Category: Mozilla

On March 31, Mozilla turned 15 years old. In these years, something radical has happened: the Web has become an everyday presence in the lives of billions of people. It’s made their lives better. Mozilla was a big part of this.

Looking back, Mozilla’s plan was as radical as the Web itself: use open source and community to simultaneously create great software and build openness into the key technologies of the Internet itself. This was something commercial vendors weren’t doing and could not do. A non-profit, community-driven organization like Mozilla was needed to step up to the challenge.

In our first phase, Mozilla brought competition, choice and empowerment to the World Wide Web on the desktop. We did this by bringing a phenomenally better experience to hundreds of millions of people with Firefox. At the same time, we used Firefox to drive openness and opportunity across the whole Web ecosystem — open source, open standards, open development process for Firefox, and the ability for people everywhere to participate in creating Firefox, in tuning it to fit their local environments, in customizing and extending it to fit their needs, all on their own terms and without needing permission from Mozilla or anyone else.

We did these things by cracking open the closed, tightly-integrated set of software, hardware and related services provided by Microsoft, the commercial Internet giant of its time.

The result: over a decade of creativity, innovation and increased competition on the Web. Mozilla has helped shift the center of gravity to a Web that’s more open — that gives more people the opportunity to create and enjoy the Web on *their* terms. The “open” way of thinking has spread to a range of other activities, from open data to open government to open science. More importantly: billions of people experience the openness of the Web every day as they create, connect and invent in ways that reflect their goals and dreams, without needing the permission of a few commercial organizations.

In the coming era both the opportunities and threats to the Web are just as big as they were 15 years ago. As the role of data grows and device capabilities expand, the Internet will become an even more central part of our lives. The need for individuals to have some control over how this works and what we experience is fundamental. Mozilla can — and must — play a key role again. We have the vision, the products and the technology to do this. We know how to enable people to participate, both by contributing to our specific activities and coming up with their own ideas that advance the bigger cause of enriching the Web.

It’s an exciting time for Mozilla and the Web. Another two billion people will join the Internet community in the coming years. It’s critical that these people all have access to the openness and empowerment that the Web has brought to date. The browser is a necessary piece of making sure this happens; yet we need to do more.

One part of “doing more” is Firefox OS, a completely new mobile device ecosystem that brings openness and the freedom for individuals to create and enjoy the Web on their own terms, enables new kinds of competition across the ecosystem, and brings new opportunities for locally-tailored content to be created, organized and consumed.

We’re also building the Mozilla Webmaker program. Webmaker will give people the tools and skills they need to move from being consumers to being co-creators of their online experiences. It will also provide an umbrella for people who want to teach others how to tap into the full power of the Web. Finally, we’re re-focusing our efforts to better support local communities as they grow and organize.

Let’s enjoy our history.  But let’s also celebrate by thinking what great things we can make happen for the future. The world needs Mozilla. Mozilla has been key to getting us where we are and it’s key to getting us where we want to be.

Yesterday makes it a full  year since Creative Commons and Mozilla contributor Bassel Khartibil was imprisoned by the Syrian regime.  Last July a public campaign was launched, and Mozilla participated .

This public  campaign to #freebassel  may have played a significant role in getting Bassel moved from a military intelligence to a civilian prison with visitation rights.

We continue to urge support for the #freebassel campaign by visiting the website, tweeting about Bassel’s case (#freebassel), or attending an event in his honor.

I’m happy to say that Mozilla’s Community Participation Guidelines have reached a 1.0 designation. They state that “We welcome participants of varied age, culture, ethnicity, gender, gender-identity, language, race, sexual orientation, geographical location and religious views.”

A bit more info here: https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2013/01/10/mozilla-welcomes-all/

The ITU has a long and venerable history.  Today that history and reputation are at risk.  Negotiations in Dubai this week on updating the International Telecommunications Regulations treaty contemplate expanding the ITU’s scope to regulate aspects of online life.  If this happens, the ITU will find itself on a collision course with online freedom and the aspirations of the world’s international digital citizens.  The efforts to set the ITU up to regulate the Internet are written in technical terms, but they actually make global public policy on questions of freedom, such as monitoring of Internet communications, the relationship of a citizen to civil organizations and government. The ITU is on the cusp of recreating itself as a lobbying institution at odds with individual citizens.

