Archive for the ‘Mitchell’s Blog’ Category
April 24th, 2010
Last weekend I had an extra half day in San Diego while waiting for a gymnastics meet (entry level boys competition) to start. I had an experience that makes me feel even more strongly that we should be telling everyone we touch that Mozilla is a public benefit organization, existing to build the Internet as a global resource; open, accessible and “hackable” by all. I’d like to see most or all Mozilla websites make this clear, and I’d like to see our products make this very clear as well.
At the hotel I saw a brochure for “Quail Botanical Gardens” in a rack with brochures featuring San Diego’s many visitor attractions. I love gardens so I took a look. It sounded potentially interesting but I was also wary of finding a “tourist trap” where someone has planted a few basic plants and is trying to find newbies who will pay to see them. So I went poking around their web site.
The first thing I noticed after the photos was the statement, “The mission of the Garden is to inspire people of all ages to connect with plants and nature.”
“Hmm,” I thought, “that sounds a lot like a non-profit mission statement.” It soon became clear that this is the case – the garden is a non-profit organization. My worry about the tourist trap immediately decreased, and I felt better about the chances of something worthwhile coming of a visit. Non-profit organizations can make mistakes. They can be boring and ineffective just like anything else. But the chance that the whole thing was just something dumb designed to get people there to extract money felt much, much lower.
As it turns out, the garden is great. Lots of bamboo, subtropical fruit, cactus and other fun items, and I’ll go back next time I am in the San Diego area.
April 12th, 2010
The Mozilla community in Poland is one of the earliest and strongest Mozilla communities. MozillaPL has been active for a decade — well before Firefox, before the Mozilla Foundation was established and before we shipped our first product (the Mozilla Application Suite) in 2001.
In the dark, difficult days of Mozilla before we were a “success” the MozillaPL team was a clear indicator to me that we were on the right track. In those days — before RSS, before social networking, before personal blogs — our only project wide news source was an independently run fanzine called “Mozillazine.” The first time I saw an item about MozillaPL I was astonished. And the items kept coming. Mozilla PL did this, MozillaPL provides support, MozillaPL had this great idea and is making it happen.
The creativity, dedication and leadership of MozillaPL made it clear to a bunch of Mozilla contributors that the difficult days of Mozilla could lead to something better, something much brighter.
Yesterday Poland suffered a tragic loss as many of its national leaders were lost in a plane crash. A partial list, from the New York Times:
“Among them, the Polish government said, were Mr. Kaczynski; his wife, Maria; Ryszard Kaczorowski, who led a government in exile during the Communist era; the deputy speaker of Poland’s Parliament, Jerzy Szmajdzinski; the head of the president’s chancellery, Wladyslaw Stasiak; the head of the National Security Bureau, Aleksander Szczyglo; the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Andrzej Kremer; the chief of the general staff of the Polish Army, Franciszek Gagor; the president of Poland’s national bank, Slawomir Skrzypek; and the commissioner for civil rights protection, Janusz Kochanowski. . .”
plus a hero of the Solidarity movement, and dozens of other people heading to a memorial of national significance itself.
Our hearts are with you.
March 19th, 2010
Last week at an Open Source Digital Voting Foundation event I had the chance to meet Debra Bowen, the California Secretary of State. The Secretary of State is the elected official responsible for the integrity of the electoral process — making sure that our voting system is accurate and honest and counts every vote correctly.
After talking to Secretary Bowen I ended up quite happy that she was elected to this role. Secretary Bowen is deeply interested in transparency, openness, and privacy. She is also a strong advocate for using open source software as the basis for digital voting equipment. Not long after she was elected she commissioned an independent review of the reliability of voting equipment and the auditing process, and found some disturbing facts. She’s been active in trying to fix these to bring more accuracy and trustworthiness to our system.
It was really fun to meet an elected official who understands implicitly that software code can effect our lives in much the same way as legal codes can.
I also learned that one of the big surprises I had at my local polling place recently is due to Secretary Bowen. The average age of the people who donate their time to run the polls in California is — again according to Secretary Bowen — 77 years old. But last time I went to vote there was a young woman there. We talked to her a bit — she was a high school student. It turns out that Secretary Bowen has a program to encourage high school and college students to participate in making the voting process possible. It seems a giant step forward from how I grew up, which was simply taking the whole process for granted.
March 10th, 2010
Twelve years ago I spent the month of March frantically drafting version 1.0 of the Mozilla Public License. That was a public process, a part of the launch of the Mozilla project. Approximately a year later we created the 1.1 version.
Since then a decade has gone by without any further revisions of the MPL. This is in part a great success story. At the same time, a decade is a long time not to look at something as basic as the license. Ways of working that were “best practices” a decade ago may not make sense today. FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) is far better understood today. When I wrote the MPL we drew upon the GPL v2 for many ideas, and on the MIT and BSD and early Apache license. Since then, both the Apache license and the GPL have been updated.
