Standblog - en

Mozilla awards grants to six international non-profit organizations

Tristan — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 11:20:00 +0100

Fosdem 2012, under the snow

Earlier today, in FOSDEM in Brussels, a series of grants by Mozilla to non-profit organizations and aimed at Europe have been announced. Here is the announcement:

Mozilla awards grants to six international non-profit organizations

We are pleased to announce that Mozilla awards six international non-profit organizations in Europe and the US with grants for projects that will further strengthen open web, free and open source technologies and user sovereignty on the Web in Europe. Grant recipients are:

April: April is the main French advocacy association devoted to promote and protect Free/Libre Software. It is a major player in spreading the word of free software and open standards to the general public, professionals and institutions in France. It also acts as a watchdog on digital freedoms, warning the public about the dangers of private interests keeping an exclusive stranglehold on information and knowledge.
FOSDEM: The Belgium-based FOSDEM team organizes the free and non-commercial Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) event to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software and provide FOSS projects with a platform to meet, exchange, and collaborate.
Framasoft: Framasoft is one of the most prominent voices of FLOSS (Free, Libre, Open Source Software) in France and other French-speaking countries. The organization’s aim is to educate users about the importance of open software.
Free Software Foundation Europe: Free Software Foundation Europe works across Europe for freedom in the information society by promoting Free Software and Open Standards in politics, business, law, education, and society at large.
Nowoczesna Polska: the Modern Poland Foundation consequently cares for modern education and development of information society in Poland.
Participatory Culture Foundation: The US-based organization is dedicated to creating open and decentralized video tools and services. The grant is earmarked for Universal Subtitles, a project of Participatory Culture Foundation that makes web video accessible through a collaborative platform for captioning and translation of video. Mozilla has collaborated on this open-source project since its creation.

Mozilla has a history of awarding grants to projects that are aligned with its mission. The funds for this round came from Mozilla Europe. Going forward all grant applications, including those for Europe, will go through the Mozilla foundation. Details can be found here: http://www.mozilla.org/grants/ (Once the page has been updated, that is )

This photograph is free

Tristan — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:15:00 +0100

I've just read This photograph is not free on Petapixel.com, and I should explain why I disagree with the author and decided to give away the picture below:

The photo above is free. You can reuse it, as explained in its Licensing terms. Actually, you will not be the only one. Many publications have already done so, and I've seen this pictures used in dozens of places.

I think it's a fine photo. It has cost me quite a bit of money in order to create it. A Canon SLR camera, a high-end lens, my time to take the picture, edit it, publish it. Not including the cost of the computer. Several thousands of Euros overall. But that's a silly way of looking at things. I have taken literally thousands of pictures with this camera, so the actual cost is under 1 EUR per photograph...

I took the picture because I like taking pictures. I've invested a lot of money into camera gear over the past 27 years or so and never made a dime from it. On the other hand, it has given me a lot of joy and pride. The joy to take beautiful pictures. The pride of building the reputation of being a decent photographer. The pleasure to give away my work and see people smile. The satisfaction coming from the fact that my work is useful, seeing it's reused by others^[1].

Of course, after taking this picture of the Eiffel tower in Paris, I could have said that it cost me a lot of money. So I should not share it. And the picture would have stayed on my hard drive, far from the eyes of people who could "steal" it.

But I gave it instead to Wikimedia Commons^[2] so that it could be reused by other people on Wikipedia articles and elsewhere. I also gave dozens of photos to Wikipedia. Some of them have been published in highly successful books.

I don't regret giving this photo to people I don't know. It has cost me a little, but brought me a lot more in return.. because I made it available to the world. It would not have happened if I decided to leave it hidden in my hard drive. So if you want to reuse it, please be my guest: I'd rather see my artwork used than forgotten. Most of all, I have realized a long time ago that in a world where everyone has a camera, a lot of free time and fantastic tools to publish stuff, there is not a lot of money to be made anymore by taking pictures.

Update, Jan 12th, 2012

Hundreds of comments later^[3], I'm revisiting this post and the issue it discusses. For the record, I understand the position of professional photographers, as explained in This photograph is not free post. I should mention that my younger brother is a pro photographer, shooting fashion here in Paris, for large publications and famous brands such as Hermès and Levi's. I don't want all pro photographers to die from starvation. I completely agree that someone can refuse to see his work reused for free. I do it myself (this post for example is not under a free license).

But the world is changing, with 141 million cameras sold in 2010 (not counting gazillions of smartphones) and the ability for people to publish on the Internet and potentially reach millions of people with a touch of a button.

It's a tough world for pro photographers, but it's a great progress to see millions of people being able to do art. Thanks to the comoditization of photography (and tools that enable creativity, from music instruments to computers), we're likely to see more and better talent emerge. The downside is that average photographer will be less likely to live from their craft. I can live with that. The other option is to prevent distribution of cameras and shut down the Internet in order to come back to the "good old days" of publication scarcity. Not what I want, really.

Notes

[1] For example, I took the picture of the guy with the I Love the Web sign on a high-traffic page of the Mozilla Website.

[2] Which is approaching 12 million freely reusable media files.

[3] on Reddit, Hacker news and Hacker news again.

More details on the upcoming MozCamp Europe in Berlin

Tristan — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:46:00 +0200

Do you remember my call to save the date back mid-August? So now William is calling for papers for the MozCamp EU and gives us more details.

