Powered by Mozilla FAQ

I just posted a Powered by Mozilla FAQ that answers the questions I’ve seen asked during the ongoing conversation about this logo. If you think that there is a question missing or if you have comments about a particular answer, please feel free to post a comment here.

Some more information (guidelines about the logo and an application to request using the logo) still need to be posted and those pieces will be coming soon. For now though, I’m posting the FAQ to let people give us some more feedback before the other pieces are finished up.

One other thing I want to do is put up a page that lists all of the organizations and people using the logo. For now, I see that Songbird and Flock have it on their site and I’ve heard that Nokia uses it in their Internet tablet. Potentially any Mozilla-based application could be using it as well. If anyone knows of any other current uses not listed here, I’d be very interested to hear about that.

The Long Tail Has Let Me Down

What I’m looking for is exactly the sort of thing that the Long Tail said would be easy to buy online. I want to get songs from Cotton Mather, a band from Austin that had a few albums in the 90s and then split up, but the Internet isn’t cooperating.

Their albums are out of print now and I could buy the physical CDs on Amazon or eBay for about $30. There are two problems with this. I don’t want to buy CDs anymore when all I do is rip the music to my computer and stick the jewel case in a box in my basement. I also don’t want to pay extra just because there’s a limited supply of this band’s round plastic discs in the world.

I want to buy individual songs online for $1 a piece, but looking around on iTunes, Amazon’s MP3 service and Google I can only come up with a couple of their songs. Isn’t this the sort of hard-to-find niche product that companies can make money off of selling only a few copies when there are virtually no stocking and distribution costs?

Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough or there’s a licensing problem or something else, but I’m disappointed this isn’t easier.

To All Of The Organizations Who Keep Mailing Me Stuff

If you’re a non-profit or political campaign that I’ve donated to online, please don’t send me physical letters in the mail. Any mail I get goes straight to the trash. Not only is it a waste of paper and energy, but it’s a waste of part of the money I’ve sent you. Feel free to email if you need to get in touch with me.

New Mozilla Shirt Now Available

I’d like to let people know that there is a new Mozilla shirt available in the Mozilla store. This new design is heavily influenced by the old school Hack shirts (there are stars, there is a dino-head and there is a freedom related tag line).

What Is Happening With ‘Powered by Mozilla’

There has been an ongoing discussion about creating a Powered by Mozilla logo that people and organizations can use as part of their projects or products. We have been working on creating some guidelines to determine how the logo can be used and I wanted to post an update about where we are with this.

Guidelines need to be specific since we don’t want someone to be able to check out just one file from our repositories and then claim that their application is Powered by Mozilla. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be an existing list of reusable technologies that the Mozilla community creates*.

Since a list doesn’t seem to exist, I took a pass at creating one. I’m pretty sure my list is incomplete or contains things that might not make sense, so I wanted to get some feedback. If you have suggestions about the following criteria or technologies, please comment on this blog or edit this wiki page.

Draft Technology Criteria

• The code should be an official and currently active Mozilla project
• The code should be included in an official Mozilla product or it should be packaged for re-use by other products

Draft Technology List

• Gecko
• NSPR
• NSS
• Prism
• Rhino
• SpiderMonkey
• Tamarin
• XULRunner

*There is the old Mozilla Projects page, but this is out of date and contains not just technology projects but also entire applications (like SeaMonkey) and community efforts (like the marketing project). MDC has a list of technologies on the home page, but this isn’t geared toward Mozilla code that others can reuse (for instance, SVG is a specification developed by the W3C and not a technology that the community has created).

The Exciting Life of Bureaucrats

I just finished reading Life of a European Mandarin. It was written by a former EU official and is full of stories of his time in Brussels. Most of the stories dealt with explaining how difficult it was to get anything done in such a big bureaucracy and some others involved dishing dirt on European politicians I’ve never heard of before.

It was interesting to compare his experiences with his overview of the history of the European Union. He mentioned several times how amazing it was that so much had been accomplished in 50 years — who would have guessed right after World War II or during the Cold War that most of the countries in Europe would voluntarily join to form a political and economic union?

The author ends by saying that he thinks the EU has become less capable as it’s grown larger and that it is no longer able to meet the challenges ahead of it. I can understand why someone who has dealt directly with the frustrations of working in a huge bureaucracy would have a negative opinion of that organization’s abilities, but I think he misses the larger picture.

It’s true enough that on one level it is nearly impossible for a bureaucracy to get things done but on another level it can bring about huge changes, like uniting a continent or sending people to the Moon or creating the Internet or… There are issues that are unique to the EU’s situation today but any large organization deals with this dynamic and somehow things manage to get done.

This is getting me interested in going back and reading more of Arthur Schlesinger’s Age of Roosevelt series. I read the first a couple years ago and am interested in reading more about an earlier transition where people started looking to the government as a positive influence instead of something that worked poorly and should stay out of people’s way.

But first I’m going to read Kafka on the Shore. My friend Evan sent me a Murakami short story recently and that got me excited to read more of his books again.

Update on www.mozilla.org archiving

It has been a few weeks since I last talked about archiving content on www.mozilla.org and I wanted to post an update. We’ve removed a first batch of pages from the site and are still working to make sure that we’re redirecting and migrating any content from this batch that is still in use today. This process is ongoing and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

We’ve heard that the archiving process has caught some people by surprise, so I want to post information about the content we’re looking at for the next round of archiving. For the following links we’re looking at migrating the developer documentation to MDC and archiving any other content that is out of date and no longer being maintained.

• Migrate http://www.mozilla.org/directory
• Migrate http://www.mozilla.org/docs
• Migrate http://www.mozilla.org/editor
• Migrate http://www.mozilla.org/profilemanager
• Migrate http://www.mozilla.org/rdf
• Migrate http://www.mozilla.org/rhino
• Migrate http://www.mozilla.org/scriptable
• Migrate http://www.mozilla.org/unix

If you have comments, questions or suggestions about what to do with any of this content, please feel free to comment in the relevant bugs. If you are the owner of any of this content, we will be getting in touch with you before making any changes.

The Mozilla Foundation and Platform Developers

As part of the recent discussion about the Mozilla Foundation’s future, one theme that has come up is that the Foundation has a role to play filling in gaps and connecting dots between different parts of the community. One of the connections that we would like to help strengthen is the collaboration between Mozilla core developers and developers working on Mozilla-based applications.

The people and organizations that are using Mozilla as a platform are doing innovative things with Mozilla technology and they are also helping to expand the scope and size of the community. The Foundation is interested in making sure that this part of the community, and the community as a whole, is healthy and growing. As an organization, the Foundation can help by organizing, guiding and facilitating — what Matthew Gertner has identified as a diplomatic mission that would make developers’ lives easier (both core developers and developers using the platform).

The Mozilla Foundation is still in the process of bringing on a new executive director and building its capacity so that we are able to take on new activities such as this. For now, we are thinking through how we should be getting involved and we welcome feedback, comments or suggestions from people interested in this topic. If you have ideas about how the Foundation might help, please post them here or on your own blog (if you post on your blog, please add a link on the Mozilla Foundation Futures friendfeed page).