New Xserve will serve AMO, IT, and SeaMonkey

The Community Giving & Empowerment program recently approved the purchase of an Xserve for community use. This resource extends our long-lasting goal of providing leveraged resources to the community.  Here’s why:

1. The addons.mozilla.org (AMO) editor community will use this Xserve to test extensions on platforms where some of them lack access.  They filed this bug, which provides more background on the need.
2. The SeaMonkey team filed a request with this bug to get more virtual machines for testing.  It took us some time to process as we decided what was best and most leveraged.
3. Finally, the server will be used as a place for the IT community (with AMO and SeaMonkey) to test virtualization of OSX.

Just today, I was at a conference and was asked what we mean by providing leveraged resources to our community.  This is a good example.  With the Xserve, we are serving many different purposes:  hundreds of thousands SeaMonkey users will benefit;  all add-on editors can now test on three platforms, which may result in quicker processing of the sandbox where new add-ons go before being listed on AMO; and, the IT community will use the Xserve to test virtualization.

Finally, if anyone is asking, I am still managing community requests, but at a slower pace for two reasons:  community requests have slowed down a bit since we launched the program a couple years back, and localization occupies most of my time so I don’t do as aggressive outreach as I did in the past.  But, we are receiving requests and I do get to them.  If you’ve contacted me about a request, we will respond.