The roads I take...

KaiRo's weBlog

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Popular tags: Mozilla, SeaMonkey, L10n, Status, Firefox

Used languages: English, German

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May 17th, 2013

Preserving Software - Feedback Requested!

As Digital Preservation is part of the agenda of the US Library of Congress, they're doing a workshop on Software Preservation next week, and Mozilla was invited as an expert group. Otto de Voogd and myself are in the delegation going there (I'll be roughly in the Washington, DC, area from Saturday until June 2) for Mozilla - and the text below is a guest post by Otto with questions that we would like some feedback on so we can represent the Mozilla community as well as possible:




On the 20th and 21st of May the Library of Congress holds a workshop on the topic of preserving software.
Otto de Voogd and Robert Kaiser will be representing Mozilla, putting forward our viewpoint as custodians of a codebase with a significant heritage and importance.

Many questions and thoughts arise. Here's an overview of ours; we look forward to feedback.


- Should archivists keep source codes or executables or both?

Executables and source code are both valuable. Executables are valuable because the source code is sometimes not available, or perhaps the build tools are not, and setting up a build environment for older code can be a difficult and complex thing.

Source is valuable to determine how a program works. It also makes it possible to reuse code and algorithms, especially, but not only, in the case of open source software.


- Preserving documentation.

Preserving documentation that goes with software, seems logical.
Would this need to go as far as preserving discussion threads and entries in bug trackers?


- Preserving environments/platforms.

It seems obvious that without preserving an environment in which the software can run, it is going to be impossible to experience the software.
Preserving such an environment should therefor be part of the software preservation effort.

To avoid the physical constraints imposed by preserving old hardware (which would be a preservation effort in its own right), a solution would be to build virtual machines and emulators.
As hardware capacity constantly grows, running virtual versions of older hardware should generally be feasible.

To fully recreate an environment we'd also need to preserve the operating systems and other software tools that the preserved software needs to run.
Those being software themselves would logical already be included in any software preservation effort.

Preserving documentation concerning environments, would also be required.
To build virtual machines and emulators it would be helpful for hardware makers to make technical specifications available. One could envision this to become a legal requirement at least for older hardware.

Can we imagine a world where web based emulators would allow an online digital library to serve users worldwide? Users who would be able to run old software in emulators running in their browsers...


- Is everything worth preserving, if not how does one go about selecting what is worth preserving?

Does one need to preserve every version of software, just the last version or all major releases? What about preserving software that has not spread widely. Would there be some threshold, or some other criteria?


- How does one index software and search the library?

There will be a need to gather meta data about software and the preservation of documentation as we already mentioned. This meta data and documentation could serve to populate an index enabling for instance the search for particular features.


- Can software preservation help in making code reusable?

If there are good ways to actually find relevant and useful code, this could lead to more reuse not only of actual code, but also of algorithms and concepts.
It may also become a valuable source for students who wish to learn about actual implementations of software solutions.

At the very least a minimum of meta data, such publication dates, copyright owners and licenses should be available to determine how certain code can be reused.
In particular for open source software we believe that software libraries should strive make it available without restrictions.


- Preserving data formats.

The software preservation effort should also include an effort to preserve data formats. Including technical descriptions of those formats and the tools to read, write and edit those formats.


- Can software preservation help in the discovery of prior art?

We believe it can, and as such preserving old code could be a great tool in preventing the repatenting of existing software concepts.

Of course we believe that software patents shouldn't exist in the first place, as software is already covered by copyrights, but at the very least prior art is a good avenue to prevent some of the worst abuse of software patents.


- How do copyrights affect software libraries?

A lot of software is licensed to be used on a particular piece of hardware or only available via subscription. How does this affect software libraries? Should there be exceptions like there are for traditional libraries?

In the life cycle of software, the commercially exploitable time is limited, likely anything older than 10 years no longer has any commercial value.
Maybe copyrights on software should be significantly reduced to something like 10 years, which is more than enough to cover the commercially exploitable timeframe of the software life cycle.

Such a limit would greatly enhance the work of software libraries, increasing availability and ease of access as well as removing a lot of the red tape involving requests for permission to keep copies.


- What about software as a service?

And what about software as a service, where neither the source code nor the executables are ever published? How can something like Gmail be preserved, when neither the service's code nor the environment is available to the public?


