Posts tagged: MOZILLA

About a year ago I filed a minor bug report against the Camino browser, noting that text selection didn’t work quite like “real” Mac apps, where if you double-click a word and then drag, you select by words (likewise for triple-clicking and paragraphs). I quickly learned that this bug went back almost seven years.

Activity on the bug for most of those years consisted of people marking other, new reports of the issue (there were usually a few each year) as duplicates of that original bug. It was kind of sweet, like postcards from a friend you don’t see very much anymore.

I can hardly pose as knowledgeable about XUL, having only just recently learned to pronounce it, but I’m happy to learn that the Mozilla project is moving forward with XUL bindings for Python. I prefer the more revolutionary slogan, though: “Breaking the grip JS has on the DOM”. Yes! Cast off the chains!

If you’re not versed in the internals of Mozilla, a good bit of that wiki page will make your eyes glaze over. If you’ve remained conscious, also check out Brendan Eich’s blog posting on the subject and the comments on bug #255942.

At OSCON I learned that just up the Willamette River from Portland, in sleepy Corvallis, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab hosts www.mozilla.org. Maybe you’ve heard of it. They also provide hosting and/or mirror services to Apache, KDE, Xiph.org, Debian, Gentoo, and others. In the early ’90s I briefly lived in Corvallis and this just gives me the warm fuzzies.

Public universities have a long history with open source – my server would not be what it is without Berkeley in particular – but I don’t come across a lot of explicit advocacy from schools beyond the level of individual employees or researchers who work on projects of their own volition. Public universities should be big backers of open source, I think, so I hope that OSU’s example is inspirational.

One of the major themes of this year’s OSCON is commercial adoption of open source technology. There are also many for-profit companies represented here whose businesses revolve around packaging, delivering, and supporting open source software. Now there’s another one:

On August 3rd, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit public benefit software development organization, launched a wholly owned subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation…. One of our goals in establishing the Mozilla Corporation is to further promote the success of the Mozilla project and the Firefox and Thunderbird products, which then has the effect of strengthening the commercial ecosystem around the project and providing additional opportunities for Mozilla developers.