Mozilla

Archive for December, 2015

A call for the release of Bassel Khartabil

December 16th, 2015

Bassel Khartabil is a Creative Commons and open source contributor in Damascus, Syria. He  has been imprisoned for three years due to these activities. The MIT Media Lab has invited Bassel to join the Lab as a research scientist in the Center for Civic Media. There Bassel could continue his work building 3D models of the ancient city of Palmyra, the remains of which have been destroyed by ISIS.

Instead, word has recently come that Bassel has been secretly sentenced to death.

On December 10 Joi Ito, the Director of the MIT Media Lab, described how he and Creative Commons came to work with Bassel. Joi’s story is also the story of how I came to know and work with Bassel on open source projects.  I’ve put some additional details of my experiences with Bassel below.

The Guardian has also written a detailed story of Bassels’ involvement with open culture and open source activities. Bassel was also explicitly mentioned by US Secretary of State John Kerry in the statement issued this December 10 to mark International Human Rights Day.

I initially met Bassel through joint activities with Creative Commons. Joichi Ito, then CEO of Creative Commons, invited me to join CC in their launch events in the Middle East. I accompanied Joi on the trip he describes in detail in his post linked above.  My role was to add additional open source contacts and expertise to the group.

As Joi mentioned, the CC crew and I drove from Amman, Jordan to the Syrian border, and then from the border to Damascus. All except me, that is, who had visa issues when we arrived at the border. This was not really surprising to me since the idea that an American citizen could drive up to the Syrian border and get a visa on the spot seemed unimaginable to me. One of the organizers had been sure this would not be a problem however, so I joined the group. It didn’t take long at the border to realize it would would be a problem. Joichi asked one of the local CC contacts and one of the drivers to stay with me, giving me two Arabic speakers to help and a degree of comfort. The other car, driver and the rest of the CC team continued on to Damascus for the events Joi describes. In a moment of odd humor to defuse the tension, Joi named me the “hot potato” to be juggled.

I spent seven hours at the Syrian border while Bassel worked with authorities to get my visa situation sorted out. I was extremely lucky that the driver was an elegant and cultured gentleman, who told me stories and acted as my guide around the border buildings.

Meanwhile, Bassel was working like crazy to resolve my visa issues. This of course involved constant contact with the government authorities. I was fully prepared to learn it was not possible to continue  –emotionally, anyway. I wasn’t really sure how I would get back to Amman, or if I had enough local currency to pay for the trip but I figured that the Creative Commons folks would help me get settled somehow.

At the end of the phone call Bassel kept saying that it would work out, it just needed time for him to talk with all the various people who needed to sign for my visa. To my surprise he was right.

Eventually all the necessary paperwork was obtained and the border authorities allowed me to continue to Damascus. After arriving in Damascus I attended the events Joi described, feeling very lucky to see Creative Commons and open source welcomed by a previously unknown community. It was clear that Bassel was focusing huge amounts of his life’s energy on serving these communities.

A year or two later I returned to Damascus on my own. Once again Bassel was my host. He arranged for me to meet with government officials. He did the same with a range of students, including the local organization of women programming students. He arranged for me to give talks at the university and at the local HackerSpace which he had founded. We talked about Open Source, learning to code and Creative Commons. Bassel worked to promote the open Internet and open culture.  He pushed hard for inclusion of Arabic speakers in online life.

Bassel was arrested in March of 2012 when he returned to Syria after a Creative Commons conference. The Guardian article describes what has happened to Bassel after that arrest. And recently the warning that Bassel has been secretly sentenced to death has come.

Today I echo Joi’s call to the Internet community on behalf of Bassel Khartabil: “We ask for your help in calling attention to Bassel’s arbitrary detention and seeking his whereabouts and immediate release.”

Mozilla Open Source Support: First Awards Made

December 10th, 2015

We are delighted to announce the first set of awards in the Mozilla Open Source Support program’s “Foundational Technology” track, which supports projects that Mozilla uses or relies upon.