- Preserving "illegal" or cracked copies?

What if a copy of a piece of software comes from an illegal source? A cracked version with modifications maybe? They have value in themselves as they are a cultural expression.

What if such an illegal copy is the only copy still available? Would it make sense to preserve that too?

By KaiRo, at 00:08 | Tags: history, Mozilla, preservation, software | 2 comments | TrackBack: 0

April 4th, 2013

15, 14, 13, 8, 7, 2 years ago, and the future? My Web Story

It all started on March 31, 1998. Just a few days off from 15 years ago.

Netscape open-sourced the code to its "Communicator" Internet suite, using its own long-standing internal code name as a label for that project: Mozilla.

I always liked the sub-line of a lot of the marketing material for this time - under the Mozilla star/lizard logo and a huge-font "hack", the material said "This technology could fall into the right hands". And so it did, even if that took time. You can learn a lot about that time by watching the Code Rush movie, which is available under a Creative Commons license nowadays. And our "Chief Lizard Wrangler" and project leader Mitchell Baker also summarized a lot of the following history of Mozilla in a talk that was recorded a couple of years ago.

Just about a year later, in May 1999, so 14 years ago, I filed my first bug after I had downloaded one of the early experimental builds of the Mozilla suite, building on the brand-new Gecko rendering engine. This one and most I filed back then were rendering issues with that new engine, mostly with my pretty new and primitive first personal homepage I had set up on my university account. After some experiments with CSS-based theming of the Mozilla suite, I did some playing around with exchanging strings in the UI and translating them to German, just to see how this new "XUL" stuff worked. This ended up in my first contribution contact and me providing a first completely German-language build on January 1, 2000.

A few months after that, in May, I submitted my first patch to the Mozilla project, which was a website change, actually. But only weeks later, I created a bug and patch against the actual Mozilla code - in June of 2000, 13 years ago. And it would by far not be the last one, even though my contributions the that code were small for years, a fix for a UI file here, a build fix for L10n stuff there. My main contributions stayed in doing the German localization for the suite and in general L10n-related issues. Even when Firefox came along in 2004, I helped that 1.0 release with some localization-related issues, esp. around localized snippets for its Google-based and -hosted start page - and stayed with L10n for the full suite otherwise (while Kadir would do the German Firefox L10n). I wrote a post in 2007 about how I stumbled into my Mozilla career.

As Firefox became rapidly successful and took an increasingly large standing in the project and community, I stuck with the suite as I liked a more integrated experience of email and browser - and I liked the richer feature set that the suite had to offer (Firefox did cut out a lot of functionality in the beginning to be able to found its new, leaner and more consumer-friendly UI). When in March of 2005, it became clear that the suite was going into strict maintenance mode and be abandoned by the "official" Mozilla project, I joined the team that took over maintenance and development of that suite - once again using a long-standing internal code name for that: SeaMonkey. In all that project-forming process 8 years ago, I took over a lot of the organizational roles, so that the coders in our group could focus at the actual code, and eventually was credited as "project coordinator" within the project management group we call the "SeaMonkey Council".

When I founded my own business 7 years ago, in January of 2006, I was earning money in surprising ways, and trying to lead the SeaMonkey project into the future. We were just about to release SeaMonkey 1.0 and convince the first round of naysayers that we actually could have the suite running as a community project. In the next years, we did quite some interesting and good work on that software, and a lot of people were finally realizing that "we made it" when we could release a 2.0 version that was based on the same "new" toolkit that Firefox and Thunderbird were built upon, removing a lot of old, cruft code and replacing it with newer stuff, including the now common-place add-ons system and automated updates among a ton of other things. I would end up doing a number of the major porting jobs from Firefox to SeaMonkey, including the places-based history and bookmarks systems, the download manager (including a UI that was similar to the earlier suite style), and the OpenSearch system. With the Data Manager, I even contributed a completely new and (IMHO) pretty innovative component into SeaMonkey. In those times, I think I did more coding work (in JS, mostly) than ever before, perhaps with the exception of the PHP-based CBSM community and content management platform I had done before that.