Dates: no changes. Still scheduled for November 12th and 13th, 2011.
Overarching theme: "Many Voices, One Mozilla"
The MozCamp will take place at Kalkscheune, in Berlin
More details can be found on the EU MozCamp 2011 Wiki page, including:
- Logistics for participants.
- Berlin
There will be 3 tracks during this event:
- Product & Technology Track
- Skills Development and Community Growth Track
- Engagement/Regionalization Track
The Format for talks has also evolved.

If you are an engaged Mozillian, I hope you're considering attending! William will be sending the invitations this week. I'm really looking forward this event. Like I wrote earlier, Mozilla is changing. The MozCamp in Berlin will be an important moment for us as a community to discuss how we're approaching this, and what will be our respective role in the future. I hope to see you there!

Mozilla Camp Europe 2011: save the date!

Tristan — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 12:06:00 +0200

I'm very excited to announce that the next Mozilla Camp Europe will take place in Berlin (Germany) on November 12th and 13th, 2011! I'm also very happy to announce that Mozilla Camp concept extends to Asia: it will take place the following week end, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on November 19th-20th, 2011. For those who aren't familiar with the event, Mozilla Camp (aka MozCamp) is a large 2-day regional Mozilla summit that brings together Mozilla staff and active contributors from a region for (an intense!) weekend of presentations, discussions, brainstorms, workshops, hackathons around specific areas of the Mozilla project, all with a special focus on a region. The event is, of course, also the opportunity for Mozillians to meet IRL, put a face on a lot of quirky IRC nicknames, and spent some quality time together!

So mark your calendars and stay tuned! William and I will be giving regular updates and more information on the event, its schedule and the sponsorship policy for participants. Feel free to get in touch with William or myself if you have questions and/or suggestions to make these Mozcamps a huge success!

I'm looking forward meeting you in person in Berlin!

Part of the Berlin Wall, Potsdamer Platz

Some good Mozilla reading

Tristan — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:41:00 +0200

As I said in my Mozilla is changing blog post a week ago, we need to over-communicate. In the spirit of such approach, here are a couple of very important documents I'd like to share with the Mozilla community, users and partners:

Mitchell Baker's post: Mozilla in the New Internet Era — More Than the Browser^[1]. Excerpts:

"The browser is necessary but it is no longer sufficient. There are a number of reasons the Firefox experience needs to expand to fulfill the Mozilla mission. " (...) "the browser is no longer the only way people access the Internet". (...) "mobile devices mean the entire hardware and software stacks are changing. As a result, the computers many of us use are more closed than they have been in our lifetimes." (...) "It’s time to expand the Firefox experience to encompass the changing face of the Internet."

A podcast with Brendan Eich: We (Mozilla) Fight For the User. It's in audio format, which makes it a little hard for those whose English is a bit rusty. Luckily, volunteers have made a Transcript of 'A Minute With Brendan'. It is really thought-provoking! Excerpts:

"Our Mozilla mission obligates us to make the user sovereign over the user's data and many aspects of the user's experience, and to keep the web open and interoperable and innovative at all levels"

especially on mobile devices where it's hard to get Gecko in, or get Gecko distributed, or preloaded as part of the operating system, we can use Webkit. Even use it via HTML and CSS and JavaScript, just use it as an HTML engine, and do some of our new initiatives, new products, new touch-points that users can interact with, as open web apps or as new mobile apps, maybe thin layers of native app around html. Like Firefox Home, the second version that's being worked on right now.

ARM already is supported well by our JavaScript engine, but we want to be make our code tight on ARM, as fast as possible. We want to avoid using too much battery and while we have a lot of build automation and test automation around our tier 1 platforms like Mac OS on the desktop, Windows and Linux, now we're going to elevate Android to that position and focus on making it just as awesome.

Because we're not going to try just one thing, we're not going to push only the browser, Firefox, onto the mobile devices - we're also going to try reaching people through lighter-weight means. And then the open web app system is where we hope to make our mark by not just supporting Firefox, but letting open web apps work on all modern browsers.

These quotes are not just random thoughts of two of the most important people at Mozilla, but they expression of what they get from a very important document, written but Jay Sullivan and his team: the Firefox Vision Statement, that everyone involved in Mozilla should have read by now.

Notes

[1] Please note that volunteers have translated this article into French.

Mozilla is changing

Tristan — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:03:00 +0200

Mozilla is changing, as everybody has noticed. It's not change for the sake of change, but the whole environment is changing. Here are a list of things that have changed over the past few years, from the top of my head, in no particular order:

Competition in the browser space is now really strong, with 3 browsers with more than 20% market share.
Microsoft releases a browser every year now (sounds crazy when you think about it!). Every version is getting better at supporting Web standards (Yay!)
Google marketing budgets for Chrome are much larger than Mozilla's annual revenue.
Open Web technologies are moving forward faster than ever, under the "HTML5" name (which includes all the related technologies, from the DOM to the numerous new APIs and CSS evolutions).
JavaScript is now really fast.
Mobile is everywhere. It's actually the new frontier. This year, the PC market will be smaller than mobile (in terms of units sold).
Tablets are taking off as a market.
In the mobile space, not all platforms enable the user to choose what Web browser to use. This trend may also be coming to the PC world with Chrome OS, which only runs Chrome.
The notion of App Stores has been widely accepted by the public. The upcoming version of OS X, Lion, will be sold via the Mac App Store, without physical media.
The general public is now becoming aware of online privacy issues, but it's still something that needs to be addressed.
"Cloud Computing" is so common that it's now a household word.
Social Networks are so important now that many pundits say that Google may fail for not being social enough (then Google Plus changed it all).
Hardware is changing too. Not just the form factor (from PC to tablets and smartphones), but the processors themselves, with ARM becoming a very strong contender and multiple cores becoming the norm.

