FLOSS Foundations

Trusting the Voting Machines

2010-03-08T20:06:12+00:00

Hundreds of millions of people rely on the accuracy of voting machines and the polling process to form our government. New voting machines are being developed, moving from paper-based ballots to electronic voting.

How accurate are those digital voting machines? How unbiased? Do they count every vote? Do they count every vote accurately and completely? How do they work? How tamper-proof are they? Is there a way to audit results? How good is the audit process? How would we know?

Right now it’s hard to tell. It turns out that how digital voting machines work is a secret. Voters are not allowed to know, to see or to test those machines or how they work. (I’ll speak of California here, as a result of talking to the California Secretary of State, but this is only an example of the problem.) We’re asked to “trust.”

The OSDV Foundation exists to change this. OSDV is a non-profit organization building open source voting machinery. This is important for several reasons:

This allows voters to verify what our voting machines are doing. Like other open source projects, those of us with enough technical expertise can serve as consumer advocates and validate that our voting machines operate as they should.
In voting, 1 or 2 percent is a giant amount. Many elections — at least in the US where I’m most familiar — are very, very close. A 1% to 2% margin of error may be acceptable in many business settings, but it is not acceptable in a critical election where it can change results. With open source products we can see and test and improve the quality, rather than simply trust that all is well.
Casting and counting votes should not be a for-profit enterprise; it is the foundation of elected governments.
Proprietary ownership of the means of voting IS a conflict of interest. According to the OSDV Foundation, right now something like 88% of the US voting infrastructure is owned by two companies, which will soon be one company.
Good open source alternatives are likely to cause an improvement in the quality of the dominant (close to 90% market share) product offering.

OSDV is just reaching the point where its first products are just about ready for use. Having a viable alternative in the market is critical. Having a viable alternative that is open source and public-benefit is even better. OSDV is building a system that citizens can actually verify — a system we trust based on that ability to verify what is actually happening.

You can find out more about OSDV Foundation’s Trust the Vote project at trustthevote.org/background

SQL Injection Attempts

2010-03-08T16:13:10+00:00

This is from the analog report on the Apache access logs for the drumbeat.org staging server. It leaves me wondering whether there were actually any genuine searches done at all...

Listing the top 30 query words by the number of requests, sorted by the number of requests.

reqs	search term
2459	'
2094	0
1745	delay'0:0:20'
1396	waitfor
714	and
703	or
698	1=1
698	1=2
349	'waitfor
349	%27
349	%00'
51	drumbeat.stage.mozilla.com/
34	drumbeat.stage.mozilla.com/events
16	2=2
5	1=3
3	drumbeat
3	73541692'
3	73919112'
3	27417321'
3	38822036'
3	19286078'
2	72884114'
2	20580310'
2	73307134'
2	17959598'
2	17674419'
2	14638227'
2	16063538'
2	miro
2	83234186'
1045	[not listed: 704 search terms]

The history of MySQL AB

2010-03-08T12:00:54+00:00

MySQL, the open source database product that puts the "M" in LAMP, was created by MySQL AB, a company founded in 1995 in Sweden. In 2008, MySQL AB announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion.

The story of MySQL AB is pretty amazing, so I unleashed my "inner academic", did some research and compiled a timeline of MySQL AB's history. This timeline is assembled based on different resources online, such as MySQL press releases (example 1) and interviews with MySQL AB executives (example 2, example 3), etc.

Things to add? Let me know in the comments and I'll update the post.

1995

MySQL AB founded by Michael Widenius (Monty), David Axmark and Allan Larsson in Sweden.

2000

MySQL goes Open Source and releases software under the terms of the GPL. Revenues dropped 80% as a result, and it took a year to make up for it.

2001

Mårten Mickos elected CEO at age 38. Mårten was the CEO of a number of Nordic companies before joining MySQL, and comes with a sales and marketing background.
2 million active installations.
Raised series A with undisclosed amount from Scandinavian venture capitalists. Estimated to be around $1 to $2 million.

2002

MySQL launched US headquarters in addition to Swedish headquarters.
3 million active users.
Ended the year with $6.5 million in revenue with 1,000 paying customers.

2003

Raised a $19.5 million series B from Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.
4 million active installations and over 30,000 downloads per day.
Ended the year with $12 million in revenue.

2004

With the main revenue coming from the OEM dual-licensing model, MySQL decides to move more into the enterprise market and to focus more on recurring revenue from end users rather than one-time licensing fees from their OEM partners.
Ended the year with $20 million in revenue.

2005

MySQL launched the MySQL Network modeled after the RedHat Network. The MySQL Network is a subscription service targeted at end users that provides updates, alerts, notifications, and product-level support designed to make it easier for companies to manage hundreds of MySQL servers.
MySQL 5 ships and includes many new features to go after enterprise users (e.g. stored procedures, triggers, views, cursors, distributed transactions, federated storage engines, etc.)
Oracle buys Innobase, the 4-person Finnish company behind MySQL's InnoDB storage backend.
Ended the year with $34 million in revenue based on 3400 customers.

2006

Mårten Mickos confirms that Oracle tried to buy MySQL. Oracle' CEO Larry Ellison commented: "We've spoken to them, in fact we've spoken to almost everyone. Are we interested? It's a tiny company. I think the revenues from MySQL are between $30 million and $40 million. Oracle's revenue next year is $15 billion."
Oracle buys Sleepycat, the company that provides MySQL with the Berkeley DB transactional storage engine.
Mårten Mickos announces that they are making MySQL ready for an IPO in 2008 on an projected $100 million in revenues.
8 million active installations.
MySQL has 320 employees in 25 countries, 70 percent of whom work from home.
Raised a $18 million Series C based on a rumored valuation north of $300 million.
MySQL is estimated to have a 33% market share measured in install base and 0.2% market share measured in revenue (the database market was a $15 billion market in 2006).
Ended the year with $50 million in revenue.

2007

Ended the year with $75 million in revenue.

2008

Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB for approximately $1 billion.
Michael Widenius (Monty) and David Axmark, two of MySQL AB's co-founders, begin to criticize Sun publicly and leave Sun shortly after.

2009

Mårten Mickos leaves Sun and becomes entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital. Sun has now lost the business and spiritual leaders that turned MySQL into a success.
Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion.

gsoc2010

2010-03-06T13:37:22+00:00

The Squeak community are working with ESUG to submit a joint entry to this year’s Google Summer of Code but need your help at once!

Squeak participated in GSoC in 2007 and 2008 but in 2009 Google started to focus on bigger communities, so Squeak developers are working with ESUG this year to put together a joint submission with other groups including open-source projects from all Smalltalk dialects, including Pharo, Smalltalk/X, GNU Smalltalk and Cuis as well as commercial distributions such as VisualWorks, VisualAge, Dolphin and Gemstone. Entries from cross-platform projects like Seaside, AidaWeb, Magma, etc. will also be welcome.

Mariano Martinez Peck will administrate the joint application supported by Janko Mivšek. They need to supply Google with information about ESUG as a mentoring organisation and a list of ideas/projects, each with a description and a nominated mentor. If their submission get selected by Google they will be told how many projects Google will sponsor — the mentor receives $500 and the student who volunteers to work on the projects will receive $4500.

Due to a late start, they are very near to the first deadline! They have until 12th March 2010 to submit all the information of the mentor organisation and give the list of projects with mentors. So as a matter of urgency they need your projects. They’ve put together a webpage to hold details, so if you have project suggestions, send them a short title and a paragraph (for the moment) explaining the idea. You can also reply to Mariano’s email on most of the key developer mailing lists including the squeak-dev mailing list.

Good mentors are often as hard to come by as good ideas, but often being helpful, being aware of the dates, answering emails, etc. can be more important than the Smalltalk knowledge, so if you’re able to act as a mentor or a back-up, let them know at once!

For some inspiration, you can see the ideas proposed in previous years:
2007: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5936
2008: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6031
2009: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6120

Gerv Status 2010-03-05

2010-03-05T20:02:25+00:00

Here's my status report for this week. Lots of projects inching towards the finishing line (or the starting line, in one particular large case).

STFU

2010-03-05T14:07:56+00:00

In honour of the recent discussions on foundation-list, I would like to resend everyone to this piece by Dan Spalding, which I’ve mentioned previously. It had a huge influence on me, and hopefully will on others too.

