particular improving the performance of Orca with Firefox. This project also includes work covered by GNOME bugs 448848, 446277, and 491862. We’re also funding Codethink Ltd to do a study to evaluate the feasibility of porting the GNOME AT-SPI accessibility interface from ORBit to D-Bus; we’re looking at this because ORBit is being deprecated, and we want to make sure that the accessibility infrastructure used by Firefox on Linux is as up to date as possible. Dojo 1.0 was released last week with lots of accessibility-related enhancements, including those developed by the University of Toronto Adaptive Technology Resource Centre with funding from the Mozilla Foundation; for more information see the final report on the project. CAs and related issues Last week I published version 1.1 of the Mozilla CA certificate policy; this new version formalizes our policy for considering requests from CAs to have their certificates marked as capable of issuing Extended Validation certificates. Note carefully: This does not guarantee that you’ll see EV capability enabled in Firefox, particularly for every CA that claims to issue EV certificates; this is just a policy revision, and actual EV support will depend on the work of the NSS and Firefox developers. I did some work on CA applications from SwissSign and VeriSign, and will continue working on other CA applications this week. Other Gerv did some work on Mozilla community activities in the UK. Zak delivered a keynote address at the International PHP Conference. David was on vacation all week. Upcoming activities I’m tentatively planning to be in Mountain View on December 11 and 12.

2007-11-12 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/11/02

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 2, 2007. As in previous weeks, we’ve been working on projects not yet ready for public announcement; also I lost a lot of time dealing with medical issues and system problems. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. ...

2007-11-05 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2007/10/26

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 26. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures I published a blog post on Mozilla Foundation grants and related expenditures for 2006. Legal/IP issues I’m still waiting on more feedback on the proposed corporate contributors agreement. Other We posted the Mozilla Foundation 2006 Form 990 and 2006 consolidated financial statement to www.mozilla.org along with an accompanying FAQ, as noted in Mitchell’s blog post. I attended FSOSS 2007 and met with representatives from various Mozilla Foundation grantees, including Seneca College and the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto. (I’ll blog more about this soon.) Upcoming activities I’m not planning any out-of-town trips in the near future. ...

2007-10-30 · 1 min · Frank Hecker