I'm sure I'm forgetting many things when describing the changes happening around Mozilla (please leave a comment below if you think I forgot something significant). Anyway, we're far from the days when IE had a monopoly, while the Web technologies where stagnating, everybody on the Web was developing for IE6 and the PC was the center of the IT world.

Basically, everything around us (Mozilla) is changing: the landscape is changing. The battlefield is growing. We need to change, to adapt.

The good news is that we've started changing already in a significant way, for example with the Rapid Release Process. The not-so-good news is that change is uncomfortable, for two reasons:

it takes some time to get adjusted to the new situation, for some people more than others.
we're going to make mistakes along the way (I know for a fact we've made a couple already).

We're going to fix these mistakes as much as we can, just like we're going to get used to do things in a different way. We'll have hard decisions to make. We'll have to revisit some of these decisions if they're really bad. It's not going to be all easy and fun, but the history of Mozilla has not been a walk in the park either.^[1]

So change is taking place because it has to: in such a changing environment, we need to demonstrate leadership, take initiatives, or we'll become obsolete.

Although there are things that will not change. At least two things come to my mind:

Why we^[2] pursue the Mozilla mission as described in the The Mozilla Manifesto.
How we do it: within a community, in an Open way, around Open standards, using Open source and Free software.

Some details^[3] on the how part will change, or have already changed. The Rapid Release Process comes to mind, but while it's a significant change, it does not touch our principles. It certainly impacts our community, both for Add-ons developers and Enterprise users, and we're working on addressing these issues. As Mozilla evolves, we'll keep on making mistakes, because we're going to places we've never been before. It's OK: we need to learn how to take risks, make mistakes and learn from them. We also need to learn to over-communicate, as communication becomes even more important as we change. It's already happening in the add-ons world^[4] and we've just announced the Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group.

So change is happening because it has to and it's uncomfortable for many of us. Maybe too uncomfortable for a few of us. We'll see a handful of people leaving the Mozilla project. It has happened before, and it was unpleasant^[5]. I just don't think we should stop evolving because we're scared that people may leave.

Now as long as the course of the project is in line with our goals and values - like it is right now - you can expect me to be here, committed and working hard. I'm sure I can count on you for this too.

Notes

[1] Remember when all Netscape employees were let go in July 2003? Remember when Mozilla had decided to bet everything on Firefox and Thunderbird instead of the Mozilla Suite? I was there and I do remember, and I have no regrets. I do have scars from back then, though.

[2] the Mozilla project as a whole including paid staff, volunteers of all kinds, partners, add-on developers and the numerous enthusiasts around the world.

[3] as opposed to principles.

[4] See the add-on compatibility report and Jorge's blog post.

[5] Remember JWZ and MPT? I do. People come and go, and that's a fact of life.

Back from Bilbao

Tristan — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:45:00 +0200

Raise your hand if you like the Open Web! Nonick crowd cheering for the Open Web, taken from the stage

Last Friday, I gave a talk at the Nonick Conference in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. I've put the slides on Slideshare.net: [The Open Web approach |http://www.slideshare.net/nitot/the-open-web-approach|en]. I hope to have the audio and/or the video to publish soon, if the organizers can provide me with the files.

I encourage you to view the slides, but here is what I discussed:

Cross-platform development (Windows/Mac/Linux) is hard, but Mobile development makes things even harder
The Open Web can be a solution especially since HTML5 and related technologies enable developers to build much richer applications, with video, audio, 3D,
I gave demos from Web Of Wonders
I discussed how cool it would be to have the benefits of App Stores for the Web (discovery, sense of ownership, monetization), without the negative part (centralization, possible censorship, lack of choice), as communicated a few months ago by Jay Sullivan.

I also gave a couple of TV interviews with the EITB (Basque regional TV and Website):

A video interview for the news on Friday;
A video interview to be published in October in Nickdutnick.
El presidente de Mozilla Europa presenta en Nonick su nueva plataforma de aplicaciones libres para móviles ;
Mozilla Europe's Tristan Nitot presents new mobile apps;
Tristan Nitot, Presidente de Mozilla Europa, abrirá nonick ;

Adobe Ditches AIR for Linux

Tristan — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 19:52:00 +0200

Reminder: as usual, I'm not speaking on behalf of Mozilla here, just expressing my own views.

So it looks like Adobe will no longer be releasing (...) versions of Adobe AIR and the AIR SDK for desktop Linux..

A few questions and remarks come to my mind, which I'd like to share:

Is this going to hurt Linux?
Is this a good thing for Adobe?
Is there a lesson here?

So Is this going to hurt Linux? Well, maybe, but not much. The application ecosystem on Linux is pretty strong, and as Adobe says, "since the release of AIR, we’ve seen only a 0.5% download share for desktop Linux", which tends to show that Linux users are not much interested in AIR at all.

Is this a good thing for Adobe? On one hand, it will enable them to invest more in the Android version of AIR, which is an important market, with enormous potential, Android being a platform that needs more love from Adobe if they want to be able to compete. But on the other hand, this is pretty bad for their cross-platform story. People who have chosen AIR because it enabled them to "write once run anywhere" - recycling the old Java promise - rightfully feel betrayed. AIR is a decent platform, but what made it stand out was the promise of running on all three desktop platforms. And this is now gone.