The longer I was in the SeaMonkey project, the more I realized, though, that the innovation I would like to have seen around the suite wasn't really happening - all the innovation to the suite came from porting Firefox and Thunderbird features and/or code, and that often with significant delay. Not sure if anything other than the Data Manager actually was a genuine SeaMonkey innovation, and I only came up with that when trying to finally get some innovation going, back in 2010. I was more and more unsatisfied with the lack of progress and innovation and the incredible push-back we got on the mailing list on every try to actually do something new. In October of 2010, I took a flight to Mountain View, California, to meet up with Mitchell Baker and talk about the future of SeaMonkey - and I also mentioned how I wanted to be more on the front of innovation even though I seem to not manage to get the SeaMonkey community there. Not sure if it came out of this or was in the back of her head before, in one of those conversations I had with her, she asked me if I would like to work for Mozilla and Firefox. I said that this caught me by surprise but we should definitely keep that conversation going. Just after that I met then-Mozilla-CEO John Lilly, and he asked if Mitchell had offered me a job - just to make sure. As you can imagine, that got me thinking a lot more about that, and gave me the freedom to think outside SeaMonkey for my future. I was at the liberty to think about my personal priorities in more depth, and it became clear that the winds of change were clearly blowing through my life.

After some conversations with people at Mozilla, I decided I wanted to try a job there, and Chris Hofmann proposed my working on tracking crashes and stability, so I started contracting for Mozilla on the CrashKill team in February 2011, first half-time, finally full-time. So, 2 years ago, I opened a completely new chapter in my personal web story. Tracking crash statistics for our products - Firefox desktop, Firefox from Android, and now Firefox OS - and working with our employees and community to improve stability has turned out to be a more interesting job than I expected when I started. Knowing that my work actually helps thousands or even millions of people, who have a more stable Firefox because of what I do, is a quite high award. And I'm growing into a more managerial role, which is something I really appreciate. And I'm connected to all kinds of innovation going on at Mozilla: A lot of the new features landing (like new JIT compilers for JavaScript, WebRTC, etc.) need stability testing and we're tracking the crash reports from those, Firefox for Android needed a lot of stability work to become the best mobile browser out there - and with Firefox OS, I was even involved in how the crash reporting features and user experience flow were implemented. I'm also involved in a lot of strategic meetings on what we release and when - an interesting experience by itself.

Where this all will lead me in the future? No idea. I'm interested in moving to the USA and working there at least for some time - not just because it would make my day cycle sane and having most or all my meetings within the confines of the actual work days in the region I'm living in, but also because I learned to like a lot that country has to offer, from Country Music to Football and many other things (not to mention Louisiana-style Cajun cuisine). I'm also interested in working from an office with other Mozillians for a change, and in possibly becoming even more of a manager. Of course, I'd like to help moving the Mozilla mission forward where I can, openness, innovation and opportunities on the web are something I stand behind nowadays more than ever - and Firefox OS as well as associated technologies promise to really make a huge impact on the web of the future. I'm looking forward to quite exciting times! :)

By KaiRo, at 00:13 | Tags: CrashKill, Firefox, future, history, L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | 6 comments | TrackBack: 0

December 17th, 2012

Thirteen

Being born on a 13th (just like my brother), I've always considered the number 13 as somewhat of a "lucky number" for myself. And today, it's been 13 years since I started contributing to Mozilla!

It's been an interesting ride for sure so far, as a localizer, theme designer, build patch contributor, project leader/coordinator/manager, even JS/XUL author, add-on and web app developer, and nowadays paid-by-Mozilla contributor in stability tracking - just to name a few of the main things.

In those 13 years, Mozilla has changed my life, and enabled me to make a living out of idealism. It's crazy and awesome at the same time, or, I guess, actually crazy awesome! ;-)

And now, we're looking forward to achieve great things in "the year 13" that's upcoming in just a few weeks, and where we'll be trying to deliver on the momentum we built in 2012 and even ship phones that make "the web is the platform" literally true with Firefox OS!

I'm excited to have been in this community for such a long time of thirteen years and to continue strong in being part of this great project - and looking forward to making things "moar awesome" in two-thousand-and-thirteen!

By KaiRo, at 05:01 | Tags: history, Mozilla | 3 comments | TrackBack: 0

January 4th, 2012

The Winds Of Change

Quote:
The winds of change continue blowing
And they just carry me away. -- Albert Hammond

Like many others, I've been thinking quite a bit these days about what went on last year and what will or might come up in 2012. (And I figure I should bring in a bit more from my overall personality into my future blog posts and mention or quote songs I have in my mind on a particular topic, so I'll start with that here).

