A Community, a Technology and an Organization

The word Mozilla has meant many different things over the years (the linked Wikipedia article lists 10 uses). Although several of the historical meanings (such as Mozilla referring to an application) are no longer in use, it can still get confusing if people are using the term in different ways.

Today when people talk about Mozilla, they are usually talking about either an organization (the Mozilla Foundation and/or the Mozilla Corporation), a technology (the Mozilla code) or a community (the global group of people that work on the software hosted at mozilla.org and the extensions, applications and other projects related to that code).

To give some examples for how Mozilla can be used in different ways, take a look at the following applications:

• Firefox is a Mozilla community project that is supported by the Mozilla organization and uses Mozilla technology
• Bugzilla is a Mozilla community project that is supported by the Mozilla organization and doesn’t use Mozilla technology
• Open Komodo is a Mozilla community project that is not supported by the Mozilla organization and does use Mozilla technology
• XUL Dark Matter are applications that aren’t Mozilla community projects and are not supported by the Mozilla organization but they do use Mozilla technology

These distinctions matter because we need to know what we’re talking about if we want to tell other people about what Mozilla is and why it is important. Do we want to have the word Mozilla mean all three of these things? Would it be worthwhile instead to use different words for the organization, the technology and the community?

For example, the recently announced Powered by Mozilla logo is talking about Mozilla as a technology, so this would include both Firefox and Open Komodo. But Open Komodo isn’t part of what has traditionally been known as the Mozilla applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, and Sunbird) that are supported by the Mozilla organization.

This has come up for me while working on the www.mozilla.org site. On the recently updated Projects page the distinction between Mozilla as an organization and Mozilla as a technology was handled by creating two sections for applications (Mozilla Applications and Mozilla-Based Applications). It seems to me that these names are somewhat ambiguous and we could find something that is more clear but I’m not sure what that would be.

This is also an issue that will need to be dealt with when we update the content in the About section of the site. If the About page should provide an answer to the question of ‘What Is Mozilla?’ we’ll get a very different result if we decide that Mozilla is just one thing or if it is several things with different meanings. My opinion is that the answer to this question is that Mozilla is a community, a technology and an organization, but I was interested to hear what other people thought.

Status Update 2008-01-25

Last week I started settling in to life in California. It should be a few weeks before things return to normal, but I was able to get some work done. The main thing I did was taking part in a planning meeting to discuss the direction for the www.mozilla.org site. This week I plan to follow up on some of the action items from that meeting and prepare for a follow up meeting next week. I also stopped by the main office and took care of some paperwork stuff and found a desk to use when I start going in regularly.

So Long to Taveuni (But Not to My Bottle of Potato Juice)

I tried to use our recent move as an opportunity to get rid of a lot of stuff that had built up over the last six and a half years we lived in our apartment in Brooklyn. I certainly didn’t need the inflatable Homer Simpson in a Santa Claus outfit that had been living in our basement or the software installation CDs for a PC I no longer have.

A lot of stuff got thrown out, but I did make an effort to give away as much stuff as I could. I made a particular effort to give away our house plants and we ended up giving away all of them except for the enormous plam tree in our bedroom that reached all the way up to our ceiling. I got Taveuni (named after an island in Fiji* I had visited) shortly after I had moved to New York in 1999 and the plant just kept growing.

Several people took a look at Taveuni, but none of them ended up taking it. In the end, I was resigned to the fact that I’d have to throw it away. On the day of the move I was going to have the movers help me take it downstairs, but we ended up running out of time so I left Taveuni (and a couch we were also going to put on the curb) behind. I’d like to pretend that the building manager would keep it for the new tenants, but I don’t think that’s what happened.

There were some other things that I went back and forth on about keeping or not. For an example of what I got sentimental about, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of my empty bottle of potato juice that we picked up on our trip to Iceland. Other than the pictures that’s one of the only souvenirs I have from the trip, so I figure I’d keep it. It is undeniably an interesting thing (it tasted a lot like dirt, if you were curious) but is it worth shipping across country? It probably isn’t, but I’ll hold on to it until the next move at least.

* We were scheduled to go scuba diving there after spending some time on the main island as part of Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village program. I wasn’t pleased to find out right before we left to go there that the name of the island translates as ‘Shark Island’. I did end up seeing one shark while we were diving and it wasn’t the terrifying experience I had expected it to be.