Is there a lesson here? I guess so. In short: never trust of a proprietary vendor when it comes to running cross-platform, especially when you have a truly open alternative. In this case, the Web. What makes the Web beautiful is the fact that no one owns it. You don't have to make a deal with the VP of Business Development of the Web in order to deploy a large application. You can pick a (modern) browser and switch away from it later on if the vendor you've chosen is taking a path that you don't like. Just make sure it's following Web standards and is Open Source and open to external contributions, so that you can offer patches if needed. Make sure it's extensible, so you can customize it for your needs. You'll see, the Open Web as a platform is making progress daily. It's amazing, really.

You'll have no fees to pay, no contracts to negotiate, just freedom to use and innovate. I know it's a little unsettling at first, but over time it's liberating. So liberating that - once accustomed to freedom - you won't want to go back.

Free as a bird flying into the sunset in Normandy

Mozilla at the eG8

Tristan — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 20:21:00 +0200

(I wish I had some time to post this earlier, but vacations got in the way.)

A couple of weeks ago, Mitchell Baker and I have been invited to participate to the eG8 forum, an event which took place in Paris, led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, known for his "three strikes law" that kicks citizens out of the Internet if they share copyrights content and get caught three times:

The two-day e-G8 gathering was an opportunity for debate and collective reflection on a wide number of key themes involving the Internet. They included support for innovation; future development of the Internet; freedom of networks; protection of personal data from cybercrime; protection of minors; and, more broadly, the practical impact of virtual and digital applications on fields as varied as economic growth, job creation, democracy, government administration, education, news and health.

President Sarkozy takes a question from the crowd during the opening session of the eG8 forum

The speaker line-up was quite impressive, including Eric Schmidt (Chairman, Google) and Mark Zuckerberg (CEO, Facebook) and many other CEOs. The fact is that the event was mostly focused on the economic value of the Internet, and therefore missed what is probably the biggest part of the Internet: users, the civil society. In short: us, the people who make the Internet what it is. While participating to the eG8, I had the impression that the attendees were entrepreneurs looking for business opportunities in an Internet that was perceived as a sea of customers. But Internet users are much more than customers. We're participants. Citizens. Human beings.

Mozilla, along with a handful of participants of the civil society, was here to bring a different perspective, following the 9th and 10th principles of the Mozilla Manifesto:

9 - Commercial involvement in the development of the Internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial goals and public benefit is critical.

10 - Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.

Mitchell Baker (Mozilla) at the privacy workshop during the eG8 - Paris

Mitchell as she participated to a workshop on privacy, has taken the side of the users. The eG8 has also been an opportunity to meet with the press in order to explain what makes Mozilla a special organization, competing on a market against large commercial organizations, while being mission-driven.

eG8 - Mitchell Baker - Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation;
eg8 - Tristan Nitot - Fondateur Mozilla Europe (actually in French, but available with English subtitles, thanks to the always amazing Universal Subtitles project and members of the French-speaking members of the Mozilla community);
An invitation to speak on French National Radio the next day for 15mn in a live show
Mitchell Baker interviewed by Nouvel Obs' (French magazine).

Mitchell Baker (Mozilla) being interviewed by OWNI.eu reporters at the eG8 Forum- Paris

Links to other articles, talks and interventions related to civil society at the eG8:

Firefox leading in Europe

Tristan — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:12:00 +0100

A recent report by StatCounter says that Firefox is now the leading browser in Europe. As always, market numbers are to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's hard to imagine a better way to start 2011, considering how small Mozilla is compared to its main competitors (Microsoft, Google and Apple). This is the result of the commitment of the Mozilla community and teams over the past decade. Very frankly, if someone told me that a non-profit organization would beat Microsoft at its own game just 5 or 6 years ago, I would have told him to quit smoking funny cigarettes ;-).

It's time to rejoice and have a drink, (after all, the Paris office is in France, so we're always ready to party and have a drink!), but let's not forget a couple of things^[1]...

We're now in a market that is more competitive than ever, where 3 players are likely to dominate the others (Firefox being one of them):
1. Chrome is gaining market share and shipping new versions very quickly, along with a very aggressive marketing campaign
2. Microsoft is back at work and IE9 is a very serious competitor, especially as it's bundled with Windows (as always).
Mobile is the new frontier, and Mozilla has a card to play here, especially on Android.

In order to succeed on the desktop and the mobile spaces, there is a very simple thing to do: ship a killer version of Firefox 4 soon!

So let's enjoy the fact that we're succeeding more in Europe than we hoped for initially, but let's quickly return back to work and invest all of our energy in making an amazing Firefox 4 both on the desktop and on mobile. This is key for our future!

How is Firefox different from other browsers

Tristan — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:37:00 +0100

As always on this blog, this article does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

In the light of the recent Google announcements about Chrome, Chrome OS and the Web App Store, I am getting questions from people around me and from reporters. Many people seem to forget how Google and Mozilla differ. While both of us- like Apple and Microsoft - are browser vendors who care a lot about speed and security, Mozilla is different by nature. Mozilla is a non-profit, mission-driven organization who cares about the health of the Open Web. I recognize that this may be hard to understand, as it's not very concrete. So let's see in very concrete ways how the Mozilla approach differs from the other browser vendors, who are all commercial ventures^[1]

An App Store for the Open Web, not for a specific browser

Mozilla has recently announced a Prototype of an Open Web App Ecosystem. Let's see how this differs from Google's announcement on a similar topic.

