The Thai community of Firefox localizers is very busy these days.
Last week they held a localization party called “House 2.0” where they worked to finalize most of the localization needed for the upcoming Thai Firefox release. This is very similar to the German Mozilla community who recently also held a “Hack’n'Cook” event. I am looking forward to the Thai locale release.
UPDATE: Molecularck has an overview of the House 2.0 Firefox Thai l10n sprint and blognone has a nice overview in Thai Firefox 3 Thai localization sprint วันที่ 2 และ 3
Firefox Thai Locale!, originally uploaded by pittaya.
1st Thai Firefox 3 on GNU/Linux (very pre-release), originally uploaded by arthit.
Firefox 3 Thai Langpack pre-alpha 1, originally uploaded by kengz.
John Markoff of the New York Times has a good piece on ‘hybrid’ organizations of which Mozilla is a good example.
They’re often referred to as “social enterprises” because they pursue social missions instead of profits. But unlike most nonprofit groups, these organizations generate a sustainable source of revenue and do not rely on philanthropy. Earnings are retained and reinvested rather than being distributed to shareholders.
The new companies, like thousands of Silicon Valley start-ups before them, typically begin as small groups of intensely motivated people dedicated to the goal of building a product or service.
The best-known examples are efforts like the Mozilla Corporation, which maintains and develops the Firefox Web browser, and TechSoup, an organization that was started two decades ago to connect technology experts with nonprofit groups. It now distributes commercial software to nonprofit groups in 14 countries. (Mozilla’s mission is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet, which it considers a social good.)
Those of you who followed Mozilla in 2007 may remember our 24 hour global community event in September, Mozilla 24.
Mozilla 24 was an amazing continuous 24 hours of Mozilla events held around the world at Stanford University, Paris, Tokyo, and Bangkok all interconnected by live high-definition Internet video (and IRC). Mozilla 24 had presentations (with video) from Dr. Lawrence Lessig, Zak Greant, Dr. David Humphrey, Mike Shaver, Johnathan Nightingale, Atsushi Shimono of Mozillagumi, Masayuki Kanda of NTT, and a panel discussion on the future of the Internet with Mitchell Baker, Dr. Vint Cerf, and Dr. Jun Murai.
In Japan, Mozilla also held a music festival (photos tagged mozilla24 at Flickr) alongside Mozilla 24, the Firefox Rock Festival ‘07 (official photos). One of the community members here in Japan, Yuji, who is a car enthusiast as well as Firefox user, decided to theme his car with Firefox and show it off at the Firefox Rock Festival which was held in Tokyo to showcase a number of awesome independent musicians including Shonen Knife, Qomolangma Tomato, Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re, SLUGGER, MARS EURYTHMICS, Midori, 101a, marron, Kokusyoku Sumire, Naoya Yoshida * APO, AJI, オーノキヨフミ, and Taizo Jinnouchi.
Yuji decided to remodel his car recently so a few folks went to take video of the car on the highway.
A 708 MB mov file of the Firefox car is also available for download.
For those of you who understand Japanese, we also have two other interesting videos at firefoxccstudio.org with musician Keigo Oyamada (better known as Cornelius) and Mozilla Foundation board member Joi Ito discussing the changing state of music in the Internet age and the importance of the alternative licensing of artworks and music including Creative Commons. Another video with Cornelius, Joi and musician Ryuchi Sakamoto also discusses similar themes.
Just a quick note to those of you who are in or near Boston.
Mozilla is sponsoring the first (?) conference on Internet memes: ROFLCon.
Mozilla Partners Up With ROFLCon
A number of friends of mine, including Anil Dash, Matthew Haughey, David Weinberger, and Joshua Schachter will be speaking so I highly recommend you go. I’m sorry to miss this one.
Links of note today, March 26th.
Some links I enjoyed today…
Yahoo! Japan has launched their re-designed home page (it launched earlier this year actually) and the Firefox for Yahoo! Japan is showcased (scroll down, on the left.)