One topic that has been with me throughout the year and will probably also continue to be with me is change. A lot of it started with my visit to Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, CA, in October 2010, actually - I posted about my changing personal priorities back then. And I still remember driving my rental car up to Lake Tahoe, thinking about all those things and listening to the then-just-released Zac Brown Band album "You Get What You Give" and in particular the song "Let It Go", whose lyrics gave me the right mindset for what was I was going through and what 2011 would bring: "Save your strength for things that you can change, forget the ones you can't, you gotta let it go."

Following that, I started 2011 by transferring the vast majority of my responsibilities in SeaMonkey over to other people (we have built up a great team there over the last years, including awesome people like Callek, InvisibleSmiley, etc. - kudos to them to be able to take all that over in their free time) and get the ball rolling on making the project even more sustainable in the future (I hope we'll have news for you on that soon).

Instead, I followed another piece of advice from this song - "When the pony he comes ridin' by, you better sit your sweet ass on it" - and started contracting for Mozilla on the CrashKill team in February, first half-time, finally full-time. With that, my focus changed from SeaMonkey to Firefox and from project management to crash analysis.

For one thing, I ended up growing into that role better than I imagined at first, finding crash analysis more interesting than expected, for the other, this change ended up having more influence on my life than I had imagined. With the need to communicate a lot with different people in this job, from the CrashKill team via the Socorro team that works on the crash-stats server and which I'm coordinating with to various devs, engineering managers or release managers as the need arises in crash analysis.
Unfortunately with me being a "remotie" all communication needs to be online (or via phone) and is stripped down to the essentials needed for the job. Being a very social person, I'm missing the additional nuances that face-to-face communication would bring to the table, and more need for communication as part of the job makes that more obvious to me.
Then, the whole CrashKill team is based in Mountain View, the vast majority of the Socorro team spread across the US, and most engineering or release managers also based in Northern America, so most of that communication as well as all my meetings is happening during US working hours, which from my point of view in Europe is in the evening to night hours, which requires my work time to be mostly at the end of the day. I have been doing work at late hours in the years before, but there was not as much requirement of that before, while now I have to make at least the meetings, and should be available for more conversation on IRC at those times. Making evening appointments becomes quite difficult in that light.
And speaking of requirements, while I could basically completely make my own schedule before, I now should bring in 8 hours of work per day, and with doing that at the end of every day, I need to make all shopping and other private stuff in the afternoon, leaving me all day with "I still have a full work day to deliver today" in mind - until I achieve that and fall into bed. This causes its own share of subconscious stress.
And I'm doing all the work from my own private apartment, not getting out unless I go shopping or take my usual Monday and Tuesday evening off for some Karaoke.
So, I learned that working from home and remotely has its downsides, esp. for the kind of job I'm in there. This is one area I need to work on a lot in 2012 and find solutions that will be connected with another share of change I'm sure.

But not only my role and work life have changed - Mozilla went in a direction I had often spoken for and has changed to a rapid release cycle and started planning for that shortly after I started contracting. I commented in the planning phase and tried to help shape this process and always was convinced it was a good idea, even though we hit more road bumps than expected. I was heavily involved in coordinating to get crash-stats support rapid releases usefully and also laid out publicly how the new process can improve stability.
Mozilla also has revamped its mobile efforts completely - both with a completely new "native UI" version of Firefox for Android, which is in Aurora testing now and with a completely open mobile stack in the form of Boot To Gecko (B2G), a complete "operating system" based on the browser and open web standards (requiring new WebAPIs), which is also coming together piece by piece now.
And next to those changes, we're also working on changing how identity and logins work on the web and changing the current "silo"ed app store model by bringing open concepts for web apps and markets into the fold that easily allow decentralization and users really "owning" their apps.
In the middle of all that, Mozilla has restructured a bit, brought some previously split-off groups back into the common Mozilla fold, hired a lot of new people, lost (as employees but not as community members) a few high-profile ones who were looking for new challenges, worked on the MPL 2.0, founded exciting new initiatives like WebFWD and went stronger on marketing that we are a non-profit - clearly a lot of change happening everywhere, with the mission and the Manifesto standing unchanged and as clear as ever over all of it, though.

