Archive for 2008

Ubuntu recently included a patch that causes an End User License  Agreement for Firefox to appear. This has caused great concern on several topics. One is the content of the agreement. Another is the presentation. A third is whether there’s any reason for a license at all.

The most important thing here is to acknowledge that yes, the content of the license agreement is wrong. The correct content is clear that the code is governed by FLOSS licenses, not the typical end user license agreement language that is in the current version. We created a license that points to the FLOSS licenses, but we’ve made a giant error in not getting this to Ubuntu, other distributors, and posted publicly for review. We’ll correct this asap.

Second, the way the license is presented to people also has issues. I think the presentation might not be so bad if we had the correct content there, so that it said the software is governed by the FLOSS licenses that are so important to us. But even then the presentation may have issues. We’re certainly trying to figure this out. We’ll do this with public input; you’ll see posts about this shortly as well.

There’s a third question of services, and whether the FLOSS license for the code can include the services one accesses. We think this isn’t true all the time, and the license will reflect that. The code is governed by FLOSS licenses, and we should have been clear about that.

This leaves the question of whether it ever makes sense to show people the terms that relate to the software and services available to them. I saw some comments asking why one ever needs any terms. Again, if we had the correct content I think this would be less of an issue because then we would be telling people about FLOSS licenses. We (meaning Mozilla) have shot ourselves in the foot here given the old, wrong content. So I hope we can have a discussion on this point, but I doubt we’ll have a good one until we fix the other problems.

We take this very seriously and are working hard to fix it.

Update: text of the revised license is online.

What can Mozilla do with our products and our product development processes to move the Internet toward our vision of an open, decentralized, participatory place in the next two years? In my last post I suggested we develop a set of goals to answer this question. Here’s my proposal. Comments, suggestions, additions, deletions, concerns, even wholesale restructuring welcome!

1. Deepen Mozilla’s role as a centerpiece of the Internet

• communities continue to expand and provide means for individual development
• thought leadership expands to include things such as the open web, hybrid social enterprises, organizational sustainability, shared decision-making, individual control, and portability in Internet life
• innovations emerge from the Mozilla world
• technology excellence and industry wide leadership continues
• projects and products remain vital

2. Data: provide leadership in

• helping people exercise better ownership and control over their data
• making anonymous, aggregate “usage data” more of a public resource

3. Mobile

• have an effective product in the mobile market
• demonstrate that “mobile” is part of one, unified, open web

4. Continue Firefox mindshare and marketshare momentum

I propose we have a set of goals for the next two years that describe the ways we want our products and technologies to move the Mozilla misison forward.

These goals should be concrete enough that people can respond to them and provide a means for evaluating the scope of progress. Perhaps even more importantly, these goals should express important ideas rather than specifying implementation plans. They should set the directional, aspirational goals. They are intended to describe the type and scope of accomplishment we want to see.

Broad aspirational goals are critical, for the reasons I described last May. Mozilla’s great success is built on:

. . . many thousands of people (tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, actually) moving in the same general direction, most of whom aren’t full time, aren’t employees and may not even be known personally to the project’s leadership. We won’t know and don’t seek to control all the things people will do that make us more successful. Articulating a broad, commonly shared set of aspirations helps many disparate groups of people organize themselves and work towards very practical, concrete tasks that make our aspirations real.

There are also other broader goals that Mozilla might take on — proposals to date include education, open source evangelism in general, open everything, assisting online communities with participatory tools. These discussions will pick up steam as Mark Surman joins us. Having an  set of goals for our product and technology development will also provide valuable input into that discussion.

I’ll give a list of 2010 Goals in my next post. I initially presented these goals at the Firefox Summit, and invited people to post sticky notes and comments on a whiteboard. The transcribed notes have been placed on the Wiki so they can continue to generate discussion.

Please take some time to review the proposed goals, make suggestions, ask questions, and make alternatve proposals. It’s important to have only a small number of goals, so I’ll be constantly trying to find the over-arching themes.

It’s been a hectic summer. First the Firefox 3 release, then the Firefox (Plus) Summit, then working on renewing our Google agreement, then  a week of vacation at the end of August, and then responding to the release of Google’s browser. (Fortunately part of my vacation was in an old cabin in a beautiful old state park with waterfalls and woods and trails and not much else to do but relax and unwind.) I’ve got a lot of things in progress that I want to return to, as well as a bunch of new topics. Here’s a partial list:

On-Going:

• data and privacy
• two year goals for Mozilla technology and products
• Mozilla’s scope and mission
• standards process and standards bodies
• “hybrid” organizations — those that combine public benefit mission with market mechanisms

New topics:

• Mark Surman starts as new Mozilla Foundation ED in two weeks. I’m anticipating he’ll spend a couple of weeks getting settled and then there will be a flow of Foundation topics that both he and I will be focused on.
• Describe my current role — what I’e been doing, how I work with John and the rest of MoCo in my current role.
• Describe my perspective on what it’s like to guide a project like Mozilla, how we “manage” things, what leadership looks like, what I’m learning about distributed authority.

