More on “Powered by Mozilla”

A series of blog posts has been written about how we might start to apply the idea of “Powered by Mozilla”.  I’ve read posts by Slater, Tiffney, DougT, and David Boswell.   These posts all came just before or after a nice lunch time conversation we had about what the term “Powered by Mozilla” actually represents.  If a project used the term, what exactly did that mean?  Lots of thoughts emerged, but I came away thinking that we should start by defining some easy cases where we would feel comfortable with a project using this phrase.

Building on that idea about a week ago, I invited Harvey (Mozilla’s internal legal counsel) and a few others to sit with me and Asa, where we would draw the code stack on a white board and literally start circling the aspects of that code that would have to be included if we were to encourage someone to say they were powered by Mozilla.  The drawing looked something like this:

Luckily, Brendan then walked in the room and the conversation got even more focused.   One point that was mentioned was that any “Powered by Mozilla” app should be, at least, Interenet-enabled and should align pretty well with Mozilla’s mission/vision. Brendan and Asa really helped drive the discussion of the code and what has to be involved to define an applicaiton.

So, I began to think about ways that we could tell if the app was Internet-enabled.  I brought up the point that maybe an application powered by Mozilla has to clearly state that it uses the Gecko user agent.  That’s not too hard to tell, thanks to cool applications like this that Asa forwarded to me from Henrik Gemal’s blog.  With this service, you can see what user agent your browser (or Internet-enabled app) is using.  Wouldn’t this be a fairly easy way to determine some good cases? This particular discussion is ongoing and I am sure more posts will surface, but I do think this is one interesting and fairly straight-forward way to find applications that could make the claim they are powered by Mozilla.