If you are a Yahoo! Japan user, this version of Firefox ships with the Yahoo! Japan toolbar installed and should be helpful.
Via flors I see that Ari Jaaksi, a Vice President of Software at Nokia, recently presented on “What Mobile Users Need and How Open Source Can Help” at OSiM USA 2008. Jaaksi’s presentation is also available in pdf and Podshow is also providing an mp3. I recommend the mp3 audio as the presentation is largely images.
Jaaksi’s presentation is very relevant to Mozilla because Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet ships with Maemo Linux as the operating system and Mozilla’s Gecko is used as the rendering engine for the Maemo Browser. I know from recent discussions with Christian Sejersen and Jay Sullivan of Mozilla’s mobile team that Mozilla very much values Nokia’s participation in the Mozilla project.
Jaaksi’s presentation touched on these points:
While the entire presentation was worth reviewing, starting around 16:40 in Jaaksi’s presentation are some interesting and insightful comments about Nokia and working in open source. In response to a question about whether Nokia contributed patches back to Webkit around the implementation of Webkit in Nokia’s S60 platform, Jaaksi was open and honest and said that Nokia did not do enough in that instance. He then went on to say that Nokia plans to work more closely with the open source projects they are shipping code from in the future.
Note: when Jaaksi talks about the ‘upstream model’ what he means to say is contributing patches regularly back to the original project’s codebase. I’ve also added in some clarification in brackets in the transcription below to make it more clear as to what exactly Jaaksi is referring to.
Question from the audience (@ 16:20): Excuse me, another question. If I remember correctly, it was 3 years ago when you [Nokia] implemented Webkit in to the Series 60 devices, you had to make a lot changes, for example in memory management. Did you use the ‘upstream model’ in that case? I mean, did you feed back to the community the changes you had made for your devices?
Answer from Ari Jaaksi: Not the way we [Nokia] should have done it. Let me be very honest about that. Also with our Internet tablets we have horror stories where we didn’t do it [share patches back with the trunk]. Just today, or yesterday I discussed this with the Mozilla guy, the name escapes me at the moment, I don’t know if he is here today, about our Mozilla browser here. It is really that, what we did was last summer when we started to ship with the Mozilla browser we made a couple of mistakes. We are kind of working upstream there [with Mozilla] but we are not doing as much as I would like to do and we sort of need to go back. We almost forked the code [from Mozilla] but we need to go back [to sync up with the main Gecko 1.9 trunk].
Also in the [Webkit] browser on the Series 60 devices, I claim that the Webkit situation is not a trivial case. There are… Apple forked it. We [Nokia] kind of forked it. There are some challenges now [due to the forking of code from the Webkit trunk]. This is something that we as an industry should learn [not to do]. This [forking code] is not benefitting anybody if we do it like that. That is kind of my message here. Good question.
I, for one, am very glad to see Nokia using open source, and it’s clear from Jaaksi’s presentation and comments that while Nokia has had some challenges in developing with open source code, they are learning how better to work with open source communities (like Mozilla) to provide innovative products to Nokia’s customers. It’s great to hear that Nokia plans to sync back with the core Gecko code base as Nokia (and the users of the Nokia products that will ship with Gecko) will get all the benefits that the entire Mozilla community is working on for the current version of Gecko 1.9 and beyond.
Thank you to Ari Jaaksi and the entire Nokia open source development team for their hard work and efforts. We look forward to your future products, especially those made with OSS and especially Mozilla.
This post is for any of the Japanese readers I have.
ZDNet Japanさんが弊社の Brendan Eich との対談ビデオを日本語字幕で出しましたので JavaScript に興味を持つ方、ぜひご覧下さい。
ITの歴史にイノベーションを巻き起こした技術者に話を聞くシリーズインタビュー「Super Techies」。このビデオでは、現在MozillaのCTOであり、JavaScriptを開発したことでも知られるBrendan Eich氏が、シリコンバレーでのプログラマーとしてのキャリアや、Firefoxの展望について語る。