As a teaser, here’s an extract of the target audience:

Consensus decision making is a model of the society we want to live in, and a tool we use to get there. Men often dominate consensus at the expense of everyone else. Think about the man who…

Speaks for a long, loud, first and often

Offers his opinion immediately whenever someone makes a proposal, asks a question, or if there’s a lull in discussion

Speaks with too much authority: “Actually, it’s like this…”

Can’t amend a proposal or idea he disagrees with, but trashes it instead

Makes faces every time someone says something he disagrees with

Rephrases everything a woman says, as in, “I think what Mary was trying to say is…”

Makes a proposal, then responds to each and every question and criticism of it – thus speaking as often as everyone else put together (Note: This man often ends up being the facilitator)

It’s rarely just one man who exhibits every problem trait. Instead it’s two or three competing to do all the above. But the result is the same: everyone who can’t (or won’t) compete on these terms – talking long, loud, first and often – gets drowned out.

This is a result of society’s programming. Almost no men can actually live up to our culture’s fucked up standards of masculinity. And our society has standards for women that are equally ridiculous. In one way, we both suffer equally. That’s why we all yearn and strive for a world where these standards – which serve to divide us and reduce us and prop up those in control – are destroyed.

In another way these standards serve those who come closest to living up to them. Sure, we all lose when a few men dominate a meeting. But it’s those men who get to make decisions, take credit for the work everyone does, and come out feeling more inspired and confident.

Like I said, Dan’s piece opened my eyes to my own bad behaviour, and also enabled me to improve as a meeting/round-table/discussion facilitator. Hopefully a reasoned reflective analysis of their behaviour by the most disruptive elements of foundation-list will also have a similar effect on them. I certainly hope so.

New 'Feedback' Flag in Bugzilla

2010-03-04T15:52:46+00:00

bugzilla.mozilla.org now has a new "feedback" flag for attachments (bug). Use this like "review", but for where you want to get someone's input on a patch, and that input does not amount to a formal review. This is useful if the patch is a work in progress, or if the person you are asking for feedback is learning to do reviews in your component.

This new flag was Marco Bonardo's idea and was endorsed by mconnor.

You can request feedback from specific people (obviously) and from multiple people at once. It's available in all products and components.

Mollom CAPTCHAs are "intelligent"

2010-03-03T16:30:16+00:00

Every other week or so, someone asks me the following question: How are Mollom CAPTCHAs better than those created by CAPTCHA module?. This is an important question, and understanding it is central to understanding our philosophy with Mollom.

First, when using Mollom in "text analysis" mode, a CAPTCHA is only displayed when Mollom is uncertain about whether a message could be spam. Mollom analyzes the text of comments and combines that analysis with what it knows about the internal reputation of the posters, to determine whether a message is "spammy". Non-spam submissions are accepted without a CAPTCHA, and posts that are certainly spam are rejected automatically. By only presenting a CAPTCHA when necessary, we avoid penalizing normal (non-spamming) users with CAPTCHA challenges. The CAPTCHA module is different in that it does not perform text analysis and therefore must always display a CAPTCHA challenge.

Second, the Mollom module for Drupal has a "CAPTCHA only" mode, which is useful when clients would prefer not to use text analysis, or for when the forms have almost no text to analyze (like Drupal's user registration form). In "CAPTCHA only" mode, the user experience of the Mollom module is very similar to that of the CAPTCHA module -- the user is always prompted to complete a CAPTCHA in order to perform a certain operation. The similarity ends here, however. While the user experience is the same, the actual CAPTCHA generation is not. Mollom CAPTCHAs are "intelligent", in the sense that Mollom tracks the behavior and reputation of IP addresses from all sites using Mollom. A known spammer, operating from a known IP with a poor reputation, won't be able to complete a Mollom CAPTCHA no matter how hard he tries. And, as more users install Mollom, its performance increases as it learns from the additional data. A stand-alone module like CAPTCHA doesn't learn from user behavior, as it simply generates CAPTCHAs without regard to their context and delivery.

This second difference between the Mollom and other CAPTCHA modules is, in fact, huge. When we analyze our server logs, we see that 20% of all correctly completed CAPTCHAs are submitted by known spammers. Spammers don't seem to solve CAPTCHAs algorithmically; instead, they persuade humans to solve CAPTCHAs for them by using botnet infected machines. Two blog posts that detail this process are How to defeat Koobface and Breaking Koobface's CAPTCHA solving process. As spammers evolve and their arsenal of tools become increasingly powerful, CAPTCHA solutions must keep up to remain effective. We believe Mollom's "intelligent CAPTCHA" processing represents a significant benefit from traditional CAPTCHA generation and is one way we'll continue to stay a step ahead in our goal to eliminate posting spam.

Different protection modes in the Drupal module for Mollom.

The Economics Of Privacy

2010-03-03T15:28:40+00:00

Tristan recently blogged about privacy as a currency. His point:

Privacy is a currency for which we don't know the [ex]change rate. It's something we're giving to online services without knowing what it's worth.

I started to apply basic economics to that idea. It seems to me that a key point is that the exchange rate of the currency is not only unknown, but it is also different for different people. You may value your privacy much more highly than I do. By contrast, for people in the same socio-economic group, the value of the information to the company is (approximately) the same. For most of the readers of this blog, it's worth about the same to (e.g.) Google to know X amount about you as it is to know X amount about me.

A mutually beneficial exchange is one in which both parties receive something of greater value than what they lost. Is our loss of privacy mutually beneficial? It depends. I may decide to put a $50 value on the privacy of my list of friends. If that list is worth $100 to Google or Facebook, and they will provide me with $70 worth of services in return for it, then clearly the exchange is a beneficial one. However, if you value your list of friends at $500, then it would not be a good exchange for you, if all else was the same.

Another important economic attribute of exchanges is that they should be 'fair'. A fair exchange is one which is uncoerced, and in which both parties understand what they are giving away and receiving. Do people understand what they are giving away when they give away their privacy? Perhaps not. Or it could be just that they put a low value on it. In which case, it's entirely reasonable for them to make the trade.

Conclusion: privacy advocacy is not about persuading people not to use particular privacy-reducing services, it's about persuading people to understand the value they personally put on their privacy and perhaps, secondarily, to increase that number. But if people, once they understand, choose not to increase that number and to make privacy-reducing deals, we should respect their free choice.

Open Source in the Enterprise and in the Cloud

2010-03-02T20:59:24+00:00

In a couple of weeks, I'll participate in a panel discussion on The Future of Open Source in Business. In preparation for that discussion, I figured I'd write down my current thoughts and solicit some feedback. I'll talk about two important trends relevant for the future of Open Source, but there are certainly more.

First, Open Source adoption in the enterprise is trending at an incredible rate -- Drupal adoption has grown a lot in 2009 but we saw by far the biggest relative growth in the enterprise. Fueling this movement is the notion that Open Source options present an innovative, economically friendly and more secure alternative to their costly proprietary counterparts. Second, Cloud Computing is a transformational movement in that it enables continual innovation and updating - not to mention a highly expandable infrastructure that will reduce the burden on your IT team.

Two years ago, when starting Acquia, we predicted this would happen so it is no surprise that Acquia's strategy is closely aligned with those two trends: Drupal Gardens, Acquia Hosting and Acquia Search are all built on Open Source tools and delivered as Software as a Service in the cloud. Combining Open Source tools and Cloud Computing makes for the perfect storm for success. It provides real value to end-users and it enables companies to monetize Open Source. It creates a win-win situation.

At the same time, I think we have an opportunity to go beyond that, and to redefine the Software as a Service model based on Open Source values, almost exactly like we started doing 10+ years ago with off-the-shelf software. Almost all Software as a Service providers employ a proprietary model -- they might allow you to export your data, but they usually don't allow you to export their underlying code. While a lot of these services might be built on Open Source components, they have a lot more in common with proprietary software vendors than Open Source projects or companies.

There is room for Open Source companies to disrupt this model, and it is probably not something that can be done without the help of Open Source companies. Drupal Gardens provides a good example of this model.

