Axel Hecht Mozilla in Your Language

LinuxTag 2007 was interesting, in fact, more interesting than I anticipated. I cherry-picked a few talks from the program on Friday and Saturday.

Crowding effects: How money influences open source projects and its contributors, by Matthias Stürmer. I already blogged about this one a bit. The slides are up by now. Matthias is organizing the OpenExpo in Zürich in September, and we’re invited. I’m waiting for an invitation on English, still.

Best Practices for Open Source Projects, by Ross Turk. Didn’t see all of his presentation, but I did come in time for a picture and to catch that he’s anticipating to see sf.net cooperate with external projects to make their tooling better. They apparently want to improve their site to get beyond a download redirector, too.

Das Phänomen OpenOffice.org – alles Individualisten oder Freaks? by Jacqueline Rahemipour. Not sure if the target audience for that talk was there. Most notably, she explicitly turned down attempts to target increasing female contributions to OpenOffice.org, despite females being a minority there, as elsewhere in the open source community. She wouldn’t see any climate or somesuch making it hard for women to contribute. These notes translated from German spoken word into written English, so take it with a grain of salt. But the core message was “Women in Open Source special project? No thanks.”

The Best of Both Worlds – Open Source und Marketing by Valerie Hoh. The talk was aimed at development leads that haven’t looked into marketing yet, and wouldn’t just because of the name. She introduced a two definitions of marketing, one of which was along the lines of “plan an exchange of goods or services for the benefits of both parties”, which led her to point out that software needs to work for the user, not the developer, and that the developer gets more users and more cookies in return for more users. She had room for one positive example, don’t hurt the web. That’s her wallpaper now :-). I was able to detail on more of our marketing approaches in the following discussion. Later that day, I pointed here at foxkeh.com. As painful as that is to german eyes, it works for Japanese.

I had to report back some dog food bugs on the native OSX OpenOffice.org build I got on Friday on Saturday morning, so I didn’t really get a whole lot of Nicolas Vandenberghe’s Semantic Web, Wiki and Mashup: how they can all work together. He was presenting ITerating.com, a wiki-based software guide. I wasn’t intending to go there for all the RDFness in it, but for some ideas on how to merge wiki editing and more or less structured information. Sadly, I didn’t get a whole lot more than “we’re using RDF on a laid back path, without all the fancyness on top of triples”. They do reification, though, if I got that right. But no OWL or SPARQL or somesuch. They did get asked to open the source of their app, and they’re going to spend some thinking on that.

Grüße aus der Gruft: JavaScript in Zeiten des Web 2.0 by Christian Wenz. This talk was an interesting mix of anecdotal stories, history of fun, grief and fun of using js on the web without blaming Brendan half as much as he does himself at dinner tables. Christian promised to give his left hand for Firebug and was pleased to hear that we’re investigating including it in fx3. I didn’t poke him for a comment on js1.5+ -> 2, as he was focussing on the web.

GNU/Linux stack Localization to right-to- left languages: Persian Language Experience. Mohammad Khansari and Narges Zali’s talk was cancelled, sadly.

Create cross- platform web applications with XUL by Carola Kummert and Arne Blankerts. You probably know Arne as TheSeer from #developers, I had no clue he was in Germany. Hamburg, to be precise. I met Bernd Mielke before that talk, and we both scared the holy cow out of Arne. The first time that folks in the audience raised their hands on the “Are there any core Mozilla hackers in the room?” question. Harharhar, pirate day. The talk was mostly focused on more abstract pros and cons like XBL, better layout, templates for huge datasets. They also differentiated remote XUL vs installed extensions or xulrunner applications. No technicalities on the xml markup level. They mentioned RDF a few more times than it seems to be fashionable these days. The good news is, they’re working on a book. The bad news is, they asked me to proof-read it. They even had some XUL dark matter than I didn’t run across yet, took a screenshot of that.

Besides the actual talks, I did a bunch of networking. I hang around at the OpenOffice.org booth for a bit again, and dug into a few issues in Firefox. I did receive a bunch of compliments to forward to the Thunderbird team for tb2, too. Not to mention, I did wear my tb shirt on Friday, go Scott! The reactions I received when talking to people throughout on Mozilla were positive. I received some questions on structure and cash, in particular as I commented about our giving program on Friday morning, bascially the first thing I did after buying a ticket. I even answered questions about debian and iceweasel to the full satisfaction of those that asked, though I didn’t run into any debian maintainers, AFAICT. The idea of Firefox as a brand wasn’t alienating people at all. When it comes down to community, product, and marketing, I haven’t received any doubts or disagreement, it was a comfortable atmosphere of “Mozilla knows where they’re going and they’re good”.

Carlo approached me on psyced, which I admittedly didn’t get. twentyafterfour is working on a Firefox implementation. I invited to them to do more blogging about their stuff and get it syndicated on planet, and maybe prepare a brownbag to present at the office. It may be a protocol to distribute data real time to multiple recipients, something that artists at myspace.com would be interested in, or taking chat a step further, and both. Sounds confused? I am. I blame myself for not finding the step between network protocols and who cares about yet another multi-protocol chat. Carlo was sure it’s not a dupe of AllPeers nor really p2p, but that those guys should talk.

In general, I can’t really judge on the claims that LinuxTag would be the Europe’s Biggest Trade Fair for Free Software, Linux and Open Source, I would estimate the crowd at FOSDEM to outnumber the crowd on LinuxTag, both this year and last. Even if I consider that Wednesday and Thursday are rumored to have been better and if I multiply the crowd at LinuxTag by 4 (FOSDEM crowd stays for both days, mostly, LinuxTag is likely more one day per visitor), FOSDEM feels bigger. It does feel more technical, too.

Oh, did I mention pictures? Here, of course.

I listened to a talk by Matthias Stürmer on crowding out effects in communities by monetary incentives. Gonna be interesting to have Seth and Matthias look at the Mozilla Community giving program. The good news is, I feel that we’re on the right track here from what I heard so far.

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.

I have two morning routines, going through my newsgroups, and through my list of comics. Today, side by side, the Mozilla 2 discussion on .platform and today’s strip on sinfest.