All this makes it clear that a lot of change has come in 2011, both to me and Mozilla, and that it's still only the seed for what's to come in the year(s) ahead. The winds of change are still blowing, and I'm excited for what they propel and which interesting experiences they drag in for all of us.

Quote:
The future's in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind
Of change. -- Klaus Meine / The Scorpions

By KaiRo, at 21:26 | Tags: CrashKill, Firefox, future, history, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | 1 comment | TrackBack: 0

January 1st, 2010

10 Years of German Mozilla releases

Here's is more on my 10 years in the project: Exactly 10 years ago today, on January 1st, 2000, I released the first fully localized Mozilla release or milestone in German.

(I actually posted about its availability 2 hours before midnight my time, but didn't have any place to upload files back then, so I consider the next day the actual release day, when others could upload them somewhere to be accessible to the public.)

Yes, right on the "Y2K day" so many people feared, just 15 days after I posted first on the L10n group and was assigned German localizer, I made a fully localized M12 available to the public - starting a story that is still ongoing, now with a community of German localizers bringing all major Mozilla applications to the largest user base of a locale other than US English, and me still doing the suite part of that, now under the SeaMonkey brand.

To celebrate this anniversary, I added a download page and news story for that release to the German SeaMonkey website today (and the same for M13, which was also still missing).

I almost can't believe I've been serving the German community those builds for 10 years now - and most of that time, I did all the packaging myself, creating language packs and tearing apart en-US binaries to create German one by replacing the L10n files, manually in the beginning, with a script in later years. It's only been now since SeaMonkey 2.0 (including Alpha/Beta) that the Mozilla build machinery has started to produce those for the suite as well and I don't have to run things locally and by myself.

With that, I wish a successful new year ("Ein erfolgreiches neues Jahr" in German) and hope for continuing to serve the community with localized builds for a long time to come!

By KaiRo, at 00:00 | Tags: German, history, L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | 3 comments | TrackBack: 0

December 19th, 2009

10 Years of Work on Mozilla

(I know I'm very late for a Weekly Status Update, I still need to write up the one for last week, hope to come to it soon.)

I wanted to write this post on the day of the actual anniversary, but I got caught in a few other things... In any case, On December 17th, 1999, which happens to be just two days more than 10 years today, I wrote a small, innocent newsgroup message:

Quote of Robert Kaiser:
Newsgroups: netscape.public.mozilla.l10n
Subject: how to contribute?

Hi!

I'd like to help with German translation of Mozilla. How can I do that?
Is there somebody already working on that?
How to contribute so that I don't work hours and be rejected then? (I
already tried some work & I've read all I could find about localization
of Moz with DTDs...)

KaiRo

And I got an instant reply from the back-then L10n coordinator at Netscape/Mozilla, containing among other things those two sentences:

Quote of Tao Cheng:
If you have no objection, I'll put you as the German translation
contributor. The upcoming release is M12.

That was "fatal" in the sense that it pointed to my fate in the upcoming years. What has started with trying what that technology could do was turning into a major mission.
In the hours or days before, I had (out of interest what new things would come out of my beloved Netscape side of the "browser wars") downloaded a new milestone version of this "Mozilla" development software, whose downloadable test binaries were provided under the "project Seamonkey". I was intrigued by the open philosophy but also the technology, as it looked like I would understand those UI files in the "chrome" directory, and they were even easier than the Visual Basic stuff I knew! Among other things like playing with the CSS and what I could screw there (birth of the LCARStrek theme), I tried if replacing the strings in those *.dtd files would really have an influence on the screen by putting German words instead of English ones in there - and it worked! I tried a few more things, read up on all kinds of info about this L10n effort with DTD files, and decided I could help this open-minded project by contributing to the German localization.
And after that reply from Tao, I was suddenly leading the German efforts (note that he's talking of "THE German translation contributor") and saw myself in the mission of providing a full translation of that early development piece of software.

10 years later, I can't believe how long it's been, where it has led to and what a fun ride it turned out to be. I've seen lots of things here with Mozilla in those years, I've got to know a huge number of very bright and incredibly cool people in all parts of the project, and I lived with it through seeing Netscape slowly go down, being an enthusiastic player on the sidelines of the game the Internet world played, up to the rise of Firefox, its incredible success, contributing to the installation of a new Mozilla Foundation Executive Director, and the funding and stabilization of the SeaMonkey project, and I hope I'll still have many more years to be with that project, do something for the greater world and our community, leave my footprints here and there, and above all, have fun working with all those cool people we have in the Mozilla community.

