Mozilla grant to PCF
May 29th, 2007 by seth bindernagel
When Mozilla distributes grants to individuals and other organizations, we are looking at leveraged ways to support our community. If you’ve read this blog, the message may be getting a bit monotonous, but it has really been one of the core ways we are thinking about how to make our distributions. For every proposal we receive and then review, we try to ask how any level of support we give will amplify impact to the community.
Using this methodology, we have been able to provide resources to both individuals and projects whose efforts represent what we’re hoping to support. For example, we gave a grant to Creative Commons last quarter because CC is an organization that very much pursues the same ideas and principles set forth in Mozilla’s mission and the Mozilla Manifesto. (Just to restate it, the Mozilla mission is to provide choice and innovation on the Internet.)
In our last board meeting, it was decided that Mozilla would give a $100,000 grant to the Participatory Culture Foundation, the makers of the Democracy Player. PCF, like CC, aligns well with Mozilla and its manifesto. Additionally, PCF has projects that are built partly on Mozilla’s technology.
More on Democracy Player…it is soon to be named Miro and it is a cool desktop application that’s sort of a mashup of a video player, an RSS reader, an FTP & torrent client, and a channel guide — the experience is that video is regularly delivered to your desktop. They also make a server and have built a ton of great docs to help you get started as a video publisher on the web. Please check it out.
Some might wonder how we came upon this opportunity. Mozilla decided to give support to PCF after the Moz board was approached by them and was asked for some level of meaningful support. John Lilly sits on the board of PCF, so he was able to represent the request, but willingly removed himself from the voting process. The Mozilla Board agreed to support them for the following reasons:
1. Their mission to ensure the continued rise of open source & open standards aligns with the Mozilla mission to encourage choice & innovation on the web.
2. They’re building something that can have influence on the way users browse web content, rich media, and desktop UI — and it’s based on Mozilla technology.
3. PCF is another example of that leverage we are looking for…they don’t have any venture backing, they’re running on a very lean budget, and they continue to seek creative resources to make a big difference in the way their users access content on the Web.
Mozilla is excited to support ideas like this. We are looking for those volunteer contributors and interesting experiments that align with our mission and manifesto. If you have any suggestions, please contact us. You can start by emailing me and we’ll find out the next best steps together.
MoFo, in the same spirit as with the field of WebTV, should strongly support the field of Instant Messaging and Presence through the promotion of Jabber/XMPP.
IMP is highly ill today, with closed and proprietary protocols and services, all of them being fragmented, non-documented, changing/unstable, non-interoperable, etc.
Let’s name a few uncompatible IMP systems: Nate On, MSN/WLM, Gadu-gadu, AIM, QQ, ICQ, Xfire, Yahoo!Messenger, SameTime, etc.
IMP is deeply broken.
Jabber/XMPP is the only open standard (IETF RFCs) that can federate and bring back interoperability to the world of IMP, besides its intrinsinc technical qualities and supporting/developping communities.
Jabber/XMPP brings instant messaging of course, and presence, but also much more than this: real-time editing, multimedia sessions bringing VoIP, online gaming, social communitiy-features, etc.
Goog examples of Mozilla-platform based Jabber/XMPP frameworks and applications are SamePlace/xmpp4moz and OneTeam.im.
http://oneteam.im/
http://dev.hyperstruct.net/xmpp4moz
http://sameplace.cc
MoFo should strongly and urgently support Jabber/XMPP.
Blog post in french:
http://nyco.wordpress.com/2007/05/30/democracy-player-miro-aide-par-la-mofo/
Sincerely yours,
Nÿco
While I find the donation in itself admirable, I must say that in my opinion Democracy is just a pretty frontend for the Open Source video player ‘VLC’ (http://videolan.org), which itself is based in part on FFMPEG. While this is quite a wild guess, I would say the distribution of ‘Labor’ that brings Democracy to a computer near you is:
60% FFMPEG
35% VLC
5% DEMOCRACY
Extrapolating, to make everything fair, I surely hope that Mozilla’s next grants are $700K to VLC and $1.2M to FFMPEG!
Good to see that Mozilla is starting to share the wealth! That said I am kinda wondering why this project got the cash and not some others? Mind you, of course everybody can chime in with their pet projects, but in this specific case one specific project should receive a mention at least:
- VLC - the very core of Democracy.
While perfectly legal (and very nicely done), Democracy really is a pretty GUI for VLC. Effort-wise, I would say Democracy is:
5% Original Code
5% Other code
35% VLC
50% ffmpeg (which VLC uses)
Who’s going to fund them?
to some extent this money will trickle down. if something in FFMPEG and VLC needs fixing it’s highly probable that the Democracy Player devs will allocate resources to these efforts.
puntloos: By that logic, you’d want them to grant money to Linux, GNU, and a whole bunch of other dependencies. It also sounds like you haven’t tried Democracy - it’s not centred on playing videos, the main innovation is in how it makes it easier to find and download them.
This is a case where it would be really useful to specify whether “Mozilla” means the Mozilla Foundation or the Mozilla Corporation. It makes the reference to the “Mozilla Board” ambiguous as both the Foundation and the Corporation have separate boards.
It’s confusing people. See the LWN article about the Democracy funding for an example.
Now I think that “Mozilla” in this case refers to the Mozilla Corporation. But I’m not certain. And I’ve been following the progress of the Mozilla project on an almost daily basis for over seven years.
Not so much. Whereas Democracy does allow you to play video, you don’t download Democracy to be your sole media player. (I actually wish Democracy would allow it to operate more like a media player, so I wouldn’t need a standalone media app.
Simon is right: Democracy is innovative in the finding and downloading of content. They didn’t need to reinvent video playing, so they left that to the VLC/FFMpeg (or whomever) folks. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with Open Source?
Thanks for the grant Mozilla. I look forward to future revisions of this app with a bright and hopefully impactful future.
I second Nÿco: integration of XMPP would make Democracy Player a lot more sexy than it now already is. Another feature that is hardly missing: HTTP proxy support. Currently, I can’t retrieve the channels list because of this.
To Alex’s comments above, this grant came from the Mozilla Corporation. Thanks for asking for the distinction.
As for the other comments, thank you! Please keep the opinions coming. I have asked some others who might have something to say to chime in if they feel compelled to do so. I for one like what everyone has to say and will be thinking about these types of comments as we move forward. Thanks.
Very nice! Good to see one great organization support another.
As a Democracy end-user, I say kudos to this decision.
While I can see how some people perceive Democracy as a front-end to VLC, there’s an important distinction that should be made — proprietary formats and availability of content.
Think about watching your podcasts and other content, then think about something like Joost and how quickly you’d sour on a subscription model if it meant you weren’t in control of what you view (”premium content” decided for you), when you view it (blackout, geographic, and other restrictions), or on what platforms you’re able to view it with (DRM vs. open standards).
Just my $0.02.
I actually wish Democracy would allow it to operate more like a media player, so I wouldn’t need a standalone media app !!!
good content, i like this blog/website
keep it up
Sweet. Mozilla is great with their grants.
Mozilla is great for the easy access to addons