In Mozilla's approach, Open Web Apps:

work in all modern Web browsers
Support portable purchases: An app purchased for one browser works in other browsers, and across multiple desktop and mobile platforms without repurchase
Can be distributed by developers directly to users without any gatekeeper, and distributed through multiple stores, allowing stores to compete on customer service, price, policies, app discoverability, ratings, reviews and other attributes.

Fore more details, go read Pascal Finette's recent post: Building the Open Web App Ecosystem.

On the other hand, Google's App Store requires Chrome and centralized, two things that differ from the principles of the Open Web (choice of browsers and services to use)^[2].

Getting a personalized experience without losing your privacy or control over your data

The promise of the cloud is that our data is accessible from anywhere. Like many other people, I love this idea! Now it does not necessarily mean that everything has to be stored centrally. As an individual, I want my data to stay private and not data-mined, while enjoying the benefits of the cloud.

Firefox Sync is one of these services. Built into Firefox 4 for both mobile and desktop and available as an extension for Firefox 3.6, it enables people to store their browsing history on a server so that they can access history, passwords, bookmarks and even open tabs across all his/her devices.

Mozilla understand that people expect things to work right out of the box, so we offer a server to host people's data in order to make their life easier.

User data, when hosted by Mozilla, is encrypted on the client side, so it cannot be data-mined by Mozilla (what Mozilla hosts is encrypted data that cannot be analyzed).
Users - should they want to - can run their own server: the protocol is public and extensible, the code is free and open (for both client and server).

Some other browser vendors offer similar services, but you cannot run them on your own server and data is not encrypted.

Conclusion

All Browsers are making significant progress in terms of performance and some of them also offer more when it in terms of security and standards support. But when it comes to choosing which browser you are going to use, one should consider the reasons of the organization who's producing it, and how it relates to keeping the Web Open and user data private.

Notes

[1] nothing wrong with this, of course. It's just that our goals and approach differ significantly because of that.

[2] For the record, Apple is significantly worse than Google in this regard, going as far as preventing users to use competing App Stores...

Community meetups with Gary Kovacs

Tristan — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:32:00 +0100

Our new CEO, Gary Kovacs, was on a trip in Europe last week to meet with employees (in Toronto, London, Paris and Munich) and communities (in Paris, Munich and Ljubljana). I traveled with him, Chris Beard (VP of engagement) and Mary Colvig (Head of contributor engagement). I took quite a few pictures that I posted on Flickr.

Group photo during dinner in Ljubljana

The initial plan was to have a community dinner in Paris with Gary, but the weather decided otherwise (pro tip: Eurostar seems to be less reliable than airplanes when snowing), so we had to party without Gary and Chris. As you can see with the Paris pictures, we had tons of fun!

The next day, we had breakfast with Gary at the Paris office, then we headed to Munich (Germany) to meet with members of the Open Source community during one of the famous Open Source Treffen organized by Tomcat.

The next day took us to Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, where William and amazing volunteers (including Milos Dinic, Brian King and Matjaž Horvat organized the Mozilla Balkans Community Meetup, where 9 communities from the Balkans were represented.

Our visit was a surprise to the community members, and the dinner was a lot of fun!

Here are the links to the pictures I took on this trip:

Mozilla and Fosdem 2011

Tristan — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 15:20:00 +0100

The holiday season is upon us, which means that the Mozilla team is hard at work preparing our participation to FOSDEM! For those who live on a different planet (or just a continent other than Europe), FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting. The event is as nice as it's a mouthful, and Mozilla has been participating to it since almost forever. I think my first FOSDEM was in 2002, but other European Mozillians were there the year before, while it was called OSDEM. Mozilla started having a developer room officially in 2003.

FOSDEM entrance

So Mozilla will be at FOSDEM once again, for its 2011 edition, but in a slightly different format. Both FOSDEM and Mozilla have grown very significantly over the years, and we have increasingly been facing the following issues:

It's becoming harder to accommodate the needs of the Mozillians with the resources of the FOSDEM team. We've been struggling with the size of the room, despite the huge efforts by the FOSDEM organizers to help.
To be more productive, we need several rooms, but we don't want to steal them from other FLOSS projects
Participating Mozillians have been facing a dilemma: either participating to the Mozilla dev room or attending the sessions led by other projects.
Since the schedule is pretty packed, it's hard to make it appealing to contributors from other projects.

In order to solve these issues, we have decided to change the way Mozilla participates to FOSDEM. We'll still have a dev room, but the goal is to use it as an opportunity to engage with participants to the other FLOSS projects, while using the future Mozilla Camps Europe (like Barcelona and Prague?) and other local community events for the Mozilla communities to gather.

To this end, we are going to invest more in upcoming Mozilla contributor events and less in FOSDEM. We will only sponsor Mozillians giving talks at FOSDEM this year, as opposed to sponsoring all Mozillians like in previous years. This will enable us to focus our energy and financial resources on improving future Mozilla contributor events and ensuring that more of our contributors can participate in more events.

Those who want to give a talk in the Dev Room this year should get in touch with Brian King like every year before Friday, 15th January 2011 at: brian at mozdev dot org.

Should you have questions, please connect with William (william at mozilla dot com) - who has just posted on his blog too - or myself!

