:: home :: mozilla :: foundation-activities-2006-03-31

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/03/31

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.

Upcoming activities

Here's what I'll be doing and where I'll be in the coming months.

If time permits I'll be attending at least parts of the PKI R&D Workshop at NIST on April 4-6.
I'll be in Mountain View in late May or early June for a Mozilla Foundation board meeting.

This concludes the report.

2006-04-03

Comments

kamper wrote at 2006-04-03 21:08:

Sincere thanks for the OpenBSD donation. You guys rock!

An OpenBSD User wrote at 2006-04-03 21:19:

Just wanted to say "Thank You" for giving that support to OpenBSD and OpenSSH. It is much appreciated.

OpenBSD User #2 wrote at 2006-04-03 21:46:

Thank you for you support to OpenBSD and OpenSSH also.

Doe wrote at 2006-04-03 22:07:

Wow, The donation to OpenBSD/OpenSSH is cool. Mozilla rocks!

brian wrote at 2006-04-03 22:26:

cheers on the donation to openbsd. this was the straw that pushed me to firefox full time.

Another OpenBSD/OpenSSH User wrote at 2006-04-03 22:28:

Another "Thanks" to the Mozilla Foundation for donation to the OpenBSD project.

Samh wrote at 2006-04-03 22:50:

Thankyou for supporting Open{BSD,SSH}
I am very impressed and hopefully others will follow your lead.

Another OpenBSD user wrote at 2006-04-04 01:25:

thank you for your support to the OpenBSD project :-)

Chris wrote at 2006-04-04 02:26:

Just want to express gratitude for the donation to the OpenBSD group.

nerveup wrote at 2006-04-04 02:32:

I'm impressed about donation to OpenBSD. Fully respect to mozilla foundation and people who considered to donate.

OpenBSD lover wrote at 2006-04-04 05:06:

Thank you for your Open{BSD,SSH} donation.

an OpenSSH user wrote at 2006-04-04 05:07:

I commend you for your decision to donate. This is very wise since the technology supports so much of the security infrastructure of the Internet. Thanks!
The OpenBSD team does a really good job maintaining and carefully adding new features to OpenSSH.
I have and will make my own small contributions.

Tasos Varoudis (OpenBSD user) wrote at 2006-04-04 07:10:

Another "Thanks" to the Mozilla Foundation for donation to the OpenBSD/SSH projects.

veins wrote at 2006-04-04 07:30:

Yet another "thanks" for your donation to the OpenBSD project ;)

Paul 'WEiRD' de Weerd wrote at 2006-04-04 07:34:

Thank you very much for donating to the OpenBSD/OpenSSH project.

OpenBSD user wrote at 2006-04-04 07:44:

thank you

yet another OpenSSH user wrote at 2006-04-04 08:51:

A big "thank you" for your donation.

A NetBSD user wrote at 2006-04-04 09:02:

Supporting operating systems that run Mozilla products sounds pretty generous. How about donating to NetBSD?
Reasons: 1) it's a free operating system with no commercial backing (not even CD and t-shirt sales :-) that is being used as base for many commercial (and some free :) projects; 2) given NetBSD's multiplatform capabilities, it ensures that software can be ran on many hardware platforms - of course this includes running Firefox; 3) With the pkgsrc system, software like Firefox and many other programs can be built on a wide range of operating systems, including NetBSD, Solaris, Linux and others by a simple "cd pkgsrc/www/firefox ; make install".
I think communication-exec@NetBSD.org will be happy for any contacts about donations and be happy to answer any related questions. Help the world stay free!

Diggo wrote at 2006-04-04 09:39:

Thanks for the donation to OpenBSD. I don't use the Distro (yet) - but i think OpenSSH is very important to any admin, so I just also wanted to say a big "Thank You!".

uv.negativa wrote at 2006-04-04 10:02:

Gracias por lo de OpenSSH, no mas BLOB. Chaos

Alex wrote at 2006-04-04 10:37:

Thank you for the generous OpenBSD donation!