Unplanned: I don’t know what these are yet, but I’m sure they are coming. If the past is any judge, the unplanned topics may well overshadow everything else! Even before that happens there’s plenty to do 🙂

Mozilla exists to build portions of the Internet where individual human benefit, social benefit, and civic benefit are the most important things. We build Firefox explicitly to advance this goal. Mozilla is uniquely suited to doing this. As a non-profit organization we are organized — legally and logistically — to do this, and only this. We build Firefox as a first, critical step in this goal. But Firefox isn’t the end goal. The end goal is to create an Internet where all of us can participate, where all of us have the ability to build, where all of us can earn authority, responsibility and decision-making ability.

Each one of us will live in a world where our online identity and experience is massive and growing. Each one of us should be able to participate in creating and defining that experience. And to participate in the ways we think are important, not just in the ways someone else offers us. Mozilla recognized long ago that an independent browser dedicated only to the public good is a necessary piece for building a healthy Internet. Many people thought this was silly — the browser was generally treated as simply a part of the Windows desktop and not important in its own right. These days we know that’s not true.

Almost 200 million people have spoken by adopting Firefox; demonstrating how much the browser does matter. Yesterday Google announced that it will release its own browser, validating once again the central idea that this tool we call the browser is fundamentally important. Our first great battle — that of relevance and acceptance — has been won.

We build Firefox with an open development process. At Mozilla people earn respect, authority and decision-making ability by demonstrating their abilities. This allows individual people to become full, equal participants, with both authority and responsibility for building a better Internet. The development process for Firefox demonstrates the type of Internet we want to build. (Not perfectly, of course.)

Firefox is our first step in building this Internet. It’s the demonstration of how to make these goals tangible in a product hundreds of millions of people can enjoy. Firefox is a terrific product and it needs to be. Clearly we need to continue to build great products, and to lead in a competitive environment. Mozilla created this competitive environment through the success of Firefox, and I’m as confident as John is about Mozilla’s future. We’ve already got great things ready for our upcoming 3.1 release, and there’s much more to come. Performance, stability, security, ease of use, features — it’s a great time in Firefox and browser development in general.

We’ll continue to compete in the browser world, and we’ll continue to do well. We’ll continue to produce a product that people choose, and trust and understand is theirs. We’ll continue to do this as part of our overall mission — building an Internet where individual, civic and social value are paramount.

Competition is seldom comfortable, but it forces us to do our best. Firefox 3 is a terrific product and there’s much more to come. We’re just beginning to touch the surface of what Mozilla can accomplish. The best is yet to come.

(Note: I’m flying back to California today after a few days of vacation and so unfortunately will be out of touch for parts of the day.)

Late in July we got together close to 400 extremely active Mozilla contributors for a face to face gathering known as the Firefox Plus Summit. This gathering was partly acknowledgment and celebration of our work so far, and mostly preparation for the future. The Summit has caused me to reflect on the future of Mozilla. In short, that future is bright.

The overriding reason for this is the strength and vibrancy of the Mozilla community. We’re growing, we’re effective and we’re expanding the types of activities that live within Mozilla. The Summit made this very clear.

There are other reasons as well. Mozilla combines the abstract goals of Internet openness, participation and decentralized decision-making with the concrete task of building great products. This combination is working. It attracts people to Mozilla, and it gives us a way of building products that reflects the Internet itself. The values of the project bring meaning and guide the way we do things. The software allows us to make those values tangible, and put their manifestations in the hands of millions of people.

Another important element is the financial resources Mozilla enjoys. We’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income. We’re also learning more all the time about how to use Mozilla’s financial resources to help contributors through infrastructure, new programs, and new types of support from employees.

Finally, the quality of our technology, products and innovation also holds great promise. In the few weeks since the Summit we’ve already seen a new approach to vastly improving JavaScript performance, the launch of “Snowl,” the introduction of the browser concept series, developer releases for Thunderbird, and video moving into the browser via Firefox 3.1. There’s much more coming.

We have large challenges ahead of us, there’s no question of that. There are many ways in which Internet life could become closed, manipulated and decidedly unpleasant. And Mozilla itself is not perfect. Many improvements are possible in how we work and what we accomplish. To be effective we’ll need to do our best, and then do even better.

Our challenges are real, our opportunities are real, and our strength is real.

Put those together, and the future is bright.

I’m thrilled to announce that Mark Surman is joining the Mozilla Foundation as our new Executive Director. Mark joins us after a long period of getting to know — and being known by — Mozilla contributors. This includes many, many hours of discussions with Mozilla contributors, Mozilla Foundation Board members and search committee members, an Air Mozilla broadcast, extensive discussions with current Mozilla Foundation personnel, and more hours getting to know Mozilla at the Firefox Plus Summit. It’s a rare candidate who can transit such a prolonged and open process. Many thanks to everyone who participated.