At the Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona

Tristan — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:29:00 +0100

]

Drumbeat stickers

This week, the Mozilla Drumbeat project is having its first international event in Barcelona: the Drumbeat Festival. Hackers^[1], Wikipedians, Digital Librarians, teachers, and all sorts of people are gathering to discuss how to make the Web a more open and participatory place, as well as leveraging the Open Web, mass collaboration and open content to reinvent things like education.

Kaizendo.org volunteer during the science fair, demonstrating how to build customizable textbooks

A few links if you want to follow this amazing Drumbeat Festival:

Look for #drumbeat on Twitter
MozillaEU account on Flickr.com for photos
Drumbat tag on Flickr for more photos (approaching 1000 as I type this!)
One of the many blog posts about the Drumbeat Festival: Create Joyous Insurgency ;
For those who speak French, an interview by the award-winning publication Owni.fr I'm very proud of: Drumbeat Festival: apprendre de et avec le web ouvert ;

Notes

[1] People who like to play with technology, not to be confused with "crackers" or "computer pirates".

Hardware acceleration browsing explained to the rest of us

Tristan — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:49:00 +0200

Hardware-accelerated Web page rendering is a complex issue. Using a demo and slides from the most awesome Paul Rouget, I've tried to explain how these things work with Firefox 4 in the video below:

I hope that I have not oversimplified things too much, so if you happen to be a mozillian working on this very exciting topic and hear me saying things that make you cringe, please lave a comment below!

If you want to know more about what's coming from Mozilla here are a couple of links:

Hacks.Mozilla.org, a blog for Web developers
Mozilla Developer Network, the reference for Web developers documentation
about:mozilla email newsletter, to get regular updates on what's exciting at Mozilla, directly in your inbox!

Welcome to Document Foundation and LibreOffice

Tristan — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:31:00 +0200

So, it's now official: important and well-regarded members of the OpenOffice.org community are forking the project and have launched LibreOffice, under umbrella of the Document Foundation:

Our mission is to facilitate the evolution of the OpenOffice.org Community into a new open, independent, and meritocratic organizational structure within the next few months. An independent Foundation is a better match to the values of our contributors, users, and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient, transparent, and inclusive Community.

It is not a secret for anyone who has been watching the OpenOffice.org project for the past decade: its dependency on single commercial organization has slowed down the project and has been detrimental to the motivation of an otherwise very active and dedicated community. It's a pleasure to see the beginning of a new chapter for what is now LibreOffice.

This does not mean that Oracle (who took over Sun Microsystems) is not welcome anymore. As stated by the press release:

Oracle Corporation, owner of the OpenOffice.org trademark, is invited to become a member of the foundation and contribute to the development of the code.

I wish the best of luck to this new effort and wanted to congratulate the community members who have the courage to take the bull by the horns in order to lead the project towards a better future.

Edit: a few goo reads this section may be updated over time.

My colleague Patrick Finch’s take on this issue: Party like it's 2003 ;
Heise: LibreOffice - A fresh page for OpenOffice ;
ZDNet: OpenOffice.org forsakes Oracle, forms new foundation and fork ;
The Register: OpenOffice files Oracle divorce papers ;
ComputerWeeklyOpenOffice.org claims independence from Oracle ;
Glyn Moody's point of view: OpenOffice.org Discovers the Joy of Forking ;
The Inquirer: Open Office ditches Oracle ;

Video+html5+Popcorn.js=hyper-video

Tristan — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:08:00 +0200

You may have seen that Brett Gaylor is joining Mozilla (see also Mark Surman's post). For those who don't know Brett, he's particularly famous for his "Open Source documentary" Rip! A remix Manifesto^[1].

One may ask why Mozilla has hired a film director^[2], but it actually makes a lot of sense thanks to Mozilla Drumbeat, as Brett is working on a Drumbeat project called Web made movies.

Now Brett has been a Mozilla community member for quite some time, contributing with the good folks at CDOT / Seneca College to create popcorn.js, "a JavaScript library for merging video with semantic data". I understand that this is a bit of a mouthful, but don't close your browser window just yet! Popcorn.js is what I would describe as "hyper-video" ("hyper" as in "hypertext"): the ability to leverage data from the video and link to it, Web style. Such data include:

location. Where on earth was this video sequence made? Then display it on an interactive map
subtitles. What is being said on the soundtrack. Display it as text, and offer to translate it into the foreign language of your choice using an online translation service
license. Under which license is this video sequence made available? (Copyright, Creative Commons, etc.)
person. Who's on the screen? If we know, then link to his/her Twitter and Flickr streams in real time
topic. What is being discussed? Then link to the corresponding article in Wikipedia and in the news.

Go and see for yourself the PopCorn.js demo (in case you're stuck with an older browser that is not capable of running the demo, here is a video of the demo).

I think this is a very significant step further for video on the Web, which was until now a very TV-like, passive and linear approach, now merged with the hypertext nature of the Web (its ability to link to things in other places), so that users can click on links in order to learn more. Of course, this is just a demo. Tons of things need to be done, but I see this as a very cool way to show what HTML5 and its video element, combined with the power of JavaScript and mash-ups.

Notes

[1] I can't say how strongly I recommend watching this movie, starting with its trailer.

[2] It's actually the second one, as Henrik Moltke, co-author of Good copy, bad copy, is already working at Mozilla... on Drumbeat!

The Web has never been as exciting!

Tristan — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:15:00 +0200

(This is a quick translation of a post I wrote in French earlier today)

Firefox 4 Beta has just been released. It brings seed, a better UI tons on new things for extension developers (hmm, JetPack!) and Web developers.