Also Also an OpenBSD User wrote at 2006-04-04 12:06:

Many thanks for the OpenBSD/OpenSSH donation :)

gthb wrote at 2006-04-04 12:16:

Thank you for the OpenBSD donation, you guys rock!

Jochem Kossen wrote at 2006-04-04 13:04:

The donation to the OpenBSD project makes me all sentimental. Thanks guys! And keep up the good work on your products, it's very much appreciated. :-)

errr wrote at 2006-04-04 14:30:

Personally, I think that OpenBSD needs to invest that money right back into Firefox development. Firefox integration is still not up to par with Firefox on OpenBSD and other unices compared to Windows and OS X, OpenBSD and the unices are treated like third class citizens. THere are many oddities when using Firefox on the environment. Also, I would have rather seen that $10,000 used for optimization. This is taking from Mozilla development that could improve OpenBSD by giving it a better Mozilla product. Basic stuff like X11 Session support has been broken forever and really, urgently needs to be fixed and putting this money into fixing the bugs that occur on that platform would have been better for Mozilla to spend the money on first.

OpenBSD User wrote at 2006-04-04 14:46:

Thank you for publicly recognizing the importance of security, open source, OpenBSD and OpenSSH.

OpenBSD enthusiast wrote at 2006-04-04 14:54:

Once again the Mozilla Foundation proved to be on point in the Open Source community. Thumbs up and many, many thanks for your donation to the OpenSSH and implicitly OpenBSD projects.

OpenBSD Mexican User wrote at 2006-04-04 15:28:

Thanks... hope another openssh users donate too, like google, redhat, suse, etc..
as always Firefox Rocks

Mr. Open Source wrote at 2006-04-04 15:32:

Mozilla products were awesome but now that gesture simply makes it AWESOME.Go Mozilla!!!

Ben wrote at 2006-04-04 15:51:

Thank you for contributing to the openssh s/ssh/bsd/gi project, I have been using mozilla and firefox since the first releases, you guy rock you produce an amazing product and you have helped another amazing product keep going.

lincoln wrote at 2006-04-04 16:02:

We have all depended on code from the OpenBSD project to do our jobs and earn a living for ourselves. It's great to see such a large donation from a great open source project. Thanks for sponsoring OpenBSD and their work. Great folks like Mozilla and OpenBSD opening their source code and their wallets makes things better for us all. Here's to the best people and the most innovative technologies on the net.

Steve wrote at 2006-04-04 16:23:

Reading about the donation brought a tear of joy in my eye; I am mightly impressed.

rasmus wrote at 2006-04-04 16:27:

err, i really think you should think again. OpenSSH really is one of the single most important piece of infrastructure/security software out there. many organizations, including Mozilla, depend on it for secure communication and authentication.

dj wrote at 2006-04-04 16:51:

Thanks Mozilla. A great gesture. Hopefully others will follow your lead in the support of OpenBSD, OpenSSH and it's projects.

TooEasy wrote at 2006-04-04 16:56:

I just want to thank the Mozilla Foundation for the generous donation made to the OpenBSD/OpenSSH project. Hopefully this will inspire more companies/foundations to give financial support to any open source projects they use.

OpenBSD User wrote at 2006-04-04 17:18:

Thank you for publicly recognizing the importance of security, open source, OpenBSD and OpenSSH.

david m. richter wrote at 2006-04-04 17:19:

I want both to thank and congratulate the Mozilla Foundation on what an awful lot of people think is a terrific gesture -- the donation to OpenBSD and OpenSSH. Their call for money lately really brought to my attention how major companies and institutions haven't been helping out at all; it blows my mind.
I imagine a world without OpenSSH and shudder. Thank you very, very kindly for your donation -- I hope it starts a trend. And hey, I'm using Mozilla to write this.

md wrote at 2006-04-04 18:14:

thanks for the OpenBSD/OpenSSH donation ! You are a great project supporting another great project !

Baczek wrote at 2006-04-04 18:48:

The world needs OpenSSH. Thanks for helping them.