For example, users of Drupal Gardens can help improve Drupal Gardens, simply by contributing to Drupal. By staying close to the Open Source project, everyone can help shape the service. Along the same lines, we want people to be able to export their Drupal Gardens site -- the code, the theme and data -- and move of the platform to any Drupal hosting environment. By doing so, we provide people an easy on-ramp but we allow them to grow beyond the capabilities of Drupal Gardens without locking them in.

It is Software as a Service done right -- it will offer enterprises a much more secure and low-cost alternative to proprietary counterparts and provides many Open Source projects the opportunity to have a much bigger reach. It creates a triple win scenario -- for the customer, for the Open Source project and the Open Source company -- in a way that wasn't really apparent five years ago. At least not to me.

Have you taken the 2010 Future of Open Source Survey yet? If not, please take a few moments to share your thoughts on where you think Open Source is headed.

Dynamic Web Development with Seaside

2010-02-28T11:10:58+00:00

A print-on-demand, softcover copy of the book “Dynamic Web Development with Seaside” is now available from Lulu.

Seaside is an source framework for developing highly dynamic and interactive web applications, and makes building web applications as simple as building desktop applications. The book gives you all the instruction and support necessary to get up and running in all the popular distributions of Smalltalk, with separate chapters on Pharo and Squeak, Cincom Smalltalk, Gemstone/S, GNU Smalltalk and VASmalltalk.

The printed book is based on the free online version and the purchasable PDF version of the book, and will be updated regularly. The book costs around €28/£24/$40 and will be delivered within 3-5 working days, so order your copy now!

The authors wish to thank the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG), inceptive.be, Cincom Smalltalk, Gemstone Smalltalk, and Instantiations for generously sponsoring this book.

Line-up pour Ignite Lyon finalisé

2010-02-26T20:14:44+00:00

Je viens de finaliser aujourd’hui les présentateurs pour l’inauguration de Ignite Lyon. Les sujets sont assez diverses, du vache à lait à l’informatique bio en passant par la course à pied et l’art libre. Pour ceux qui sont plus du tendance entrepreneur, nous avons également des présentations sur la démarche commerciale ou créer sa première boîte jeune.

Voici la liste des présentateurs pour ce premier Ignite Lyon en order alphabétique, sauf modifications de dernier minute:

Avec une salle qui prendrai autour de 100 personnes, les places risquent d’être chères, même si l’entrée est libre!

Je vous suggére vivement d’être à votre place dans la salle D101 de l’Université Lyon 2, Quai Claude Bernard, à l’ouverture des portes à 18h30 jeudi prochain le 4. Les festivités commenceront vers 19h, jusqu’à 20h30 à peu près, avec une pause pipi au millieu.

Vous pouvez également vous inscrire pour manger un bout après l’événement au Chevreuil, ou nous allons nous retrouver quor quelques boissons raffraichissantes à partir de 20h30.

Vous pouvez trouver plus d’informations sur le site Ignite Lyon. A la semaine prochaine!

Russian Tech Delegation — Overview

2010-02-26T19:57:36+00:00

Last week I participated in a government sponsored delegation to Russia called the “U.S.-Russia Innovation Dialogue” This delegation was organized by the U.S. government, in cooperation with the Russian government, as part of the Presidents’ Bilateral Commission (“Presidents” means President Medvedev of the Russian Federation and President Obama of the US). The goal was to improve the ways of working together in areas with shared interests, while not ignoring areas of disagreement. One area of shared interests that has been identified in innovation, and thus the delegation.

The delegation was co-led by Howard Solomon from the National Security Council and by Jared Cohen from the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff. The delegation included John Donohoe, CEO of eBay, Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco, Esther Dyson of EDventure, Jason Liebman of Howcast, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, Shervin Pishevar, founder of Social Gaming Network, Ashton Kutcher, CEO of Katalyst, Ellis Rubinstein, President of the New York Academy of Sciences, Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer and me. We met with all sorts of people — federal and regional officials, civil society actors, educators, students, and entrepreneurs. Our focus was the role technology can play in social development.

One explicit goal of the delegation was to do more than talk, to figure out concrete steps that can be taken. We ended up with a set of items where we see possibilities for immediate collaboration. It’s a pretty meaty list, laid out in 6 themes. There are versions available in English and Russian as well as a summary in The Moscow Times.

Confessions Of A Public Speaker

2010-02-26T14:22:23+00:00

At FOSDEM, I was given a copy of "Confessions of a Public Speaker" by Scott Berkun (thanks, Josette!).

It's an story-filled ramble through the life of someone who talks for a living. It was an entertaining read, although it could perhaps have done with more summarizing of the material, as when I reached the end I realised that I would have to re-read it if I wanted to make a list of things to change about my own speaking style and habits. But I was very pleased to see him call the Logitech Cordless Presenter, which I own[0], "the Cadillac of remote controls". The man has good taste.

Oh, and there's a story from me in the "You can't do worse than this" section :-)

[0] OK, OK. On gandalf's recommendation.

Please Upgrade

2010-02-26T12:21:58+00:00

Inspired by something Asa said, I think we really need a website which clearly explains to people why using unsupported browsers or OSes on the Internet is a bad idea, and why they should fix it (even if it costs money). If we can find the best and most convincing words to do this, everyone else can point people with old software at the site.

Does anyone know of anything like this which exists already? I know we did "Internet Health Check", but that was only about browsers, and seems to be dormant now. Still, we could reuse the name.

Here's some wordsmith brainstorming; further contributions welcomed:

Using old software is normally fine - if it works for you, that's great. No-one should be able to tell you what to do in the privacy of your home. But when you take that software onto the Internet, your choices start to affect other people. If you use insecure software, your computer is at much greater risk from Internet attackers who are trying to recruit it as a "zombie" or "bot" and use it to send spam or attack other sites. These attackers know about security problems with old software that they can use to take control of your computer, if you accidentally visit a malicious website, or even visit a website you trust that itself has had a security problem.

Upgrading can be expensive - we know that. Consider it a cost of being a good net citizen. Just as maintaining a car or house costs money, maintaining a computer can do as well. Having said that, there are some ways to make it less expensive. ...

The site would read your User Agent and then provide appropriate custom text for your out-of-date OS, or browser, or both. (It would need a database of which versions were out of date and which were not.) For old OSes it would suggest:

Buy a new computer (the easiest option, but the most expensive)
Upgrade your OS (get upgrade disks on eBay?)
Install Linux (links to useful resources)

For old browsers, it would suggest upgrading to the most recent version of your existing browser - except that the IE section would have a note about the importance of web standards, and a suggestion to switch. If the OS was so old that no supported browsers run on it, it would say that.

If their browser and OS were fine, we could move on to plugins, using the great work done by the Plugin Check people. (Although after several months, their database still doesn't seem to handle Totem...)

MPL "Initial Developer" For Mozilla Employees

2010-02-25T13:29:45+00:00

If you are an employee or contractor of the Mozilla Foundation or any of its subsidiaries (Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla Messaging, Mozilla Denmark, Mozilla Online, Mozilla Canada and Mozilla New Zealand) the "Initial Developer" section in the MPL header of new files you create should appear as follows:

The Initial Developer of the Original Code is
the Mozilla Foundation.

Also, please add the header using the official boilerplate rather than copying it from another file. The Mozilla Foundation, rather than any of the subsidiaries, holds the copyrights to work done by people in the above category. "mozilla.org" is not a legal entity, and so is also not correct.

THBAPSA.

Drupal 7 status update and release plan

2010-02-25T11:16:22+00:00

Drupal 7 is moving along nicely, and is becoming increasingly stable. We just released a second alpha release, fixing a number of critical bugs, following our initial alpha release in January. Alpha releases are to give Drupalistas something to download and test, so they can report and help fix bugs.

When will we switch to betas? We will switch to betas when the upgrade path from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 is working. Once we hit beta, we will become increasingly strict about accepting any more changes and we'll also commit to making HEAD to HEAD upgrades work.

Finally, we'll start rolling release candidates once the number of critical bugs is zero (or close to zero). To help us focus on critical bugs, we're working on adding a 'major' severity level to our ticketing system, making the options 'critical', 'major', 'normal' and 'minor'. 'Major' bugs would be really bad, but not necessarily block a release. For example, bugs that don't prevent Drupal from working, or that only affect a fraction of the Drupal population would be prioritized for fixing in follow-up releases. Critical bugs are those that badly break Drupal, or that are a major regression compared to Drupal 6.

