John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, shares some insights and thoughts on Mozilla, and its a most interesting presentation to go through. The insights are (drizzled with some of my comments):

1. Superior Products Matter - Without excellent experience and utility, the rest is meaningless. This is true, even with MySQL - our aims and values have always been performance, reliability and ease of use.
2. Push (most) decision-making to the edges - I understand that as make sure your community has a significant voice (kind of like Wikipedia’s anyone edits policy, but there’s patrolling). He also suggests that on a regular basis, you need to have surprising innovation - things that blow people’s minds. In Mozilla’s case, there are a set of core values that everyone agrees too; …

Sun reports second quarter results. Compiere reports 216% quarterly revenue growth. EnterpriseDB grows customers accounts. Hyperic and JasperSoft team up on BI for IT. Microsoft embraces Apache but resists GPL. And more.

Sun up or Sun down?
There was some comparatively good news from Sun, which reported a net loss of $209m on revenue down 10.9% at $3.2bn. As Sam Diaz at ZDnet notes, however, “after excluding one-time costs related to recent layoffs and other costs, the company posted a profit of 15 cents per share, beating analysts’ expectations of a 10 cent loss”. In regular trading, shares of Sun were up more than 5%.

Matt Asay noted the impact open …

Mozilla, the global community behind the Firefox web browser, has an idea that we need your help with. We want you to help make openness, participation and distributed decision-making common experiences in Internet life.

To do this, millions of people around the world must understand, embrace and share these values. You, me, our families, our neighbor down the street, our political representatives – millions of us from every walk of life in every wired country can help to protect the Net and make it better.

As an experiment working towards this goal, I am coordinating a program that asks people to share short (very, very short – 3 to 12 second) video statements of how the Net has changed their life. We hope that thousands of videos are made by people all over the world and that, through …

« Post 3 | This is the 4th post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series

“When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of ‘gossip.’ She held a feather pillow and said, ‘If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That’s how it is when you spread mean things about people.’ For me, that pillow is a metaphor for Wikipedia.” — John Seigenthaler Sr.

So the future pulled up in her shiny big metaphor and we got in. In the beginning, our road trip made sense, all well-ordered highways and wholesome roadside attractions. Somewhere along the way, we hit bat country and the …

This is Zak Greant's weekly report on his activities for the Mozilla Foundation from January 19th to 25th, 2009.

Wading through heaps of Mozilla email and feeds last week paid off this week. Instead of worrying about what I hadn't read or wondering where I was duplicating other's work, I was able to focus on program development with most of my effort going into developing the Mozilla Social Movement Program Concept, working on the Mozilla Manifesto Stories experiment and catching up with my peers. At 54 hours, the week was a bit long but I was glad to be able to focus. …

Gerv, Frank, Mark and I have been discussing ideas around how people can turn open source experience into an asset for their resume. We’ve got some of our own ideas, but we want yours as well. Please blog, comment, email or ‘dent any one of us, or catch up with Gerv and Mark at FOSDEM.

My top three tips for making the best of your open source participation are:

1. Free your work and free yourself. Turn software into a platform for your career by contributing to free and open projects and by releasing your own work under free software and open source licenses. In addition to the well-understood collaborative benefits, you get to keep using …

Today, Dinesh pointed us out to the fact that MAMPU/OSCC saves RM40 million with open source. That’s about USD$12 million dollars!

I quote, from the report:

Savings on licensing fee alone by adopting OpenOffice.org have already exceeded RM12 million, which is based on the total installed seats of 12,760 at public sector agencies.

Also, from the same report:

The top three applications being considered by most Public Sector Agencies are:
1. OpenOffice.org – Office Suite
2. Firefox – Web Browser
3. MySQL – Database using Open Source Technology

That is impressive. OpenOffice.org and MySQL both come from Sun Microsystems Inc. Of course I’ve known this for a long time coming, but seeing it in B&W (ok, a colour report!) is of course, most useful. Go …

This is Zak Greant's weekly report on his activities for the Mozilla Foundation from December 29th, 2008 to January 4th, 2009.

Overview

Another week of the Christmas and New Year holidays with many of my Mozilla colleagues unavailable. As with the previous week, I focused on 2009 program development and engagement.

The program development work was in the form of brainstorming, planning and research for upcoming 2009 Mozilla activities.

The engagement work focused on participating in the Mozilla blogorama. I kept up with Planet Mozilla, commented on blog posts I found interesting and continued a series of lightweight blog posts.

More details on both activities follow:

Program Development

I finished drafting a new statement of work and sent this to …

I want you to tell me the story of how you got started with the Net.

Tell me how your passion was sparked and why it keeps coming to full flame.

Tell me why the Net matters to you, even after all of the long days, short nights and wrecked weekends.

I’ve been writing my story because I need to understand why I care deeply for what the Net is and what it means.

I want to read your story for the same reason.

Don’t hold out on me now. I can see your data trails in my server logs: a few hundred of you trudging in from RSS subscriptions, the PHP, Mozilla and MySQL planets, Boris’ …

« Post 2 | This is the 3rd post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series | Post 4 »

“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I like beginnings. This is a constant. In primary school, I tried to re-invent arithmetic. My D&D characters were obsessively re-rolled and scrapped. On various computers, I’d start my games of Civilization over and over. I’d hope that if …