Axel Hecht Mozilla in Your Language

I’ll be spending some time at LinuxTag 2007, here in Berlin, Friday and Saturday. There seem to be a few interesting talks on the program, including some XUL dark matter.

I’ll be hitting the exhibition floor, too.

Firstly, architectures with one platform give you grass on rails, not rubies. Opting for still-imagery here, take a look at the Amerika Bahnhof. I pondered taking half a day off and take some pictures from Berlin’s Lehrter Bahnhof (or, Hauptbahnhof). Anybody who’s been there knows that it’s a maze of platforms, aiming at different needs, operated by different parties (there are at least 3 different operators for local public transportation in Berlin). That doesn’t count all those independent parties running shops and restaurants.

Mozilla is a train station, and it comes with a plethora of platforms. Platforms as in horizontal stuff to take off from. NSPR, NSS, Gecko (undefined in all levels of –with[-out]-technology), libxul, xulrunner, toolkit applications. Those are platforms for programming. I’d call Firefox rather a platform for web experience, not strictly one for programming, I see non-programming values in Firefox that form a distinct kind of platform, like privacy, security, good defaults, user choice. Then there’s spreadfirefox, which is a platform to launch marketing projects. Not everything that is essential to a train station ecosystem is a platform, btw, and there are plenty of those in Mozilla, too.

Despite the fact that it took me me only a few minutes to write down some punch words for some of our platforms, Mozilla doesn’t do a good job about defining which stuff we consider to be a platform or not. That doesn’t mean that platforms need to be done, or that MoCo has to commit to get them done. They may actually be as much of a Baustelle as anything. Yet, defining them and giving them names makes them easier to find, and to fix, even. I consider the non-programming platforms vital for the train station ecosystem, too.

Firefox Flicks works, listen to the cover version of Wheee in wet feets in plone at minute 9:30.

Hrm. How many folks do we have in the Toronto office exactly? Just wondering.