In this post, I'll focus on the Web development part.

In my opinion, combining CSS3, new APIs (including WebGL) and HTML5 is enabling the Web as a development platform to make a huge leap forward. I have worked with the amazing Paul Rouget in order to have a video of his demos in order to share my excitement.

For those who have installed Firefox 4 Beta 2, a good PC with a decent discrete graphic card and have enabled Direct2D hardware acceleration, here are 3 spectacular demos:

For those who are more in a hurry or want more details, please check the video and the article on Hacks.mozilla.org.

What you see on the screen is just a Web page, using standards that are being specified and implemented (HTML5, CSS3, SVG, WebGL, new APIs…). What I find fascinating is that by combining these technologies, one can do things that were deemed impossible even recently:

Native video with an Open and unencumbered coded (WebM)
Good fonts ( @font-face, WOFF)
Declarative Animations (using CSS3, and soon SVG/SMIL)
SVG Filters and Masks applied to HTML elements (Gaussian blur effect, a B&W filter on videos, a round-shaped video
3D (the WebM video used at the end as a texture to a 3D rotating cube just floored me)
WebSockets, for a persistent bi-di communication between the server and the browser, used in this case to control remotely the presentation from an Android phone running a pre-Alpha version of Firefox for Android.
Drag & Drop, Indexed DB and local storage, the File API, Geolocation and device orientation and all the tech features I won't mention.

Of course, the Open Web still has to compete with proprietary approaches such as monopolistic AppStores or proprietary plug-ins. But it never has been has powerful and innovative as it is now, and that's what is making me excited!

Firefox, add-ons and innovation

Tristan — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:54:00 +0200

Today, I was invited to give a talk in Paris about Mozilla and innovation, and Mozilla has received an award for being innovative (but also being a platform for innovation).

It was a great honor to receive such an award, with other organization on stage with me such as Touch Bionics, Archos, Pan-African e-Network, Aldebaran Robotics, Groupe SEB, The City of Helsinki and Dassault Systemes.

I was particularly amazed by the Pan-African e-Network (India helping Africa for Education using technology) and Aldebaran (amazing little robot which is ridiculously cute).

As the person receiving the award in the name of Mozilla, I had to say a little speech about what we do at Mozilla, and how we do it.

The Mozilla development process has been explained many times in many places and languages by many people. This time, as the whole event is about innovation, I decided to focus on the way Mozilla does Open innovation (or Participative innovation).

Here is a quick recap of what I said to the audience (shamelessly stolen from the Labs team and Chris Beard). Slides are available in PDF format (2.6MB).

Mozilla, non-profit organization, builds products (including Firefox, 400 million users) and communities (that build/test/localize/promote the product and its add-ons, and also help users).
Our vision of the Internet is explained in our Manifesto. We "believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet".
Our development process is focused on building great products, with participation from thousands of people around the world.
With 75 languages and 3 platforms (leaving mobile on the side for now), each release is actually 225 versions of Firefox. Shipped simultaneously, aiming at 400 million users. This leaves very little room for crazy ideas that may damage the stability, security and ease of use of Firefox. Our development process is basically a funnel that makes sure that contributions are valuable for our users. But this limits innovation (don't worry, I'll explain next how we actually innovate, on a very large scale).

Add-ons are a key ingredient for innovation at Mozilla. They enable an "hourglass"-shaped process, where we're building tons of exciting, useful and creative things, like an upside-down funnel going in many directions from a single point which is the product. Add-ons, with the help of the community and the Labs team become basically a gigantic virtual R&D lab:
- We're making the barrier to entry is as low as possible so that it's easy to prototype ideas
- Very little interference with release cycle. You don't have to wait for the next release of Firefox to collect feedback on your work.
- It's very easy to share an add-on. Post it on your Web site, or even send it as an email.
- Ability to serve the long tail of innovation. Your idea can be useful to 2 people on this planet. That's OK.
- Best ideas that are useful to a majority of users while not degrading the user experience can be integrated into a future version of Firefox, sometimes after a rewrite.
Add-ons span a very broad space, from Firefox Sync to BetterPrivacy, including FlashBlock, OptimizeGoogle, and one of the least popular-yet-super-useful (for me at least) Thitan.
Mozilla Labs, key in fostering innovation, has 3 pieces:
- Exploration (exploring strategic focus areas with product teams)
- Incubation (of new products and services, regardless of whether or not they begun in Labs)
- Support services (Concept series, Test Pilot, etc.)
Results of this approach:
- Firefox is highly customizable and close to users' needs
- Highly "generative^[1]/hackable^[2]" environment where many people are empowered to innovate
- Building an Internet that benefits everyone.

In my speech, I dedicated the award (representing Hermes and Dyonisos, respectively Greek gods of invention and creativity, among many things) to contributors, supporters and users of Firefox and Mozilla technologies. Oh, and by the way, a quick poll from the audience — people working in the field of innovation — showed that roughly 80% of them were using Firefox.

Notes

[1] The notion of Generativity is taken from the highly-recommended The Future of the Internet book by Pr Jonathan Zittrain. It explains how PCs, combined with the Internet, are "generative" and enable people to invent the future.

[2] Hackable in the most noble sense, referring to ingenuity, not in the sense too often used by the press to refer to pirates and crackers.