It’s time to look at updating the MPL. It’s time to see if we can make the MPL easier to use and incorporate a decade’s worth of experience. In particular I’m hoping to modernize and simplify the license while still keeping the things that have made it and the Mozilla project such a success.
We’ll do this through a public process of course. Here are the tools available, as of today:
- website hub: mozilla.org/MPL/
- commenting tool (where we hope to aggregate most of the comments re language and drafting): mpl.mozilla.org/participate/comment/
- newsgroup/mailing list (for comments other than language and drafting): governance-mpl-update
Over the years we’ve received feedback about the license, and we’ll use some of that, plus early comments here, to produce an early “alpha” version of what a new license might look like. Once we have published an alpha draft, we will have time for commentary, discussion, and further drafting, followed by beta and release candidate drafts. We hope to complete the process by the end of 2010.
The organizers of this effort to date are below. We expect this group to grow.
- Gerv Markham (who has been working with Mozilla licensing issues for almost a decade himself)
- Luis Villa (long time open source contributor, recent law school graduate)
- Harvey Anderson (assisted with MPL 1.0 and 1.1);
- me; and
- possibly you!
March 9th, 2010
Hundreds of millions of people rely on the accuracy of voting machines and the polling process to form our government. New voting machines are being developed, moving from paper-based ballots to electronic voting.
How accurate are those digital voting machines? How unbiased? Do they count every vote? Do they count every vote accurately and completely? How do they work? How tamper-proof are they? Is there a way to audit results? How good is the audit process? How would we know?
Right now it’s hard to tell. It turns out that how digital voting machines work is a secret. Voters are not allowed to know, to see or to test those machines or how they work. (I’ll speak of California here, as a result of talking to the California Secretary of State, but this is only an example of the problem.) We’re asked to “trust.”
The OSDV Foundation exists to change this. OSDV is a non-profit organization building open source voting machinery. This is important for several reasons:
- This allows voters to verify what our voting machines are doing. Like other open source projects, those of us with enough technical expertise can serve as consumer advocates and validate that our voting machines operate as they should.
- In voting, 1 or 2 percent is a giant amount. Many elections — at least in the US where I’m most familiar — are very, very close. A 1% to 2% margin of error may be acceptable in many business settings, but it is not acceptable in a critical election where it can change results. With open source products we can see and test and improve the quality, rather than simply trust that all is well.
- Casting and counting votes should not be a for-profit enterprise; it is the foundation of elected governments.
- Proprietary ownership of the means of voting IS a conflict of interest. According to the OSDV Foundation, right now something like 88% of the US voting infrastructure is owned by two companies, which will soon be one company.
- Good open source alternatives are likely to cause an improvement in the quality of the dominant (close to 90% market share) product offering.
OSDV is just reaching the point where its first products are just about ready for use. Having a viable alternative in the market is critical. Having a viable alternative that is open source and public-benefit is even better. OSDV is building a system that citizens can actually verify — a system we trust based on that ability to verify what is actually happening.
You can find out more about OSDV Foundation’s Trust the Vote project at trustthevote.org/background
February 27th, 2010
Last week I participated in a government sponsored delegation to Russia called the “U.S.-Russia Innovation Dialogue” This delegation was organized by the U.S. government, in cooperation with the Russian government, as part of the Presidents’ Bilateral Commission (“Presidents” means President Medvedev of the Russian Federation and President Obama of the US). The goal was to improve the ways of working together in areas with shared interests, while not ignoring areas of disagreement. One area of shared interests that has been identified in innovation, and thus the delegation.
The delegation was co-led by Howard Solomon from the National Security Council and by Jared Cohen from the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff. The delegation included John Donohoe, CEO of eBay, Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco, Esther Dyson of EDventure, Jason Liebman of Howcast, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, Shervin Pishevar, founder of Social Gaming Network, Ashton Kutcher, CEO of Katalyst, Ellis Rubinstein, President of the New York Academy of Sciences, Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer and me. We met with all sorts of people — federal and regional officials, civil society actors, educators, students, and entrepreneurs. Our focus was the role technology can play in social development.
One explicit goal of the delegation was to do more than talk, to figure out concrete steps that can be taken. We ended up with a set of items where we see possibilities for immediate collaboration. It’s a pretty meaty list, laid out in 6 themes. There are versions available in English and Russian as well as a summary in The Moscow Times.
December 16th, 2009
Today the European Commission adopted a decision that represents a settlement in its current tying case against Microsoft. The settlement is similar to the version made available for comment some time back, with some changes resulting from the comment period.