OpenBSD user wrote at 2006-04-04 20:25:

Thank you for the donation and showing support to the OpenBSD project and important spin-off projects like OpenSSH, PF and more !

Nemilar wrote at 2006-04-04 22:22:

Kudos to Mozilla for doing the Right Thing. It makes me proud of the FSOS movement.

:D wrote at 2006-04-05 00:33:

Thank you for supporting OpenSSH

nortonmohan wrote at 2006-04-05 00:52:

Its great to know that Mozilla foundation is helping OpenSSH. Long Live Mozilla!

Jason wrote at 2006-04-05 01:40:

Thank you very much for making such a generous donation. I use Firefox exclusively on all my computers, and this gives me nothing but more respect for the Mozilla foundation. I wish there were more companies like you.

OpenBSD user Central America wrote at 2006-04-05 02:41:

Thanks for the donation! OpenBSD is a great system and makes internet a better place, thanks again for the donation.

jja_fi wrote at 2006-04-05 03:29:

Thank You for supporting OpenBSD/OpenSSH! And thanks for keeping up great work with Firefox!

Nazgob wrote at 2006-04-05 07:08:

Thank you! Great job.

David Robillard wrote at 2006-04-05 09:42:

Bravo! Very very nice gesture. The Mozilla foundation is a cornerstone in the Open Source world and this is a wounderfull way of showing it, again!

Jose Ramon wrote at 2006-04-05 12:09:

Muy amables por donar el dinero al proyecto OpenSSH de OpenBSD

Also Also an OpenBSD User wrote at 2006-04-05 17:20:

Many thanks for the OpenBSD/OpenSSH donation :)

user wrote at 2006-04-05 17:50:

Respect. I hope that other companies will make this trend obvious and important.

Also Also an OpenBSD User wrote at 2006-04-06 12:25:

Many thanks for the OpenBSD/OpenSSH donation :)

jared spiegel wrote at 2006-04-07 09:05:

another thanks for the openssh donation. it compelled me to turn around and donate to mozilla this morning.

Budah wrote at 2006-04-07 13:41:

Great idea! This is a realy feel from the free software!
Mozilla \o/

Michael Erdely wrote at 2006-04-08 17:24:

This is fantastic news! The Mozilla Foundation should be proud to show their support of such a fantastic project as OpenBSD.

Opensource-user wrote at 2006-04-10 06:39:

Great to see companies are aware of the importence of donating to opensource projects!
OpenBSD/OpenSSH are major opensource projects.

WILLIAM RHODES wrote at 2006-05-03 20:04:

Outlook Express supports QURB a potent program that instantly deletes SPAM as it arrives. In the 6 months of operation it has taken two messages requiring replies. They were easily recovered and answered. Thunderbird does not recognize QURB since it requirs OUTLOOK to do so. My wish for QURB in THUNDERBIRD 1.5 that cannot be done here. Please introduce QURB for Thunderbird. Respectfully, William A.Rhodes Phoenix, AZ

Trackbacks

MozillaZine-fr Revue mentioned this post in "Mozilla donne 10 000 $ � OpenBSD":

OS News signale que la fondation Mozilla a fait un don de 10 000 US$ au projet OpenSSH. Frank Hecker le mentionne dans son point sur ses activit�s � la fondation Mozilla. Mozilla veut aider un projet, qui est important pour Mozilla en...

�‹生三年才�‹�‹ mentioned this post in "Mozilla 捐錢給 OpenBSD":

�›�對有錢的團體支援�›�對沒錢的團體 :)
先前有提到說 OpenBSD 快沒錢了，�›�›�‹到一則報導，Mozilla Foundation 已經贊助了 $10,000。 BTW，我在想，這樣的捐款行為是合乎規定的嗎 ? 一般而言，大...

erdelynet.com BETA mentioned this post in "Mozilla Foundation Donates to OpenBSD/SSH":

This week the Mozilla Foundation announced that they donated $10,000 to the OpenBSD project for the development of OpenBSD and OpenSSH. I recently posted that you should support the OpenBSD project and there have been several articles (undeadly) writt...