This would be a tragedy.  A tragedy for the ITU, for the Internet and for each of us.

The ITU was founded in 1865 as the International Telegraph Union and is now a United Nations agency.  The ITU coordinates the shared global use of radio spectrum, as well as satellite orbits.  It has done significant work on telecommunications standardization and interoperability.  It strives to improve access to information and communications technologies to underserved communities worldwide.   (The ITU awarded Mozilla its World Information Society Award in 2007.)  The ITU is a membership organization — only governments and civil organizations can participate.  Citizens do not have a right to see the materials or know the content of a discussion, let alone participate in the decision-making process.  This might have been a reasonable approach for spectrum allocation and standardization.  It is not acceptable for the types of issues the ITU is now contemplating under the rubric of “Internet governance.”  Transforming the ITU into a global public policy maker with no accountability to any citizenry is a recipe for disaster.

It is imperative that citizens have a right to participate in the public policy question of the Internet era. These are topics that will define the tenor of our lives as everything moves online. Moving these topics to the ITU will not bring us a better Internet.  It will not enhance the ITU’s venerable history.

The best thing the ITU can do to promote a healthy Internet is step away from any temptation to regulate or govern today’s Internet debates. The deeper the ITU’s commitment to empowering people, the more crisply the ITU should step away.

Citizens must insist on this and I encourage you to learn more and take action to make your voice heard.

To learn more, we’ve assembled a list of resources: https://webmaker.org/en-US/ITU/kit/#the-issues
To send a message to your country’s ITU delegation: http://www.protectinternetfreedom.net/stand
To sign a petition to keep the Internet open: choose from the options here to “Mobilize on the Web.”
To see how easy it can be to develop your own personalized video message, check out the template and tutorial.

The Web has become fundamental infrastructure of modern life in just 20 years. Today, we see how the Web can make yet another leap in its usefulness, fun, business opportunities and social benefit.

Imagine the richness and freedoms of the Web seamlessly integrated with mobile devices. Imagine that experience is awesome and it’s awesome whether you use an app for a special task or use the browser to find your own path.

Imagine acquiring an app and having it run across multiple devices, whether or not all these devices come from the same vendor. Imagine being able to choose when it makes sense to interact with the app provider directly or instead through Apple, Google or Microsoft.

Imagine having a choice about who controls your identity. Log into a site and have everything you’ve done on the web available to the world? Or log in and have information you consider public to be available to the world?

Imagine have a sense of security about your online environment — who’s watching you, who’s selling information about you, who’s protecting you and how you can protect yourself.

Imagine understanding the Web, feeling competent to make things, to change what exists and create things that meet your particular needs. Imagine where Web literacy is fun, and extends beyond to citizens as well as hard-core programmers.

Mozilla is building this world. We have the vision of this world, the architecture, the technology and the product plans. We’re building these products now. We have the financial resources to support these efforts. This is an exciting and very productive period. Please explore this year’s Annual Report to see what we’ve done and what’s on the horizon. Please join us in building this world.

In 2008 the US Internal Revenue Service opened an audit of the Mozilla Foundation. I’m happy to note that we’ve settled the issues raised and the IRS recently closed the audit. We entered into a settlement, under which the Mozilla Foundation paid the IRS US $1.5 million.

As a result of this settlement, $15 million in funds we had held in reserve pending the resolution of the audit are now available to support the Mozilla Foundation’s mission to support innovation and opportunity on the web.

I believe this to be a very positive result. We will now go back through the various documents and will have more details on this audit to share in the future. I expect to do so before the end of this year.

The Ada Initiative works to create a “A world in which women are equal and welcome participants in open source software, open data, and open culture.” This is critical not just for the women involved, but for all of us. We need diversity in people creating our infrastructures and technology if we want them to represent all points of view.