Where are we right now? There are currently about 150 remaining bugs that need to be fixed. These bugs are real, and not always trivial to fix because a lot of background and domain expertise can be required. As a result, some bug reports seemingly depend on one or two people to fix them. Therefore, it is very important that we encourage and mentor new people to help fix some of these difficult bugs. I'd like to ask all sub-system maintainers to watch their sub-system's issue queues closely (like Moshe did recently), and to provide the leadership to help us make progress. If we do and we work hard, I think we can still release Drupal 7 in Q2. If not, I'm worried that Drupal 7 might not be released until Q3.

In other words, let's all try to put some extra time and effort into fixing the remaining bugs, and let's start to be laser-focused on the critical ones. It would make for quite a party if we could roll a first release candidate in time for DrupalCon San Francisco on April 19th. I would have to sing on stage from happiness, or something. Thanks!

Software Modding For Everyone

2010-02-25T10:35:43+00:00

An article on LWN (do subscribe; it's totally worth it) contained the following quote:

Skateboarding started with proto-skaters modifying surfboards and scooters, and today, "extreme" sports vendors bring customer's modifications in-house and base products on them.

This got me thinking: how can we make people modding their software as common and as well-understood for everyday people as modding their skateboard, bicycle or console?

Some of the pieces are in place. It's possible on Debian to download and compile the source for a package, and use your version in place of the shipped version, with a reasonable amount of ease. Projects like Project Awesome Opportunity are working on making that even easier, and doable without a command line.

However, unlike a skateboard, operating systems are regularly upgraded.

How cool would it be if your Linux distribution remembered that you were using a modded version of a package and, when you started a distribution upgrade, first downloaded the new source, tried to merge it in in a newly-created branch in your local copy, and let you know if there was a conflict so you could fix it before running the upgrade? If it merged fine, or after you fixed the conflicts, it would then rebuild the package on top of the newer source, with your mods, and install it as part of the upgrade. The end result would be an upgraded system which retained your changes.

Drupal goes to Mars

2010-02-24T15:59:11+00:00

Drupal goes to Mars, or rather, Drupal helps us go to Mars ... eventually. NASA's Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University is doing a lot of advanced work with Drupal. They have a number of Drupal sites, each with a different purpose, but all used to share information about Mars as discovered by ASU's THEMIS camera on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. All of the sites have some interesting integrations with other software, including LDAP, legacy authentication systems, Java Servlet based web services, Flash, Java desktop clients, map servers or Google Earth.

Their main portal, http://themis.asu.edu, features news, images and articles about THEMIS and the Odyssey mission. Another Drupal site, http://viewer.mars.asu.edu offers a search portal for millions of images and data from eight instruments on Mars orbiters. It uses Drupal and jQuery as the interface to a Java Servlet backend database and integrates "Deep Zoom" style image viewers.

Ever wanted to help explore Mars? No problem, http://suggest.mars.asu.edu is for you. On this Drupal site you can suggest places on Mars for scientists to photograph with the THEMIS camera aboard Mars Odyssey. The site shows you where Odyssey will be orbiting in the next week, and it integrates with Google Earth's desktop application and the Google Earth browser plugin to let you zoom around mars and choose a place to suggest. After it made the suggested photographs, it will send you an e-mail with a link, where you might be the first human to see that particular spot on mars in such detail. If that makes your inner geek jump up and down, make sure to read their technical write-up. Cool stuff!

London.gov.uk using Drupal

2010-02-24T09:23:58+00:00

The official website for the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority is using Drupal. Check out http://london.gov.uk because it is a great site! Every major city deserves such a site. ;)

My fridge

2010-02-24T08:59:33+00:00

I'll show you mine, if you show me yours. What does your fridge look like today?

Future of Open Source Survey 2010

2010-02-23T19:24:29+00:00

Like last year, I'll be attending the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) next month, on March 17-18 in San Francisco. Also like last year, I will participate in a panel discussion led by Michael Skok (Partner at North Bridge, Acquia Board Member and personal friend). This year, I'll be in a panel with Larry Augustin (CEO of SugarCRM, VA Linux, SourceForge), Jim Whitehurst (CEO of RedHat) and Tim Yeaton (CEO of Black Duck Software) to discuss the future of Open Source businesses. The panel discussion will draw on the 2010 Future of Open Source survey so make sure to weigh in and provide your perspective on a number of important Open Source business questions. Take the Future of Open Source Survey 2010. As a reference, here are the 2009 and 2008 results.

We've also built a Drupal Gardens site to promote the survey, share articles on the Future of Open Source and facilitate ongoing discussion on the topic: http://futureofopensource.drupalgardens.com. There is also a Future of Open Source Survey twitter account that you can follow for updates.

OSBC 2009 panel discussion. From left to right: me, Ron Hovsepian (President and CEO of Novell), John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla), Marten Mickos (CEO of MySQL). For more information about OSBC 2009, read my wrap-up blog post.

MoFo Is Hiring

2010-02-23T16:18:50+00:00

The MoFo team needs a web developer/sysadmin.

If you live somewhere between the longitudes of Los Angeles and Latvia, are seeking a new challenge, and are the sort of person who can apply brainpower to a wide variety of problems, then do check out the job ad and see if this might be for you. You'll get to work on cool stuff which makes the web, and therefore the world, a better place. Much more satisfying than grinding out code no-one outside your company will ever see, or maintaining 99.99% uptime on your servers for unappreciative non-geeks.

Come and help us protect and promote the open web :-)

Facebook Email Links

2010-02-23T10:22:14+00:00

In the past, I have commented on the Facebook policy of showing email addresses as graphics rather than text. They sent a cease-and-desist to Chris Finke about his addon to convert them back to proper mailto: links.

I am pleased to announce that Facebook have relented! A Facebook spokesman said:

Showing email addresses in plain text makes it easier for people to use the information to connect with their friends.

In the spirit of making it even easier for people to use the information to connect with their friends, I'd like to plug Chris Finke's recently-released "Facebook Email Links" Firefox addon, which does the same thing as the old one, but without the need for OCR. Install it, and you will be able to email your Facebook friends using standards-based email with a single click.

Linotype

2010-02-23T08:34:00+00:00

When I was at Le Figaro's headquarters last week, I ran into an old Linotype machine that was showcased in their lobby.

The Linotype is a "line casting" machine used in printing. It was invented in the late 1800's and revolutionized the newspaper publishing industry, much like the internet and content management systems are revolutionizing the publishing industry today. Its working parts are so meticulous, that the machine was invented and built by watchmakers. Major newspaper publishers retired Linotype machines during the 1970s and 1980s. For more information about the Linotype machine, see the Linotype's Wikipedia page.

When confronted with the Linotype in Le Figaro's lobby, I felt a sudden sense of admiration and respect for how it looked, and for how it has contributed to both my personal and professional life. It is well known that geeks can get a bit emotional about machines, I guess ...

Kofi Annan Foundation using Drupal

2010-02-22T14:24:31+00:00

The Kofi Annan Foundation is using Drupal. Kofi Annan was the Secretary-General of the United Nations. In 2001 Kofi Annan and the United Nations were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Since leaving the United Nations, the Kofi Annan Foundation supports Kofi Annan in his current work to press for better policies to meet the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable in the world.

Dedication

2010-02-22T12:33:48+00:00

What would you do if you were sitting on a beach in Fiji? Sunbathe? Go for a swim? Climb a coconut tree? Order a cocktail?

If you are Taras Glek, the answer appears to be "read the ld info page a few times" in order to choose the right linker options to make Firefox start up 0.2 seconds faster.

Now that's dedication...

"Content? What's That?" Awards

2010-02-22T10:19:57+00:00

I visited a site linked from Slashdot today, which was an article (press release) about a new "open" mobile phone. The thing that amazed me was the small percentage of the initially-visible browser window devoted to actual useful content. 9.08%, by my calculations. And I have a 1280x1024 screen.

So I hereby inaugurate the 2010 "Content? What's That?" Awards. Find a website page with as small a percentage of the page devoted to content as possible, post a screenshot on your blog with the content highlighted in red, as above, and the percentage calculated, and link to it here. Lowest percentage wins.