A very special thanks go to Frank Hecker, who has served as our Executive Director since 2006. Frank has been a huge champion of extending Mozilla’s reach beyond our current scope, of using Mozilla DNA and values to do so, and of expanding the open web through programs like the accessibility initiative that he has implemented. We’re very fortunate that Frank will remain with the Mozilla Foundation and will continue to champion these and other projects central to the Mozilla identity.

Mark is wrapping up his work with the Shuttleworth Foundation and will join us officially on September 22. He’ll be thinking about Mozilla — you can find his thoughts at his blog. But Mark probably won’t be very active in the online Mozilla world for much of late August and September when he’s traveling with only limited time and access. Look for more in late September and October.

This morning at the opening session of the Firefox Plus Summit I showed this image, which has been in the works for a while. It’s my current approach to finding a good metaphor to explain the complex nature of Mozilla. There’s a fair amount of explanation needed for this image to make sense, and I’ll try to get that posted before long.

I’ve received a couple of emails from people saying it’s hard to comment on the data issue without some idea of where I’m heading or what I’m thinking. So here goes. I’ll come back to some of the topics I’ve written about already. And I’ll continue with the other posts as well; I think we need some depth of analysis to make good decisions.

In the meantime, here’s the basic message.

I would like to see Mozilla provide more leadership in helping people manage the collection and treatment of data related to them — what I’ve called “Associated Data.” I don’t have a specific plan of what leadership would look like, or what features or capabilities this means our products, services or websites should implement (or block). There are a lot of different types of Associated Data; the desired treatment of different types may vary. This is something I’d like to see us figure out.

I would also like to see Mozilla provide leadership in treating some basic aggregate, anonymized usage data as a public asset. To do this, we need to develop a sense of what data this might include and what aggregation and anonymizing techniques make the Mozilla communities comfortable. Some data — like public disclosure of bandwidth use, website rankings, etc. seem to be areas everyone is comfortable with, but we should make as few assumptions as possible. Sometimes it can be hard to get truly anonymous data and so this is an area where great care — and therefore  leadership — is required. But if everything that is known about the basic usage of the Internet is closed and proprietary then the Internet as an open platform will suffer. I don’t have a specific plan as to what Mozilla might do here; that’s the point of the discussion.

These are difficult and sensitive topics, it would be easier to ignore them. But both of these areas are critical to building the Internet that is healthy for the individuals using it. The Mozilla mission is to keep the Internet an open platform, and to promote the values in the Mozilla Manifesto. It will be hard to do this if we ignore the effects of data.

In my last couple of posts I’ve described why I believe Mozilla must pay attention to data in order to help individual people deal with  data about them.

There’s a lot of data about people being created.  I’ve listed below some of the basic kinds of this data  that I think we need to be able to distinguish in order to speak meaningfully the effects.  I’m calling all of these categories “Associated Data” for the reasons described at the end of the post.

Is there a type of data about people that’s of interest or concern to you? If so, take a look and see if it fits into one of the sections below.

1. “Personal and potential personal data.”  These terms are already in reasonably wide usage to mean specific information that identifies an individual, such as name, address, email address, credit card number, government-issued identification number, etc.   In some cases it’s used to include other information that can be combined to create personal information, such as an IP (Internet Protocol) address.
2. “Intentional Content.” Data intentionally created by people to be seen by people.  When we post to social networking pages,  blogs, photo sites, product review sites, create wishlists, send gifts and other online markers we intentionally create content about ourselves or associated with us.   Sometimes this information is in big chunks, like a blog post or photostream; other times the information is in small bits like a recommendations, “pokes,” etc.  Sometimes we want this data to be public and sometimes we may not.
3. “Harvested Data.” Information gathered or created about an individual through the logging, tracking, aggregating and correlating of his or her online activities.   It’s possible today to record just many of the actions someone takes online (the “clickstream”) and then to harvest patterns and other useful facts from that data.  For example, an e-commerce website you visit regularly will know a great deal about your shopping patterns, what kinds of items and what price ranges you look, how many times you look before you buy, the average purchase amount, the average time between purchases, etc.   They’ll know which ads you respond to and which you ignore.
4. Relationship Data.  Our relationships with other people, such as our “friends” or followers at various sites.  This can  be either Intentional Content or Harvested Information.  I call this out specifically because a relationship always involves at least two people.  And so the treatment of this information — is it public or private, how is it used — always affects at least two people.  I’m not yet positive this is a useful topic, but (obviously) I think it likely enough to include it here.

“Associated Data.” It will be helpful to have a term that describes all these types of data.  In a vacuum “Personal” would seem the best because this is all information that somehow identifies, is related to or associated with a specific person.  But I think “personal” is understood as item 1 already.    I’m using the term “associated data” to mean all of the types of data listed above.

Are there other broad categories of information about people that would help us think clearly? Are there different categories altogether that would be more helpful?  And are there examples of this kind of data you’d like to make sure we think about? If so, note them in the comments or somewhere where we can find them.