Cutting It Close

Things seemed pretty bad when the cab driver who was waiting to take me to the airport started helping put boxes on to the truck. After the movers were mostly done, I got in the car and headed off to Newark. By this time it was starting to be rush hour, so we got held up by a long line going in to the Holland Tunnel but we managed to make it to the airport a little after 5:00 for a flight that left at 6:00.

Usually 45 minutes would have been just enough time, but traveling with a cat adds a few layers to the regular process. For instance, you can’t check-in at the curbside with a cat (I found this out after going through most of the check-in process). You also have to take the cat out of the carrier and have that go through the metal detector.

I made it on to the plane, but it involved running at full tilt with a cat carrier in one hand, my belt in the other (since I didn’t think I had time to put it back on), a video camera on one shoulder and an overstuffed backpack on. Fortunately when I got to the gate there was a bit of a delay since they had run out of room in the overhead bins and were taking some carry-ons off. Even so, I was about 10 minutes away from missing my flight and doing who knows what next.

I see now that it was silly to schedule things so closely. If the movers hadn’t been an hour and a half late my plans would have been fine, but stuff happens and you need some margin. It would have probably made the most sense to leave the next morning after staying on a friend’s couch for the night and leaving the cat in our empty apartment (even if that would have freaked her out a bit).

When we set things up a few weeks ago we thought we had to leave the same day that the movers came since we couldn’t figure out what else to do with the cat. Jimmie, the cat, is traumatized by any sort of change but there has been so much change recently getting ready for our move that a little more probably wouldn’t have done much extra damage.

Moving across country is going to be a crazy experience anyway, so this doesn’t seem to have been as crazy as it could have been. There were a few other things that we might have done another way and there were definitely some things we could have done better, but we all made it to California in one piece though so I’m happy.

Oh, did I forget to mention that my wife and daughter missed all this since they caught a plane earlier in the morning? Apparently, there was no traffic on the way to the airport and they had a lovely flight.

Status Update 2008-01-11

Last week I wrapped up some changes to the www.mozilla.org site by posting updates to the Timeline and Projects pages. I also added a new Mozilla-Based Applications page.

The goal for the changes to the Projects section was to make it easier for people to find projects from all parts of the Mozilla community. The updated page groups projects into different categories instead of putting everything into one big list and includes just a featured set of active projects (this set of featured projects will be rotated and there are also links to other lists so people can still find information about all available projects).

If you have any comments about these changes or about which projects could be featured on the Projects page in the future, feel free to let me know.

Going to California

I wanted to mention that I’ll be away from the computer most of next week while my family and I finish packing up for our move out to California. Things will be hectic for a little while, but I’ll be checking my mail and responding when I can.

There are a number of reasons to move, including being able to work in the main office in Mountain View, getting more space than our current Brooklyn apartment and missing the rest of another winter in the Northeast. I’m also interested in exploring that part of the country. I’ve been living on the East Coast of the US for ten years and had been living on the Third Coast* before that so I figured it was time to give the West Coast a try.

For everyone out in the Bay Area, I’m looking forward to seeing you soon.

* I had no idea there were two Third Coasts before googling for this link today (to avoid any confusion I’m from the Gulf Coast area and not the Great Lakes area).

Status Update 2008-01-04

Over the last few weeks I’ve mainly been looking at how we can update several different parts of the www.mozilla.org site. Specifically I’ve been:

• Proposing an update to the Mozilla Timeline page
• Going through the Mozilla Hall of Fame page to identify the projects that are still active today
• Reading through the bug about updating the About content and thinking about how to address this
• Trying to put the finishing touches on the new Featured Projects and Mozilla-Based Applications pages

If anyone has any comments or suggestions about any of this, please feel free to let me know your thoughts.

Updating the Mozilla Timeline

The Timeline on www.mozilla.org is a little out of date, so I thought it would be a good idea to update the page in time for Mozilla’s 10th anniversary.

I’ve put together a mockup of a new version that includes milestones since 2005, fills in some gaps in the early history of Mozilla and adds an introduction paragraph. I also took out a couple milestones since the list was getting a little long and tried to cut out some duplicate text.

If anyone has suggestions for other milestones to add or comments about any of these proposed changes, please post to bug 410484 or leave comments here.