Rules:

Sites must be family-friendly.
Page must actually have some content - those typo-squatted all-ads domains don't count.
Analysis is made on the first visible page section only. Yes, people have different display sizes. In case of dispute, I'll make a final judgement on my display.
Please post screenshots stripped of browser chrome. You may also want to shrink them 50%.
Headlines count as content. Metadata, intra-site links and ads do not.
Whitespace does not count as content. Exception: whitespace within content, e.g. paragraph breaks and space were a headline would go if it were longer, do count.
Yes, almost no website would ever score 100%.That's OK.

Let's see if this works :-)

Le Figaro using Drupal

2010-02-22T09:28:24+00:00

Le Figaro, the oldest and second-largest national newspaper in France, started using Drupal for its social features on http://www.lefigaro.fr. It is still using its old web content management system to serve its main content, but all of the social features such as comments on articles are now provided by Drupal.

I met the engineering team, including Le Figaro's Chief Technology Officer René Wallendorf, for lunch when I was in Paris last week, and they were very happy with Drupal. The integration project was delivered on time, within budget and was considerably cheaper than the alternative solutions they had investigated. All things combined, this should be a big win for Drupal, especially in France. Vraiment très cool!

Some of Le Figaro's print publications. Le Figaro is also the official translator of The New York Times, pictured in the middle of the photo.

Left: Chief Technology Office of Le Figaro. Right: the community manager of Le Figaro.

Hanging out

2010-02-21T20:53:22+00:00

Paris merchants by night

2010-02-21T08:47:02+00:00

A women in fur at a butcher in Paris.

Hogarth - Election

2010-02-20T12:02:58+00:00

Göran Krampe has begun the process for this year’s elections for the Squeak Oversight Board.
The Squeak Oversight Board (SOB) consists of seven members from our community, all of whom are elected by popular vote. The members are responsible for

building a legal presence – currently by working with the Software Freedom Law Center as part of their Conservancy;
providing the network services that support the various mailing lists and repositories that in turn make a community possible;
helping coordinate the various interest groups and projects being pursued by Squeakers;
making decisions where there is no clear community consensus.

The current board members are:

Jecel Assumpcao Jr
Ken Causey
Bert Freudenberg
Craig Latta
Andreas Raab
Randal Schwartz
Igor Stasenko

(From http://www.squeak.org/Foundation/Board)

The schedule and process of the Election is as follows:

Nominations

Candidates should nominate themselves by 3rd March and start their campaign on the squeak-dev mailing list. Or if you nominate someone else, make sure that person really wants to run. Göran will not put anyone on the candidate list until that person makes it known on squeak-dev that he/she does run.

Final candidate list

The list will be closed on 3rd March. The candidates should ideally present themselves on squeak-dev, unless they have already done so, and the community can ask questions.

Online election starts

The voting period starts on 10th March 6PM (18.00 UTC) and is one week long. Ballots are sent out via email.

Online election ends

The voting process will end on 17th March 6PM (18.00 UTC). Results will be announced immediately when the election ends.

Registering

If you were invited to vote last year you are already on the voter list, no worries! If you are a new Squeaker and wish vote do ONE of the following:

Get a “known” Squeaker to vouch for you. If a known Squeaker sends an email to voters@squeak.org giving your name and email address then Göran will add you.
Send an email to voters@squeak.org yourself (and CC to squeak-dev if you like) with information/arguments showing that you are indeed serious about voting and that you are indeed a Squeaker.

When the voting period starts all voters will receive an email with instructions and a link to the voting website.

More information

Everything about the election, including schedule above and more, can be tracked here:

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/6150

Spammers set up shop at IBM.com

2010-02-17T10:29:25+00:00

In this post we show one way spanners operate, using organizations like IBM to spam others. We show how spammers abuse an IBM wiki to create an online pharmacy via IBM.com. Once a page like this is in place, the spammers try to insert links to it in blog comments and community websites across the web to drive traffic to it, and to improve their search engine ranking.

While IBM is not using Mollom (maybe they should?), many of the targeted blogs and community websites are, which is how we discovered this problem. Watch the video below for more details. This problem is not specific to IBM. We found hundreds of similar spam pages on Google Sites, Yahoo, Amazon.com, Wordpress.com, Ning, Tripod.com, Xanga.com and more.

I recorded this video last week, and notified IBM about the existence of these spam pages several days ago. We're happy to help IBM fix this problem.

Drupal core developer summit at DrupalCon SF

2010-02-17T05:27:51+00:00

On Saturday, April 17th, before DrupalCon San Francisco, I'm helping to organize the very first Drupal core developer summit. The goal of the Drupal core developer summit is to talk about ways we can improve Drupal core, and the core development processes, all while having a good time socializing with fellow core developers.

To make it lively and fun, we'll do a series of 10 minute lightning talks. In between the lightning talks, we'll have a number of meatier discussions or breakout sessions. The lightning talks will be divided in two categories: the first 8 lightning talks will take the format: "Why X sucks and how to improve it" where X can be anything in Drupal core; the last 8 lightning talks will take the format "Wouldn't it be awesome if ...". The idea behind the lightning talks is to educate core contributors about problems that need to be fixed, to present foundations for solutions, and to bootstrap collaboration.

The event is open to all, but ... in order to attend, you must be prepared to do a 10 minute lightning talk. To secure a ticket to the Drupal core developer summit, you have to submit a 4 slide presentation by March 17th, 2010.

We expect one background slide to provide context or to talk about the history of the problem, one slide with a clear problem statement, and a couple of slides to propose a solution. You can focus on big things (i.e. How session management can be made more scalable) or smaller things (i.e. Why drupal_get_schema() is slow and how to make it faster). Everyone who submitted slides ahead of time will be invited to attend. All slides will be shared publicly, but not everyone will be invited to present as we'll only have time for 16 lightning talks. Some talks will be hand-picked because they are important or particularly intriguing, other talks will be randomly selected the day of the event.

This should be a lot of fun!

New features for Drupal's Mollom module

2010-02-16T08:54:17+00:00

It's been a year since our last significant changes to the Mollom module for Drupal, so we're excited to announce a major update. The most exciting new features in the new Mollom 1.11 release include:

Enables use of Mollom for any form; with Webform module integration almost completed
Includes an embedded audio CAPTCHA player that works on all browsers
Adds optional blacklist functionality to block spammers by text patterns and URLs
Adds an optional link to Mollom's privacy policy from forms protected via textual analysis
Adds support for serving CAPTCHAs over SSL (for Mollom Plus and Mollom Premium customers only)
Makes Mollom compatible with Pressflow
Integrates with CCK to change the position of the CAPTCHA field
Provides many more unit tests for continuous integration testing
Improves the APIs to enable module developers to better integrate with the Mollom module
Implements various usability improvements (e.g., better permission names and better error messages)
Updates several of the translations

We spent several months working on this release, and it marks our biggest upgrade to date. Upgrading requires some database updates, so remember to run update.php.

Thanks to Daniel F. Kudwien (sun), Dave Reid and Keith Smith for their contributions to the 1.11 release.

Protecting Germans IV: An Example

2010-02-15T09:49:14+00:00

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts (previous: 1, 2, 3) on how Mozilla is using its trademarks to try and make sure everyone gets a genuine copy of our software, for free.

Today we filed what lawyers call "main action proceedings" against the most long-standing and active of the operators of charging sites (what we would call "subscription traps"), Alexander Varin. Through his companies Content Services Ltd. and Antassia GmbH, he operates several sites of similar design (unlinked examples: opendownload.de, softwaresammler.de, top-of-software.de). We have been monitoring his activities since November 2008. An early C&D request was rejected. The aim of this case is to address all his infringing activities in one action.

There have already been successful court actions against Mr. Varin, brought by individual consumers (regarding their payment obligations after signing up) and by a German consumer organization (regarding infringements of consumer protection laws, amounting to unfair competition). But the core infringement of Mozilla’s trademark rights, the offer of Mozilla’s software against hidden fees, continues. Our aim in these proceedings is to put a permanent stop to it.

What will happen next is that the court will serve the statement of claims to the three defendants. They have two weeks to notify the court that they are defending the action. Should one (or all) of them not do so, we can apply for a default judgment. If they do notify the court, they will have a further deadline of a few weeks within which to respond to the statement of claims. The court will then set a date for an oral hearing.