I would have never imagined that this small newsgroup message would change my life in such a large way, but 10 years later I couldn't be happier about actually having taken that step and get this ball rolling by offering my help.

I encourage everyone to not think twice in similar situations and try to help a cool project like Mozilla if they have the chance to - the rewards are much higher than the effort you invest in it!

By KaiRo, at 18:54 | Tags: German, history, L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | 4 comments | TrackBack: 0

April 29th, 2007

The roads I take...

When I started this blog almost two months ago, I realized I need a good title for it, and decided to go with "The roads I take..." as a play on one of my favorite quotes.

I've been a fan of American Country Music for a long time now, as well as writing songs myself, so when I purchased the album "the hits" of Garth Brooks a few years ago, I was happy to read some comments of how he came to write or pick up those popular songs in the CD booklet. For example some of those "the idea came to me and the song was done in a few hours" stories feel pretty familiar to me and it's great to see that big hits of great stars come to be the same way as I've done some of my favorite songs.

And then, there was this comment on "We Shall Be Free", a song he co-wrote with Stephanie Davis:

"We Shall Be Free" is definitely and easily the most controversial song I ever have done. A song of love, a song of tolerance from someone who claims not to be a prophet but just an ordinary man. I never thought there would be any problems with this song. Sometimes the roads we take do not turn out to be the roads we envisioned them to be. All I can say about "We Shall Be Free" is that I will stand by every line of this song as long as I live. I am very proud of it. And I am very proud of Stephanie Davis, the writer. I hope you enjoy it and see it for what it was meant to be.

And I felt I knew what he was talking about once again. Writing lyrics you clearly want to say something with, being proud of what it tells and what feelings the song transports to the listener as well as keeps alive in yourself. And, of course, that some thing you never thought of would happen.

Yes, it's true:
Sometimes the roads we take do not turn out to be the roads we envisioned them to be.
Feels a bit like how I came to be a member of the Mozilla community. And this blog, after all, is about the roads I take...

By KaiRo, at 16:15 | Tags: blog, Country Music, history | no comments | TrackBack: 0

April 27th, 2007

Earning money in surprising ways

Some people might wonder what I'm working to earn my money - esp. as I'm available on IRC most of the day (unless I'm asleep) and usually always have time to discuss SeaMonkey topics, esp. when it comes down to project coordination issues.
OK, a few people might know me as a student, and theoretically I still am, but I haven't seen university (from the inside) for quite some time (though I probably should take my 4 missing exams some time soon and finally actually write up my diploma thesis). But I always feel I need to give some work back for the money I'm earning, and studying is actually not the most attractive distraction from that work...

But, what is this work then, which I earn my money with, if I have time for SeaMonkey most of the time? Well, most surprisingly, SeaMonkey actually is that work. How, you might ask? Well, I stumbled into that the same way I stumbled into the whole Mozilla project...

When I had done the first German Mozilla localization in early 2000, I realized I needed a web page for it and set that up as a sub-page on my personal website www.kairo.at, later transferring it to its own site of mozilla.kairo.at (or, nowadays, www.seamonkey.at). I had to pay for the kairo.at domain from the beginning, but hosting it on the dedicated web server of a friend of mine was cheap, and so the Mozilla localization website did not actually cause additional costs. Traffic on those pages exploded as more and more German users became aware of it, and as time passed, I had to redefine my agreement with that friend to make me co-owner of the server and be paying half of its hostings costs. I still was reluctant to throwing some random web banners to people just to pay for hosting, especially as I felt that what banner ad services displayed to people at that time was not what I wanted to put up on an open source software page.

In summer 2002, with traffic still exploding (the default start page of German Mozilla was this website after all) and a new hosting option for our server needed, I decided to do a poll about sponsoring solutions among site visitors, and as a result, created a donation system that allowed people to specifically sponsor my Mozilla German website with non-intrusive ads (this is still running there today). It was accepted well enough that I could at least pay my web hosting costs as intended - at least when evening out good and bad months. Still, all the time I was investing in Mozilla work was not paid for, though it started competing with the time I had to spend studying.

