The roads I take...

Gary Kwong posted an interview with Mark Surman on the Rumbling Edge - now available as HTML5 <video> in Ogg Theora format!

Is there any better way to promote what Mozilla is about than to have an interview with the Mozilla Foundation Executive Director available in a truly open media format with plugin-less playing in browsers supporting the HTML5-standardized <video> element (like Firefox 3.1 or SeaMonkey 2)?

Yes, Firefox 3 has been released and did set the world record with probably (judges need to determine the official number still) 8 million downloads in 24 hours. For one thing, congratulations to Mozilla Corporation for that marketing boost and to the whole Firefox community for delivering an improved and still damn good browser for the masses.

So, the world is good, the sun is shining and everything is fine. Or is it?

For one thing, I can't hear the word "awesome" any more. I think some people should listen to the song "Now That's Awesome" by Bill Engvall and realize that this inflational use of that word is probably removing its real meaning. Thanks.

Then, something that has to be said is while the mass products make the big headlines (Firefox does that well), the nice products fill up the gaps in the market that those mass products can't fill. That's what e.g. SeaMonkey or Camino are trying to do, and I hope we have our success with that.

And then, sure, Firefox is showing that Mozilla and open source can produce and even market mass products. Good. But is that all we are here for? I don't think so, and I think it's quite interesting that Marc Surman from the Shuttleworth foundation has written up a blog post about his thoughts that the Mozilla Foundation should do more than what it does right now and try to encourage users to become participants/contributors in our vision of the open Internet, making this a really good place for the future and enriching the whole world this way. Let's start our quest for improving ourselves and mankind as a whole with a really open Internet (oh, Captain Picard and his crew from Star Trek's "The Next Generation" would love me now if they were real)!

All in all, there's still some way we need to go until everything will be fine - and I think every step in that direction is worth making. Mozilla Foundation can play a good part there, I hope SeaMonkey can as well in its "corner" of the net, and if we make it, then - and only then - it will be awesome. And I mean that.