Please note that German defamation law is quite strict where reporting of court proceedings is concerned. Only truthful facts may be reported and no suggestions or inferences be made that leave room for (negative) interpretation. So please be understanding if we can't discuss our opinions on this case in the normally straightforward and forthright ways which generally characterize Mozilla's communications :-)

The umbrella organization of the German consumer protection agencies (Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband e.V.) is also very active in informing and educating consumers about subscription trap websites. They have themselves brought several main action proceedings against the operators of various such fraudulent sites, including the website "opendownload.de". For further information, you can visit their website (also available, naturally, in German). If you are German and would rather speak to someone directly, you can find the contact details of your local consumer protection agency on their website, too.

Journalists who want more information can contact Martin Madej at Verbraucherzentrale Bundesverband e.V. Tel. (030) 258 00-123, or email recht@vzbv.de.

Gerv Status 2010-02-12

2010-02-15T09:37:45+00:00

Here's what I've been up to for the last three weeks. Highlights:

Bugzilla tips blog launched
Firefox team victory at FOSDEM Laser-Tag: (Firefox: 1357 vs. Thunderbird: -54 [corrected 2009-12-15 09:37])

AndroidSqueak

2010-02-13T11:53:08+00:00

Andreas Raab has announced a new home for some work he’s been doing recently to port Squeak to the Android platform:

http://code.google.com/p/squeak-android-vm/

He’s aware that lots of things are still missing that would be required to support a full port (including text input and network support). But he’s still interested to hear if (and how well) it works for other Android-based cell phones. So if you have a Motorola Droid or or a T-Mobile G1 give it a shot and post some benchmark results.

Andreas reports that “performance on the Nexus One is about what one would expect: With roughly 1M sends/sec and 30M bytecodes/sec it’s not exactly rocking but it’s quite usable for most tasks on a mobile device. (Input is *terrible* though; Squeak’s UI is not made for fat-fingered clicks like mine “

If you’d like to be added as developer, please send Andreas your Google Account email address so that he can add you to the project. But, he warns that “unless you know how to deal with both the Android SDK and NDK, Java, JNI, and the Squeak VM it will be a very steep learning curve”.

(Of course, for those of us still using iPhones, there also John McIntosh’s iPhone port of Squeak.)

Firefox Summit 2010 Dates

2010-02-12T17:07:53+00:00

We're not yet in a position to discuss an attendee list, so people shouldn't assume anything, but the hard-working Dan Portillo has given me permission to reveal the dates of this year's Firefox Summit, which will again be in Whistler, B.C.:

Tuesday July 6th - Saturday July 10th 2010

(The 6th and the 10th will be travel days.) As I said, don't assume anything, but if you are planning your summer holidays and think you might get an invite, you may want to keep that week free.

1000th Blog Post

2010-02-12T11:26:42+00:00

Nearly six years ago, I (slightly grumpily) got a blog, after having promised myself I'd only get one if I had something interesting to say. This, according to Movable Type, is my 1000th published blogpost, and I hope that very few have been as inward-looking as this one is ;-)

Does Brendan Eich Wear Pants When He's Hacking?

2010-02-12T11:21:30+00:00

The key question of the day, fearlessly tackled by Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge in the latest Shot of Jaq podcast episode "The Cult Of Personality" (10 mins, HTML5 Open Audio used).

General Motors using Drupal

2010-02-10T11:53:07+00:00

General Motors is using Drupal for a social microsite over at http://www.gmexpo2010.com. Cool!

Putting Oracle a11y news in perspective

2010-02-09T15:01:03+00:00

Oracle laying off GNOME contributors is certainly bad news for the project. It’s particularly bad news because Willie Walker, one of my favourite GNOME contributors, is now out of a job.

I just want to put this in perspective, though. In 2007, IBM made deep cuts in its support of GNOME accessibility, affecting contributors such as Peter Parente, Eitan Isaacson and Aaron Leventhal, who are no longer paid to work on GNOME accessibility work. The IBM cuts were perhaps deeper than those that Oracle are announcing right now (but I suspect that we’re not finished hearing bad news from Oracle). So we’ve been through this (and worse) before.

Next, it’s not all bad news on the accessibility front: other distributions are carrying a small amount of the accessibility mantle (Ubuntu, OpenSuse), with projects like MouseTweaks being funded by Canonical, the Inference lab in Cambridge has been funded for some projects (Dasher, OpenGazer (the newer development of OpenGazer is not yet available for download)) through the AEGIS project, and of course as others have noticed, the Mozilla Foundation has repeated its accessibility grant of the last two years to the GNOME Foundation, and supporting Orca is part of its accessibility roadmap. Mozilla has also funded work to port AT-SPI from Orbit to DBus, and other work on Orca and Accerciser.

So there are people who care about accessibility in GNOME, and there appears to be a potential for funding for accessibility work, for the right people with the right contacts and the right projects.

Perhaps it’s time for the GNOME Foundation to start seeking funds from government bodies, other public institutions and private funding to fund accessibility work for the greater good? I know that we’re currently raising funds for a sysadmin, and have not yet reached the level of support where we can make that position a regular fixture, but accessibility is different.

No one player is willing to put enough funding into accessibility to properly support Orca, gok, Dasher, AT-SPI, Accerciser, MouseTweaks, keyboard accessibility tools like SlowKeys and StickyKeys, and so on – but perhaps there are lots of people who are willing to support a project for a specific feature, or general stability & bug fixing work for a11y on the desktop?

If there is no commercial justification for a company like Oracle to pay two people to work full time on free software accessibility, then it’ll be a hard sell to any other company. But perhaps the GNOME Foundation could bear two full time accessibility employees with targeted grants working on a public roadmap? Raising $250,000 – $300,000 a year for accessibility from grants doesn’t sound that hard.

But then, maybe I’m nuts…

The World Bank's climate change site using Drupal

2010-02-09T11:49:23+00:00

The World Bank has many websites and a varied online presence and some are running Drupal. Their climate change site, http://beta.worldbank.org, which launched a few months ago uses Drupal. The site serves as a beta for the new content strategy the Bank would like for the future: an integrated model of publishing around shared topics, countries, and products to achieve greater audience reach and satisfaction. This site takes a single topic: "climate change", and aggregates World Bank content from a variety of sources in an automated fashion.

The World Bank's mission is to reduce global poverty and improve living standards. It serves as a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world. Global climate change is a major priority for The World Bank as developing countries will be particularly vulnerable to adverse conditions caused by it.

The World Bank has reams of information regarding climate change but it was separated by organizational groups and internal systems and it was nearly impossible for a visitor to find and combine these different sources. To counter this problem, The World Bank engaged Phase2 Technology to launch a pilot site that demonstrates the potential success of a topic-based site with large amounts of data. In addition to great tools for data integration and visualization, the site has support for low end mobile devices and multimedia integration.

It's very satisfying to know that Drupal is powering such an important site which is poised to help better the plight of developing countries. Experts anticipate climate change will hit the third world the hardest. This site is one of the more prominent Drupal sites The World Bank currently has, but it is a great example of how to effectively showcase data on important issues. I hope they will consider using Drupal for future projects.

Mollom blacklisting and language detection APIs

2010-02-07T21:43:35+00:00

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that Mollom is a continual work in progress. By studying how people use Mollom, by listening to feature requests, and by examining the plugins that our software partners and others have made available, we've introduced new ways to interact with Mollom.

First, we're announcing support for blacklisting. We introduced two new methods: one based on detecting the presence of user-specified URLs, and another that detects specific phrases or keywords. In both cases, Mollom maintains custom, site-specific URL and text blacklists, and knows to search for the presence of these links or phrases when analyzing text for your site. We're adding support for this API to the next version of the Mollom module for Drupal.

Second, we've implemented a new method that detects the language of any given text. We currently support detection of about 75 languages and this new functionality allows our end-users to take action based on posting language. It could be used to help segment web postings into different forums by language, or to help moderate the languages spoken on your site, for instance. The language detection API is used by some of our customers, but probably won't make it into the next version of the Mollom module for Drupal.

We've got other new features that we're working on as well, and will introduce them as they're ready. In the meantime, I'm excited to see what our plugin developers do with this new level of control.

Drupal code sprint at FOSDEM 2010

2010-02-07T17:24:01+00:00

With chx, dereine, seutje, mrbaileys, Bojhan and myself working Drupal 7 core and the Drupal 7 upgrade of Views.

