Community Giving update
In the past few weeks, we’ve helped a few different Mozilla contributors who have been doing more great work for Mozilla. Here’s the summary:
- Les Neste will participate in the Community Loan Program. We sent him a Mac Mini to use for the next six months so he can continue to do some great work running up to the release of Firefox 3. After six months, we’ll reassess to see if he’d like to keep it for another few months to work on other projects, or send that Mac Mini to another contributor who might need it. Les will be working on the following:
- development of the evolving Firefox user interface
- support Firefox 3 general theme development community by communicating changes in the Firefox UI
- continue to develop and maintain customized themes
- Mozilla Italia needs better web hosting as we close in on the release of Firefox 3. The user community has been growing in Italy and we are going to pay for hosting costs to make sure that there is enough bandwidth and service available to support the upcoming release (and increased traffic due to downloads).
- SeaMonkey Project requested 2 VMs (1 linux, 1 win32) to setup unit/mochi/crash/reftest buildbot slaves. We partitioned a small part of the l10n server in Amsterdam, which was being woefully underused, to help out SeaMonkey.
- Narro Project created an account on the l10n server in Amsterdam to allow for collaboration on the project for those who are interested. I blogged about this last week if you want to read more.
The good news about this last month of activity (and the past few months) is that requests are coming in unsolicited. I’m not prodding people to try to find ways to help, which I have to admit, feels good. Perhaps it’s also a sign that the Mozilla community thinks this program is useful and is something that should persist…not that it’s been a question as to whether or not it should cease existence.
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Just wanted to know – We (The Israel/Hebrew) community correctly using sourceforge as webhosting and thinks about moving on for some time. Why can’t Mozilla help with hosting to the local communities?
And why do you offer users to download from your site? Why not to place a link to mozilla.com?
Hi Tomer,
Thanks for the questions. I think there are two pretty straightforward answers:
Regarding Mozilla providing hosting, for a slew of liability reasons, we cannot offer hosting to our communities. It’s a legal thing that we have to follow due to liability laws and we have to stay consistent with our global community. So, in the mean time, we’ll just have to help pay for hosting to various communities who seem to need it most.
Regarding the download from our site, well, we do provide that. But, we also have a series of mirrors across the globe that help distribute the work and the bandwidth that is necessary when updating to major releases. We are still operating on a highly-leveraged budget at the Mozilla HQ, so we can’t buy up and establish massive data centers. We have to rely on partner mirrors and community efforts to make sure our users get all the updates needed for our software.
Does that seem to make sense? Again, thanks for the questions.
-Seth