In 2004, I realized not only that a more modern redesign of the German website was needed (based on the new CBSM website system I had written), but also that with Google AdSense, there was finally a solution to display mostly non-intrusive banners for and by decent businesses and be sure they pay well enough - and my new design, based on mozilla.org's "cavendish" design, happened to have space in its top bar for a standard banner. Because of that, I decided to try an AdSense banner on the site and see how it works out.

And there, something astonishing happened: In the first month, AdSense earned me a few hundred dollars - introduction of a special suite start page with a Google search field in March 2005 made that even jump into the four-digit range! Suddenly, I started to earn money with Mozilla! Not that this made me feel completely comfortable though, as it put some personal pressure on me to give back this value to the community by dedicating even more time to the project and the community.
After a continuing rise of AdSense income, I finally founded my own one-man-business around that and my CBSM webhosting system in January 2006. Even though income declined since April 2006 (no, never saw 5 digits there, but it's still a few thousand dollars) I'm still able to live off what the community channels to me through clicks on AdSense ads on the SeaMonkey German web page and on search results from that Google field on the default start page.

And that's one additional reason why I'm donating as much time as possible to the project - it's where my primary income stream is originated. Thanks to Google for their great AdSense system and thanks to all German SeaMonkey users as well as the SeaMonkey community, who make it possible to have SeaMonkey as a part of my business! And, I guess it's not really bad if someone like me is having commercial interest in addition to personal liking to spread SeaMonkey as well as possible. You can be sure I'm trying to pay back every cent with the time I'm investing in the project. Unfortunately, giving money away to others is not easy to do legally (there's always the problem that it might mean that legally that person is considered as "working for you", which means you need contracts and pay taxes), but for example, I could pay biesi's recent FOSDEM visits from my business as I can state need him for technical advice there. :)
I may still find other possible ways to contribute, but mainly I will contribute my time, as time is money after all ;-)

It's always nice to hear someone's found a way to make a living from open source development, it's really nice though to be one of those people - esp. if you're not working on one of the really big products. As long as that income is flowing, be sure to hear a lot about me in this project. Oh, and don't forget to spread SeaMonkey! :D

By KaiRo, at 15:46 | Tags: business, history, L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | no comments | TrackBack: 0

Stumblin' in: My Mozilla career

A few people in the Mozilla community have known the project for many years already, newer "family members" might not have experienced the pre-Firefox days at all, others are just entering or visiting this steadily growing crowd of people as testers or bug reporters - or "just" interested users.
Some of those might read my name as a "SeaMonkey Council member", i.e. one of the five people steering the SeaMonkey project, working on keeping the integrated suite alive (that has its own long history, reaching back to when Netscape still dominated the Web market).

So, how does one grow from a student and web user to one of the SeaMonkey project leaders? For me, it was mostly a matter of stumblin' in - or actually seeing that "something needs to be done" - and trying to help make it happen.

Just for some background, my father entered the computer sales business early on, bought a PC quite early on, back in the 80s (a then quite modern 8086 with 12 MHz, 640K RAM, CGA monochrome display and a 20 MB harddisk) and so I learned working with PCs quite early while going to school (ah, those DOS days... and programming with GWBASIC ;-) ). Following that, we probably were among the first people who had Internet in a private household around here - and, of course, Web and Netscape were almost synonyms in those days.

So, as an always-proud Netscape user, hating how Microsoft used their Monopoly to drive the market leader off the browser market, I started wondering in 1999 if my favorite browser producer is working anything new and stumbled over mozilla.org, trying their Mozilla M5 milestone build (made available for download under something called "the Seamonkey project"). Somehow even that early stage felt promising and cleaner in design (esp. when it came down to website rendering) than Communicator 4 to me, but clearly it was very experimental. My first post to a Mozilla newsgroup already clearly tells what I felt about the Gecko-based product: "I am convinced the final release will be the best existing browser software by far." - along with some bugs I encountered ;-) Following the advice of some Netscape employee, I filed my first bugs in Bugzilla for those issues.