Ignite Lyon: A new adventure

2010-02-04T17:04:51+00:00

I’m a big fan of short-form presentations, and I like to give one whenever I get a chance. I also like to encourage others to do them for other conferences I’ve organised or run, like GUADEC, the Maemo Summit or Fostel (site seems to be down now – shame).

I’ve been an admirer from afar of Ignite for years, for the variety and quality of the presentations that you find at their events, and seeing Global Ignite Week announced a few months ago, around the same time that PLOSS Rhone-Alpes started coming together gave me an excuse to do what I’ve wanted to for a while, and host an Ignite Lyon event! The inaugural Ignite Lyon will be held on March 4th in Université Lyon 2 on the quais.

For those unfamiliar with the Ignite talk format, you get 5 minutes for your talk – 20 slides, which advance automatically every 15 seconds. There are lots of Ignite videos on the site.

Once again I’m teaming up with Vincent Mabillot from Colibre, with whom I co-organised Richard Stallman’s recent stop in Lyon last month, and François Aubriot from PLOSS R-A and DotRiver, as well as all of the members of ALDIL and PLOSS R-A who have time to give in this busy month (in addition to school holidays, ALDIL and Colibre are once again participating in the conference Primevere and the week-long “Libre en fête” festival of free software).

I’m looking for presenters! I want to hear cool stuff – personal passions, unusual hobbies or projects, complete with pitfalls and tiny successes that led to a fun conclusion, advice on how to handle difficult problems we all meet, tips on reducing your carbon footprint, how your non-profit group made a difference in your neighbourhood, cries of passion for people to stop doing something you care about *wrong*. Ignite is not just IT, and that’s what I love about it. I will be giving a presentation myself called “hacking your body”, talking about running as performance testing for real life. Of course, it’s also IT, so the geekier and cooler your project, the better If you’re into soldering your own chopper bicycles, I want to hear about it.

As you’ve figured out, I want to hear from you if you have something interesting to say. We’re expecing 100 people from a range of backgrounds, including entrepreneurs, hackers, makers, DIY fans and general geeks & freaks (in the nicest sense). If you want to submit a talk, please use the online form I set up.

Symbian using Drupal

2010-02-04T11:06:41+00:00

The Symbian Foundation is a non-profit organization that stewards the Symbian platform, an operating system for mobile phones and smartphones. The Symbian Foundation was founded by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics and AT&T. Today, their website runs Drupal.

Protecting Germans III: Our Allies

2010-02-04T10:50:06+00:00

This is the third in a series of blog posts (previous: 1, 2) on how Mozilla is using its trademarks to try and make sure everyone gets a genuine copy of our software, for free.

Mozilla has a form where people can report sites abusing our trademarks. And we are very grateful to people who do. Harvey Anderson, the Mozilla general counsel, has recently posted some statistics on what those sorts of reports have helped us achieve.

But we aren't the only people trying to deal with the problem of "subscription trap" sites. downloados.de is a private initiative in Germany educating internet users about the typical set-up of a subscription trap. It comes across like a typical trap site, but when the user makes the final click to send off their personal details and to obtain the software, the website then informs them that they were about to spend money on free software and that they should be more careful next time.

Learning how to fund-raise from other non-profits

2010-02-03T19:54:08+00:00

More and more we’re seeing organisations outside the free software world try to learn the lessons of our success, and integrate “open source” practices into their organisation.

Whether it’s companies adopting transparency and other cluetrain or pinko marketing strategies, proprietary software development companies integrating standard free software practices, or one of the other areas where “crowdsourcing” has become the cool new thing, it’s obvious hat we have gotten some things right, some of the time, and it is definitely worth learning the right lessons from projects like Linux, Mozilla, GNOME, or Wikipedia, and trying to reproduce the magic elsewhere.

Sometimes this feels like the cargo cults in the Pacific Islands, trying to make airplanes land as their ancestors saw 60 years ago, by building airstrips and imitation airplanes. But at least they’re trying to figure out what makes our communities successful.

But are we learning enough lessons from others? It seems to me like we’re charging head first like sharecroppers into undiscovered country, only to find that we’ve run into a highly advanced civilisation.

As developers, we’ve invented our own brand of everything, from scratch. We figure out how to run conferences, or raise money from people who like what we do, when these are not new problems.

This isn’t new in IT. The entire learned history of typography got thrown out the window more or less, because with the advent of WYSIWYG editors and the web, everyone has complete control of their authoring tools and Comic Sans is shipped by default, and if I need to reduce the margins to get the letter to fit on one page then by golly I will.

Merchandising and recruitment of new star talent are more examples of things that some other organisations are pretty good at.

So – as an open question – are we learning the lessons from the past which we should be learning, or is it too attractive to think that what we’re doing is so new that every problem we encounter needs a new solution?

One example of a place where there is a wealth of experience out there is convincing people to give money to a cause they believe in. There are dozens of organisations that do this well – humanitarian organisations, political lobbyists, political parties, universities – the list goes on.

Can we figure out how GNOME is like them, and learn the lessons from their fundraising campaigns?

A typical fundraising drive for an organisation like this has three main steps:

Get a list of potential donors
Convince them that you are doing good
Find a pressure point or argument which will convince them to donate

If you look at a mailing for Médecins Sans Frontières for example, you see all of these points in action. Find potential donors – through sign-up campaigns, former donor drives, referrals. Send them a mail package, with a newsletter outlining good work, but with just enough bad news (new conflicts, new refugees, unfinished projects) and artwork (a smiling nurse taking care of a village vs a child ill from a curable illness) to show that money given to MSF will do good, and the need has never been greater.

Your response rate may be small – perhaps only 1% – but that’s enough.

Whether we’re talking about lobby groups, political parties or humanitarian agencies, the same strategies come into play – construct big databases of potential donors, and get them riled up about the thing they’re passionate about being endangered – show them the shining light of all the good work your organisation does, and then drive the sale home by making it really easy to give money or sign up.

University fundraising is an interesting case – and in fact, GNOME’s fundraising model ressembles it now. Your primary source of donations is alumni, people who have been through the university, like receiving updates every year, maybe a class-mate just became a professor, maybe a friend’s daughter got a prize in the annual awards ceremony, maybe a club or association you were in had a good year? And then you leverage the affection with the flip side of the coin – the need, the things we’d like to do better, the project we’re fundraising for which will allow us to do great work.

All of these organisations invest heavily in direct mailing, in building and maintaining databases of supporters, and in monetising them. I recently read a book by a direct mailing copywriter called “My First 40 Years in Junk Mail” and it opened my eyes to what works in that world – and also gave some ideas on the kinds of strategies maybe the GNOME Foundation should be adopting.

The first step is building and maintaining a list of GNOME fans and supporters, by any means possible, and ensuring that they are made aware of what we’re up to and what we’d like to do. And, of course, continuing to build great products.

Opel Antwerp going south

2010-02-03T09:11:23+00:00

Taken with my Panasonic GF1 and the Lumix 20mm f1.7 pancake lens while I was waiting in our car for my wife to buy some ham and cheese. Handheld, no flash, but edited in Adobe Lightroom. I love the camera's shallow depth of field.

The Sun sets on me

2010-02-02T12:56:53+00:00

On Friday I was notified that I will not be making the transition from Sun to Oracle. Sun was a company filled with talented and energetic people, and I am grateful for the chance to work with them.

Pythonistas (and others) may be wondering what this means for dynamic languages at Oracle. I wish I knew. I don’t have any direct knowledge of this, since I’ve never actually spoken to anyone at Oracle about the topic.

I am definitely looking for another opportunity. During my time at Sun I’ve worked on a bunch of Python related stuff, as well as a few things related to cloud computing. Other skills in my repertoire include server side development (Java and Python), open source community work, and engineering management. I’m definitely open to different possibilities. The about page of this blog has my contact information, and my LinkedIn profile is a pretty good summary of my credentials.

Protecting Germans II: The Steps

2010-02-02T09:42:21+00:00

This is the second in a series of blog posts (previous) on how Mozilla is using its trademarks to try and make sure everyone gets a genuine copy of our software, for free. I will continue to use Germany as an example.