Frogs, stability and performance

Tristan — Fri, 21 May 2010 10:46:00 +0200

Frog, by Lawrence Whittemore, used under CC-BY-ND license

Can you picture a bright sunny Sunday, with kids organizing a frog race? The frogs progress by leaps and bounds. Sometimes the one on the left seems to be winning, sometimes it's the one on the right. Then the one in the middle makes a nice leap and becomes the leader, even if it seemed a second ago that it was lagging.

This is pretty much what's happening right now on the Web browser market. On one side, there is the Microsoft frog, making small and rare bounds. it's making progress, but it's still the last of the race. Then there is the smaller Firefox frog, who jumps more frequently. And finally, there is a new frog — Chrome — who challenges the former challenger. The competition becomes more interesting suddenly.

Of course, there is a limit to this metaphor. Competition in the browser space is not happening in a single dimension. There are several aspects to the competition:

User experience
Page load performance
JavaScript performance
Start-up time
Stability
Security
Innovation in features
Extensibility
Standards support
… and many others.

Anyway, the general idea carried by the frog race metaphor is valid: each release of a given browser can change the race configuration, as the newest browser can out-perform the other in one or more categories of the race.

The next leaps for Firefox? Stability and performance

Mozilla is working hard on two "leaps".

First, Firefox 3.6.4 will improve stability in a very significative way, with some performance gains. This version will look exactly like 3.6.*, but it will handle plug-ins (such as Flash, Quicktime and Java) in a separate process (only for Windows and Linux for now, Mac version to come). No changes in the user interface, but significant progress in terms of stability. The issue with current versions of Firefox is that when a plug-in crashes, it crashes Firefox at the same time. Let's say you're playing Farmville^[1], which is a Flash app, then it crashes. The impression that you get is that Firefox crashed. It did, actually, but it was stable until Flash made it crash. The issue is that Mozilla has no way to make plug-ins more stable, as we don't have access to the source code. So starting with 3.6.4, plug-in crashes won't affect Firefox anymore^[2]. This version is planned for June 2010, which is very soon.

Second — and most importantly — is Firefox 4. I encourage you to read Mike Beltzner's post about Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering. I have also a PDF version of his slide deck (2.6MB).

To make a long story short, Firefox 4 will be:

Fast ("super-duper fast", to quote Mike)
Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.

Firefox 4 is scheduled for "whenever it's ready", and we plan to have it ready around the end of 2010 (that's somewhere between November 2010 and… early 2011)

Now I would like to focus on platform speed (I encourage the readers that are allergic to technical details to jump stright to the conclusion^[3].)

We're working on several fronts here:

New HTML 5 parser. This means a new generation parser really written to handle HTML 5. It will run in a separate thread so the the UI is more responsive. Its code will be cleaner and easier to maintain than our existing parser (which dates back to the early Mozilla days).
New JavaScript engine, JaegerMonkey, combining Method-based tracing used by Webkit and JIT-tracing from our TraceMonkey engine. To make things even better, our garbage collector is also being significantly improved.
Using the GPU to do a bunch of things such as video decoding and display, hardware compositing and scrolling, text rendering and drawing. This will take some serious load off the CPU so that the whole browser runs faster.
Startup time. It's already much better on the Mac, and it will be improved on Windows. (See Dietrich's numerous performance updates.)
''Limiting disk I/O. As CPUs get faster and faster, disks do not make as much progress, especially on laptops on mobiles. So we're working on limiting disk I/O in a very significant way (we're aiming at cutting it in half for the main thread!). This will improve Firefox' responsiveness in a very significant way.
Other optimizations, such as DOM performance (important for dynamic HTML), of which we'll talk more later.

So here is what Mozilla is already working on for the two important topics that are stability and performance. In future posts, I'll discuss the changes in terms of user interface, upcoming features, and new cool toys for Web and add-ons developers (new technologies and tools). In the meantime, if you want to get a taste of the future, please join us and test future versions of Firefox:

Firefox 3.6.4 beta
Firefox 4 pre-Alpha with WebM support (Open video, yay!)
Firefox pre-Alpha.

I can't predict which other "frog" is going to make another leap, and how large it will be. But be assured that the Firefox proverbial frog has a lot ready to deliver, and it will deliver very soon!

Notes

[1] Like 80 million people in the world.

[2] You'll have to reload the page that contains the crashing plug-in, of course. But Firefox and the other tabs won't be affected at all.

[3] In short, people were wondering if Firefox was a read panda or a fox, but now we're told it's actually a frog.

Standblog - en

Mozilla awards grants to six international non-profit organizations

Mozilla awards grants to six international non-profit organizations

This photograph is free

Update, Jan 12th, 2012

Notes

More details on the upcoming MozCamp Europe in Berlin

Mozilla Camp Europe 2011: save the date!

Some good Mozilla reading

Notes

Mozilla is changing

Notes

Back from Bilbao

Adobe Ditches AIR for Linux

Mozilla at the eG8

Firefox leading in Europe

More reading

Notes

How is Firefox different from other browsers

An App Store for the Open Web, not for a specific browser

Getting a personalized experience without losing your privacy or control over your data

Conclusion

Notes

Community meetups with Gary Kovacs

Mozilla and Fosdem 2011

At the Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona

Notes

Hardware acceleration browsing explained to the rest of us

Welcome to Document Foundation and LibreOffice

Video+html5+Popcorn.js=hyper-video

Notes

The Web has never been as exciting!

Firefox, add-ons and innovation

Notes

Frogs, stability and performance

The next leaps for Firefox? Stability and performance

Notes