To do this The Ada Initiative gathers active women together, such as AdaCamp in DC, with over 100 women active in wide range of open source /free culture projects. I’ve seen the impact such gatherings have, and have seen the Mozilla attendees come away super-charged. The Ada Initiative is also working to reduce harassment, which sadly still occurs more regularly than should be the case.

I was a seed donor, and I’ve just contributed to the current fund-raising campaign. Please consider joining me by donating to The Ada Initiative.

If you are in the San Francisco area this coming Tuesday (Oct 16), you can also join The Ada Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation and Mozilla to celebrate this year’s Ada Lovelace Day at the Wikimedia Foundation’s office in San Francisco.

Have you ever sat down with someone else’s computer and wondered why a particular piece of software seems to perform so much better (or worse)?  Ever wonder what people do to tune the performance of their software?  Ever wish you had more information to understand your specific experience — why something stopped working, why something got slower, what you did to make a piece of software feel new and fast again?

Firefox Health Report will be a new feature of Firefox that enables much better answers to these sorts of questions.   Firefox Health Report will allow each one of us to understand our own experiences.  It will also allow Mozilla to understand these experiences in the aggregate for our users. 

Firefox Health Report will use data to do this.  It will use data in a privacy-centric way.  This is really important.  We’re living in the middle of a data explosion.  The Internet world must figure out new ways to benefit from the richness of the data explosion without treating people like objects to be manipulated.

We’ve designed Firefox Health Report to treat people well and to start the process of putting us back in control of the data that shapes our online experience. We’ve designed it to provide useful information to you about your experience. For example: is a particular add-on causing performance to degrade? Will starting a new Firefox profile help improve performance?

Second, we’ve designed the Firefox Health Report to not gather personal information. This will allow Mozilla to develop aggregate data in a privacy-sensitive way. You can see all the details about how we’ve done this here.  

Third, we will also make it easy for people to disable this feature.  This may be an excess of caution for many users. However, we know that there are some people who prefer a world of no data, even if it means less understanding of personal circumstances.  We want this group to be comfortable as well, and so we will make the process for disabling this feature clear and conspicuous. 

Mozilla has an intense focus on building products that use data in privacy-centric way.   We’re organized as a non-profit organization precisely so we can focus on the principle of User Sovereignty rather than business models.  Indeed, the Mozilla Manifesto drives us to help people live well in a data-centric world. 

In January 2011 Mozilla proposed a new browser feature to help people control who tracks and logs our online activities. This feature is known as “Do Not Track.” It’s a simple way for a person to tell the advertising networks that he or she does not want to be tracked.

Since Mozilla introduced DNT to the market last year, other major browser vendors and web properties have announced their support for DNT on the desktop– Apple and Opera in 2011; and Microsoft not long ago. This week the Google Chrome implementation of DNT is starting to appear in the market. With Chrome joining, we’ve now reached the point where all major desktop browsers support DNT. This is an important step forward for Do Not Track, and for Mozilla’s goal of bring user control and choice to everyone.

When we first proposed Do Not Track we knew it would take a lot of work as well as some luck to be successful. But we knew that many people feel online tracking is creepy and a bit like being stalked. And of course Mozilla’s mission pushes us to do the things our commercial competitors aren’t likely to do. We felt the time was right and we should take the risk and try to improve the state of the industry in this area.

The time was right. Desktop browsers, plus Firefox on Android, now allow us to identify ourselves as not wanting to be tracked. A number of advertising organizations, including Google, have announced they will support the Do Not Track request. Adoption of DNT has been about 11% on Firefox desktop and about 16% on Firefox for Android (currently the only mobile browser to support DNT).

Mozilla’s work on Do Not Track is one facet of our work to bring User Sovereignty to all aspects of online life. Today we’re working on a richer user experience for Do Not Track, a related tool for understanding the flow of information between sites, a way of allowing people to control more of our online identity, and more.

Expect more from Mozilla on these topics!