The settlement articulates a number of principles relating to Microsoft protecting the choice of a different browser after a user has switched. (In the past it has been very difficult to avoid using IE, or to avoid repeated instances where IE keeps opening for certain tasks, or what appeared to be repeated efforts on Microsoft’s part to push people away from their choice and back to IE.) The settlement also requires Microsoft to include a “Choice Screen” offering users a choice of browsers in specified circumstances.
While the ballot mechanism represented by the choice screen has received the most attention, Mozilla is most pleased with the core principles Microsoft will be adopting that protect the choices a person has already made. These principles won’t be obvious to a person using Windows. That’s the point — once a person has chosen an alternative browser, IE should not keep reappearing. These principles are expressed in several components of the commitments and together should result in a greater respect for individual human decisions.
Mozilla’s non-profit mission is focused on self-determination and individual empowerment; we are gratified to see these principles appear in the settlement.
December 9th, 2009
Email on the desktop just got a lot better. Mozilla Thunderbird 3 is here.
Thunderbird 3 is a vastly improved email client. More powerful — check out the new search capabilities and the new tabbed functionality, similar to tabs in browsers. More polished — many UI improvements that make life much more pleasant. More extensible. So extensible that an extension like Personas, which was conceived for Firefox, now works in Thunderbird
The extensibility is an important part of the future roadmap as well. It’s clear that for many people “email” as a category is changing to a broader “messaging” category that includes tweets, RSS, IM, etc. The Thunderbird extension mechanism allows a massive increase in exploration as a complement to the exploration underway in the Raindrop project.
I’ve also found that the update mechanism for Thunderbird 3 — beta to RC to final — has been great. In other words, painless, including my extensions. This makes using a separate client a lot easier.
I’ve been using Thunderbird 3 beta builds for some time now, and it’s been great. Get it here: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/
December 1st, 2009
I was lucky enough to be in Amman near enough to the 5 year anniversary of Firefox to join in the 5 year celebration. 20 or 25 people got together in a art-house environment (old building for Amman, refurbished as art studio / hangout / gathering place) to celebrate.
The organizers talked a bit about the activities of the Mozilla Club and the Open Source Association at the Jordan University of Science and Technology. Then we had a discussion about Mozilla. I gave a brief intro for those who weren’t so familiar with Mozilla, or who are familiar with the products we build but not why we build them. Then we had lots of questions. The questions were fun and sophisticated and wide-ranging.
After cake and photos and mingling 5 or 6 people hung out for coffee and tea and we had a classic couple of hours of talking tech and getting to know each other. It was great fun to see some of this small group get to know others for the first time, and set about exchanging contact info and knowledge. I found a sense of humor that I understood completely. (For those in Amman, can you identify the source of this quote: “Can I talk about myself some more now?” )
Many thanks to everyone involved. I was honored and had great fun as well.
November 25th, 2009
Last week I visited parts of the Middle East for the first time. I hope to get a summary and some photos up soon. For now I want to thank a few people of the amazing people who went far, far out of their way to host Mozilla and me.
First, Donatella Della Ratta of Creative Commons, who did an amazing amount of work to arrange a series of Creative Comments events in Amman, Damascus and Beirut and invited me along. I attended only a few of these at the beginning of the Creative Commons tour, but it was enough to see how much was involved and how much Dona pulled together stunningly diverse set of activities. Unfortunately, my involvement caused Dona to miss a pivotal event while she sat with me at a long (6 and 1/2 hour) wait at a border crossing, something I regret deeply.
Bassel Safadi, who showed immense hospitality, patience and flexibility. Bassel is the kind of person who makes it seems as if a large group of people are working on something, when in reality a lot of the work is just one person. And with an attitude that’s hard to match. My prolonged border crossing threw a wrench into Bassel’s day as well but he managed with grace and engineered a series of great gatherings.
Samer, who spent close to 7 hours with me at the border and remained gracious and professional and positive throughout.
Andre Salame, director-general of a publishing organization Al-Aous that gets “open.”
Eman, Issa, Rami and Ashraf of the Mozilla Club and Jordan Open Source Association, who arranged a Mozilla event in Amman, where I met a set of people interested in Mozilla, and to those — you know who you are — who stayed and spent a portion of their evening talking about software, open source, and life in general with me.
Everyone at the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship and the Young Entrepreneurs’ Association in Amman, especially Mohammed Khawaja, Mohammed Kilani, Aya, Basel, Evelyn, Ayman Azzeh, Catherine and Habib, all of whom went out of their way to make a great trip. They organized a week’s full of activities for the celebration of Entrepreneurs’ Week in Jordan, including several that I participated in. And Samer for helping me get to the airport, and offering to pick me up from the border if I got turned back. This turned out to be unnecessary but it was very reassuring to know the offer was real if I needed it.