I decided to remember that project and check back later for newer milestones - as a beginner physics/chemistry student, long-time DOS/Windows user and (Visual)Basic developer I didn't feel I could help in any other way than testing that new technology. Starting with M7, I tried to use this product for browsing more and more and after some time I got interested what this XUL technology is that is said to build up Mozilla's user interface. Back then, all chrome files were unpacked plain files in the app directory and I quickly discovered that that was just something like the HTML I knew from creating web pages (I still had to learn what XML really was), being styled with CSS (which I really did know) and with strings in some simple-looking plain text format (not knowing XML, I didn't know those DTD entity definitions either). Intrigued but not yet convinced by all that stuff being simple text files, I decided to try out if they really make up what I'm seeing, replacing some colors in CSS with some Star -Trek-style colors, and replacing a few English strings with German variants - and then I was really impressed: It just did work!
While I decided that Star Trek styling was nice for playing around personally (later my LCARStrek theme based on that), the translated strings could potentially be useful to others, and so I posted a message to n.p.m.l10n in December, telling that I'd like to help with the German localization of Mozilla. As Tao Cheng from Netscape, the L10n head at that time, replied "If you have no objection, I'll put you as the German translation contributor." (note him saying "the" contributor), I realized I had just more or less taken over the responsibility of creating a full localization. I tried to live up to that and on December 31 I managed to release M12 as the first "fully" (as in: as far as possible) localized German Mozilla version.
In late January of 2000, I opened up a website (The SeaMonkey German website still has old news and downloads that I ported to the new site to archive them) and since then, practically every release of the suite has been made available in German language by me. Ah, and in September I got to know some people of our community personally for the first time when we had the first Mozilla Europe Developer Meeting near Frankfurt, Germany (organized by someone by the name of Axel Hecht, BTW).

For a some time, I contributed to the project as the main German localizer, and reported bugs here and there. In April 2002, I got a mozilla.org CVS account, originally for getting German L10n into CVS (it should take years to actually have a working model for locales in CVS and then even a different repository - seaMonkey is even still on the road to that currently). This was some kind of milestone for me personally, as I began to do some small fixes for problems in the L10n area, like some locale switching fixes, followed by the per-release localeVersion updates until I finally automated that. And suddenly I had become a code contributor (still proud it was me who made about:plugins localizable and themeable back then, which is code that can even be seen in Firefox), and I started using that CVS account for those few, mostly minor, code fixes.

In the summer of 2004, after the demise of Netscape in 2003 and the only contributor who had write access to the FTP staging server and the mozilla.org web pages being AWOL, the L10n community realized more than before that a new lead is needed: For one thing, localized builds had to go up onto mozilla.org servers again, and we needed someone to improve communications of localizers with Mozilla Foundation. As I saw someone had to make that happen, I brought forward a proposal for a new Mozilla Localization Project (MLP) staff team and tried to collect people who wanted to help there. When we got such a new team together, those people asked me to take the position as official MLP project lead - and in this I ended up as being the main L10n contact in talks and teleconferences about Firefox 1.0 release planning, even though I didn't localize Firefox myself (a different German localizer was working on that while I continued to do the suite part). The current MoCo L10n lead, Axel Hecht, also did care a lot about L10n issues there - even though he was no active Mozilla localizer himself. When Axel rose into that position, my being the MLP lead got less important, but other challenges were already waiting for me (BTW, despite trying to step down as MLP lead later on, nobody volunteered to take over, so I'm more or less still in this position).

Finally, in early 2005, the future of my beloved Mozilla suite became more and more uncertain and when bz asked MoFo for clarity on that, I also undersigned his open letter to staff and experienced the suite "Big Bang" first hand. When the transition plan laid out a way for the future of the suite as a volunteer project, I once again figured a project leading group is needed, and tried to figure out people willing to help in that team. After extensive discussions, mostly on IRC, Neil, biesi, IanN, CTho and me agreed to form that steering committee, which we later named the "SeaMonkey Council".
Once again, in a repeating pattern, my strong will to make something happen and putting my contribution where my mouth is made me stumble into being a leading contributor in the respective area.

In this role as a SeaMonkey Council member, I'm mainly concentrating on the organizational matters of the project, while the other members are more focused on doing actual development, along with our broader community of SeaMonkey contributors. Next to that, I'm trying to contribute some code myself, still work with the L10n community and, of course, keep the German localization of the suite alive and kicking.

It's been a great ride so far, I'm still eager to get stuff done, and I hope to continue the story of how I got here with some great future success stories of the SeaMonkey project!

By KaiRo, at 02:02 | Tags: history, L10n, Mozilla, SeaMonkey | no comments | TrackBack: 1

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