• 江村 秀之(えむら ひでゆき) or Hideyuki (level) Emura who you may know has the most popular Mozilla blog in Japan: えむもじら and was profiled by CNet Japan last year before Mozilla 24: Mozillaの成長を見つめ続ける、クールで熱い老舗サイトの運営者〜江村秀之（level）氏／えむもじら運営
  
• 池田 譲治(いけだ じょうじ) or Joji Ikeda who is one of the leading Mozillagumi members and is famous for his translations of Mozilla-related information. Ikeda-san blogs at Firefox Hacks 翻訳日記 and was profiled by CNet Japan last year before Mozilla 24:心に伝わるテクニカルワードを探求する翻訳のエキスパート 〜池田譲治さん／Mozilla Japan 翻訳部門 和訳アドバイザー
  
• 下田 洋志(しもだ ひろし) or Hiroshi (piro) Shimoda who many of you know is a prolific Mozilla add-ons developer, XUL expert, blogger at outsider reflex, and very talented designer to boot.
• 松澤 太郎(まつざわ たろう) or Taro Matsuzawa, who most of you know as “BTM” or “kumicho” and is one of the key members of the Mozillagumi, XUL developer, and blogs at すめるまん Broken Diary
• dynamis(でゅなみす) or Tomoya Asai, who most of you know as the localization peer in Japan and recently joined Mozilla Japan full-time. dynamis runs his own 7ème Gnossienne blog, but also runs the important Mozilla Japan 翻訳部門フォーラム and the Mozilla Japan L10N Forum where the Japanese Mozilla community discuss l10n issues and solutions.

We’re very lucky to have such active and prolific developers and localizers and authors in Japan. With the previous pocket-guide to Firefox 3, and now this expert’s guide, Japanese Firefox users and developers have a pair of great books to help them enjoy Firefox 3 to it’s fullest.

Emura-san’s blog post about the book has an image of the dust jacket cover which some of you might enjoy: Firefox 3 Hacks 予約可能に.

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:

• Linux and open source CAN meet the needs of mass-market.
• [Nokia's] role: bring open source to mainstream consumer electronics
• [Nokia & open source] need to learn from each other. Both.
• Building upstream. Community rules.
• Beyond code and licenses: developers and projects.
• Diving in: deeper involvement.

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.

Chris gave a presentation introducing Mozilla Labs, which was the first presentation of the Labs projects (Prism, Weave, Personas, etc.) in Japan.  Chris’s presentation was basically only images, and I don’t think we have video anywhere (unfortunately) so we’ll have to wait for the next Labs presentation for something people can download.  You can see most of the screenshots of the presentations in the photo galleries linked below.

News coverage:

• weaveでブラウザとWebサービスの融合を図るMozilla–builder tech day
• 【OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring】「ブラウザとOSの境界を曖昧にする」—Mozillaの研究機関が作る“Webの未来”：ITpro
• 「ブラウザとOSの境界を曖昧にする」、Mozillaの研究機関が作る“Webの未来”
• Mozilla Labsのトップが語る次世代ブラウザの姿 (go to the second page and click on the photo of amachang and Chris at the bottom)

Blog comments

• オープンソースカンファレンス2008 Tokyo/Spring 1日目報告 – SumiTomohikoの日記
• オープンソースカンファレンス2008(OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring)に行ってきました(1日目) – RX-7乗りの適当な日々
  
• オープンソースカンファレンス2008 Spring/Tokyo – なかむランチ
• OSC2008に行ってきた。 – 「 Firefox ×？＝！」を考えてみる、ブログ。
• Mozilla LabのChris Beard氏のお話 – ウィリアムのいたずらの開発日記
• OSC2008 での Chris Beard のキーノートスピーチ – えむもじら

Photo galleries:

• OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring
• Kazabana – 2008-02-29~03
• Open Source Conference Tokyo
• Mozilla Labs at Open Source Conference Tokyo 2008

Many thanks to Chris for coming out to Tokyo and thank you to all of the Mozillagumi volunteers for helping staff the booth and prepare the user questionnaire.  Thank you to CNet Japan for hosting and Six Apart Japan, Seki-san, David Recordon & Miyagawa-san for the initial event planning.

On Feb. 28th, Chris will be keynoting at ZDNet Japan’s “builder techday: open apis and beyond.” David Recordon and Tatsuhiko Miyagawa from Six Apart will be speaking about open ID and the social graph (Brad Fitzpatrick, Read/Write Web, Google code repository.) Chris will be speaking about the “open web” from Mozilla’s perspective and will probably touch upon many of the subjects Recordon will speak about but also aspects of information that we keep in the browser and how we might share that as well. I’m afraid registration for this event is already closed.

On Feb. 29th, Chris will be keynoting at the Open Source Conference (Tokyo) – Spring 2008.  Registration (jp) will be closing soon so please sign up asap if you plan to attend.

Chris Beard will provide an overview of recent activities at Mozilla including information on exciting new Mozilla Labs development projects currently in the works. He will talk about his vision for the future of the Web and the role of open source in improving our online lives.

This is the first time for any presentation on Mozilla Labs projects in Japan and we’re very excited to have Chris in Tokyo.  Hope to see you at either of these events.

• linking in outside code (vs. Air which cannot pull in outside libraries)
• multi-threaded (vs. Air which is single-threaded)
• extendable (like Firefox is)

Flickr Uploader is available in English, French, traditional Chinese, Korean, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.

For those of you who are interested in XUL or XULRunner, it’s an interesting interview, especially when Richard discusses how there may be a future for user-developed extensions to Flickr Uploader.