We have been greatly helped in evaluating applications and making awards by the MOSS “Foundational Technology” Committee – many thanks to them.

The first seven awardees are:

Buildbot: $15,000. Buildbot is a continuous build and integration system which has been immensely valuable to Mozilla over the past few years. Their award will be used to remove the term “slave” from all documentation, APIs and tests, and also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

CodeMirror: $20,000. CodeMirror is a powerful source code editor built with Web technologies, used in the Developer Tools and in Mozilla Thimble. Their award will be used to improve support for both right-to-left languages and complex script input.

Discourse: $25,000. Discourse is online discussion forum software, used by several Mozilla communities. Their award will be used to make email a first-class interaction mechanism for Discourse, allowing Discourse instances to replace and improve upon mailing lists.

Read The Docs: $48,000. Read The Docs is a website for building and hosting documentation, used by many of Mozilla’s Web projects. Their award will be used to add the ability to generate documentation from code without needing to install it, thereby making it easier to build the documentation for complex projects.

Mercurial: $75,000. Mercurial is a distributed source code management system, used heavily by Mozilla for core repositories such as mozilla-central. Their award will be used to implement better support for ‘blame’ (showing who last changed some code) and a better web UI.

Django: $150,000. Django is a popular server-side Web development framework, used in many Mozilla websites. Their award will be used to make Django suitable to be a back end for Web apps which use WebSockets.

Bro: $200,000. Bro is network monitoring software, which is at the heart of Mozilla’s intrusion detection system for our network. Their award will be used to build the Comprehensive Bro Archive Network, a public repository of modules and plugins for Bro.

MOSS is an ongoing program, with an initial allocation of $1 million. The above awards allocate just over half of that money ($503,000), and applications are open for the “Foundational Technology” track on an ongoing basis. We look forward to supporting more of the excellent projects that Mozilla uses or relies upon in the future. Thank you to you all – we couldn’t do what we do, without you.

Thunderbird Update

December 3rd, 2015

This message is a summary and an update to a message about Thunderbird that I sent to Mozilla developers on Monday.

Here are the key points. First, Thunderbird and Firefox are interconnected in a few different ways. They are connected through our technical infrastructure. Both use Mozilla build and release systems. This seems arcane but it turns out that “build and release” is a massive component in the development and distribution of complex software projects. They’re connected through the sharing of some pieces of technology. And they share a home in the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Project.

The time has come when it is no longer effective for Thunderbird and Firefox to keep sharing the same technical infrastructure. Firefox and Thunderbird have diverging needs. Firefox needs to move at the speed of the Web, and needs to bring the things we love about the Web into the world of mobile, social, data and the cloud. That’s a fiercely competitive setting with high consequences. We need to be laser-focused if we want to move these parts of online life towards the traits of individual user centrality and control, openness, interoperability and a level playing field. Thunderbird is a valuable and respected open source project, with different parameters. In my message on Monday I noted that planning for the future should be based on the need to plan for a future where the technical infrastructure of Firefox and Thunderbird are separate.

I’ve seen some characterize this as Mozilla “dropping” Thunderbird. This is not accurate. We are going to disentangle the technical infrastructure. We are going to assist the Thunderbird community. This includes working with organizations that want to invest in Thunderbird, several of which have stepped forward already. Mozilla Foundation will serve as a fiscal sponsor for Thunderbird donations during this time.

I also noted that we should look at whether Mozilla remains the best organizational and legal home for Thunderbird. This is a separate question from the technical infrastructure. This question is much more wide open. I don’t know what the answer will be. It could be that Mozilla remains the best home, based on history, affiliation and shared community. It could also be that a home geared to open source projects of Thunderbird’s size and scope is better suited. I can imagine either being the case. We have decided to separate the technical infrastructure and to explore what is best for Thunderbird and for the Mozilla project as a whole.

These discussions are at a very early stage. Finding the right solution requires some effort. This is Mozilla focusing on a more forward looking path, one aimed at longer term stability rather than continuing the status quo.

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