When we discover a wilful trademark infringement, we normally take the following steps, in increasing order of seriousness:

Contact search engines to ask for the site to be delisted.

We have a good relationship with the major search engines, and being delisted or having their advertising removed does a great deal to "cut off the air supply" of fraudulent sites.

Report the site to consumer protection agencies such as computerbetrug.de, antiabzockenet.blogspot.com and boocompany.com.
Send a cease and desist letter.

In most cases, sending a C&D sorts out the problem. If it doesn't, we:

File a DENIC domain dispute and request cancellation or transfer of any infringing domain names.

Where there is a domain name involved which infringes Mozilla’s trademarks, we can file a domain dispute alongside sending the C&D. For German domains, this is very quick and cost-efficient (national stereotypes at work :-). Upon cancellation of a .de domain by the infringer, DENIC automatically transfers the domain to Mozilla. (For other TLDs, it's not so automatic.)

We have already obtained numerous domain names this way. Examples include "mozilla.de", "mozilla-europe.de", "mozillamessaging.de" and "mozilla.fr", as well as dozens of typosquatted domains.

Unfortunately, for subscription traps, a C&D rarely has any effect. So we move on to:

Obtain a preliminary injunction (PI).

In Germany, PIs are also quick and cheap. Typically, it takes 1 or 2 days to obtain a PI. The proceedings are ex-parte (you only need one side in court), the other side is not even notified of the application for a PI and there is no discovery of evidence. You make your case, and the judge decides.

PIs become effective upon service. If they are not complied with, they can be enforced through penalty payment proceedings. However, a quicker way to take the site down is by approaching the provider. Under German law, internet providers are liable for infringing content once they are made aware of the infringement. Thus, a letter to a provider, accompanied by a copy of the PI, usually leads to the immediate shutdown of the site. (Remember, the site has already been warned of proceedings by the C&D this is not coming out of the blue.)

So far, Mozilla has needed to file 6 7 (another one this week) PIs, and all of them were successful. In two cases, the other side appealed, but the PI was confirmed on appeal.

Community Size, and Bug Quality

2010-02-02T09:06:16+00:00

I've just finished watching Diederik van Liere's fascinating presentation (Ogg video, 20 mins), linked to by Mark, about his work with bugzilla.mozilla.org data. Download the full slide deck - you'll need it to follow along with my comments, which should be of interest to the community-minded.

Slides 9 and 10, the community dynamics slides, are worrying. Diederik explains the decline in the size of the community as "increased product maturity", but I'm not sure that's true. If it were, we would expect to see the number of people entering the community decreasing. However, that number has stayed roughly constant, with peaks surrounding a release as we reach out to beta testers, and as new users report bugs. It's the number of people leaving which seems to be increasing. Fewer people are hanging around once they get here. And I don't know why.

Slide 11, about what the final resolutions ended up being of bugs filed in each year, is fascinating. It would be really interesting to see that graphed at a greater granularity.

We have made significant progress in reducing the percentage of duplicate bugs filed. People complain about Bugzilla's search, but the percentage was a flat 25% from 2002-2004, and it's now a flat 13% - basically half what it was. Also, from a low of 34% of bugs filed being FIXED, we are now up at 56%.

There are no doubt lots of factors involved in this effect, including the reduction in the size of the community mentioned in the earlier slides. I'm really interested in working out what we might have done which has improved the situation. I have an utterly open mind on this. here are some significant events I can think of which may be relevant:

Can anyone else think of other events or software deployments which may be relevant? I'm happy to do the research to find out when they happened.

Get your abstracts in for FOSS4G!

2010-02-01T18:33:10+00:00

FOSS4G 2010 call for abstracts is now open! As usual, there will be a flood of awesome abstracts and ideas to be chosen from. Make sure a presentation proposal for your favourite project or case study gets in by the deadline, so you have your excuse to goto Barcelona :)

http://www.osgeo.org/foss4g/2010/call_for_abstracts

MediaWikis Can Host Open Video: wiki.mozilla.org Enabled

2010-02-01T16:34:02+00:00

The awesome Jeremy Orem has written a Mediawiki extension to allow the direct embedding of Open Video, and has turned this feature on on wiki.mozilla.org. Check out my demo page (you just type the normal HTML syntax into the wiki markup) and then feel free to use it to host Mozilla-relevant videos. (Note: wiki.mozilla.org has a 32MB file upload limit.)

Help Acquia help Gartner with social software report

2010-02-01T15:40:37+00:00

You might remember that a while ago, Drupal was promoted to the 'Visionaries' category in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. For someone unfamiliar with all the social software vendors and projects, the choice can be overwhelming and Gartner's reports can carry a lot of weight in the decision making process. Drupal's promotion to the 'Visionaries' category was a big win for all of us.

The social software market is evolving fast, and in response Gartner is working on a presentation that compares all of the different social software players in the enterprise market, including open-source projects like Drupal. As part of that process, Acquia was invited to review the presentation and provide comments about the social software landscape and Drupal's success stories. These success stories are important to help Gartner position Drupal against its many competitors. We will also be having a followup meeting with Gartner for further discussion.

Gartner considers three different use cases for social software: (i) team collaboration software, (ii) community software and (iii) networking software. Each of these scenarios have different requirements and emphasize different features of social software. User profiles and group support seems to carry a lot of weight in their evaluations. In addition, for each of these use cases, Gartner considers two different deployment scenarios: (a) sites inside the workplace and (b) externally facing websites. This effectively creates a 3x2 matrix or grid.

To help prepare for our meeting with Gartner, and to help further Drupal's competitive positioning in the enterprise we're looking for good examples in each of those categories. Good suggestions? Post them in the comments of this blog post. Remember that Gartner is focused on the enterprise, so we're looking for examples in the enterprise that carry a lot of weight. Thanks for your help!

Nav4All Loses Data Licence, Shuts Down

2010-02-01T15:27:26+00:00

In a follow-up to my previous post, here's an example of what can happen if your build your business on non-free data or software from a single supplier:

Nav4All navigation shut down by Navteq
Letter to 27,625,631 Nav4All navigation customers

Dear Customers,

It is with the deepest regret that we hereby notify you that the global navigation of Nav4All and the Tracking & Tracing will go offline in 3 days. The reason for the same is that the data licence agreement with Navteq (a 100% Nokia subsidiary) was not extended, in a totally unexpected manner. ...

Nav4All worked on "hundreds of different mobile telephones of many makes such as Blackberry, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Android, HTC, Nokia, LG, Iphone, Ipod etc." Navteq is now owned by Nokia. It's not hard to join the dots. I'm somewhat surprised Nav4All call this "totally unexpected", though. It's the obvious thing for Nokia to do. And they bought Navteq over two years ago. If I were a Nav4All shareholder, I'd be having strong words with the management right now...

Drupal Association 2010 election

2010-02-01T14:30:27+00:00

The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping the Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, events, promotion and distribution. The current Board of Directors was elected almost a year ago, so it's election time again!

On March 1st, 2010 we will elect new Permanent Members to the General Assembly. The General Assembly wil then select our Board of Directors, who are responsible for oversight of day-to-day operations. All the details can be found in the Drupal Association's Statutes.

We are looking for people who aspire to become Directors on the Drupal Association's Board and who can provide leadership and experience to expand the reach of the Association and its activities. All current Board positions, except the President and Treasurer, are up for election, including Secretary, Legal Officer, Marketing and Communications, Infrastructure Manager, Fundraiser, and Events Manager.

The Association is also looking for new General Assembly members with skills in marketing, drupal.org webmaster coordination, project management and more. People interested in becoming a Permanent Members are invited to apply. While Permanent Members don't have the defined responsibilities of board members, membership implies a commitment to work for and promote the goals of the Association.

The Drupal Association is run by unpaid volunteers and we expect that our board members will spend a considerable amount of time working on Association responsibilities and obligations. If you think you're a good candidate, and you have the time it takes, find an existing Permanent Member to support your candidacy (i.e. find a supporter) and submit your application. Applications are due by February 22th and on March 1st, we elect the new Permanent Members and the new Board of Directors.

If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask them in the comments, or to contact the Drupal Association.

iPad

2010-02-01T09:38:38+00:00

Software freedom means never having to say "I'm very much hoping Apple continues to allow...".

And that's all you'll hear from me about the iPad :-)