Mozilla Foundation Report for 2008 Week 14
Zak Greant's Mozilla Foundation report for April 6th to April 12th, 2008.
See the weblogs of David Boswell, Frank Hecker and Gerv Markham for additional reports.
This Week
Attended Go Open 2008 in Oslo: Gave keynote, did interviews with local media, had some great discussions, participated in an anti-OOXML protest, etc. See various reports at http://zak.greant.com/tags/go-open
Visited the Opera [...]
Open Source Census
Stormy just pointed a mailing list that I subscribe to at the Open Source census project.
At a glance, the project looks well thought-out — software, documentation, legal agreements, FAQs and so on are all in order.
The only thing that jumps out at me as missing is a notice about what license census data will be [...]
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New Pitches for the Lab with Leo
My work at the Mozilla Foundation is, not surprisingly, focused on advancing the Mozilla Manifesto.
After my last Firefox 3 segment on the Lab with Leo Laporte TV show, I started thinking about pitches for new segments that tie in with the manifesto.
The rough ideas I've so far had are:
Deep Customization of Firefox: Make your browser [...]
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Staying focused (even with lots of interruptions)
A few months ago, while at the eZ systems summer conference, I was showing my focus deck to my friends Tony Wood and James Eichhorn. I promised to blog about it, but have taken a very long time to get to it. So, here's the deal: I have a simple and effective trick for keeping [...]
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Travelocity Overrun by Gremlins
http://travelocity.ca has always been a bit of a warty, grumpy service. If you visit it using platforms other than the Windows + IE, it grumbles, threatening to lose your reservation, displaying ugly gaffs in its styling or, in rare instances, randomly serving up sessions other than your own.
For the most part, the travelocity.ca's flaws [...]
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OSCON Highlight: Making Sales While Making Friends
I am really impressed by Matt Asay's presentation on Making Sales While Making Friends: Lessons Learned from Open Source Businesses. I don't entirely agree with all of Matt's conclusions, but the value of material is great. Matt clearly outlines sensible practices and sets reasonable expectations for Free Software/Open Source businesses.
Some of the really sensible (and [...]
FLOSS Foundations Meeting Day 1
We have about an hour to go in the first day of meetings for the FLOSS Foundation's group (thanks to Allison for organizing space at OSCON.)
The discussions have been excellent so far - I only wish that we could hold them more often.
So far, we have had presentations from
Kaliya Hamlin (aka Identity Woman) gave an [...]
Creating MozillaFoundation.org
One of my current tasks at the Mozilla Foundation is getting mozillafoundation.org up and running. Of course, we have all the needed infrastructure, design help and so on - this leaves just a few major tasks for me, namely:
identifying content on mozilla.org that should live on mozillafoundation.org,
collecting, revising and creating content as needed,
working with others [...]
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"Guerilla Evangelism: Opening Closed Environments" talk at EuroOSCON
At the 2004 Foo Camp, Danese Cooper, a few other FLOSS advocates (forgive me, Foo Camp is a blur and I don't remember who you were) and myself gave an ad hoc session on the methods and strategies that we each used to advocate FLOSS and to help people working closed environments become more open.
The [...]
Good Books on Free Software, Open Source and Intellectual Monopoly Law
This list has been created primarily to help one individual learn more about the laws and agreements which affect their business. As such, it is quite limited in scope. I plan to expand the list as time permits.
Free Software/Open Source-specific Resources:
A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Project (prepared by the [...]