Mozilla

I read the news today (oh boy … Beatles anyone?) and was excited to see that Mozilla has spun out MailCo:

Mozilla will provide an initial $3 million in seed funding to launch MailCo. This is expected to be spent mostly on building a small team of people who are passionate about e-mail and Internet communications. As MailCo develops it and the Mozilla Foundation will evaluate what’s the best model for long-term sustainability. Mozilla may well invest additional funds; we also hope that there are other paths for sustainability.

This is the result of months of discussion among Mozilla and its community on what the fate of Thunderbird should be. Thinking more about this, I’m left wondering how the launch of MailCo is such a good thing for Thunderbird, email messaging and Mozilla.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been under the distinct impression that Mozilla’s “main thing” is helping make the “open web” a reality. Mitchell has been blogging about it. Heck, I even have the Lance Armstrong “LiveStrong” bracelet that I got from Mozilla at OSCON that says “support the open web” on it. Great. I’m all for it. I’m drinking the Koolaid. But how does spinning out a company to do email and communication help the ‘open web’, Mozilla and its community?

While reading about this a friend forwarded me a gushy piece by Alfresco’s Matt Asay. Quoting from the article:

Mozilla has an excellent track record of taking Microsoft head-on, and winning

Which he mentions in the context of hoping MailCo will tackle Microsoft and their dominance in the email space. Now, last time I checked they were 0-1-1 against Microsoft. If you’ll recall Netscape competed against Microsoft in Browser Wars v1.0 and Microsoft absolutely crushed them into non-existence. As far as the success of Firefox, yeah, its been a great product but they weren’t competing against Microsoft, they were in a one-horse race. Microsoft had won so there was no need for innovation in that space. Now I love Firefox as much as the next guy (I’m authoring this post in Firefox) but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. By many accounts they have 20, 25%, maybe even 30% of the browser market share; this is by no means “a huge swath of the market” as Matt puts. Finally, Matt mentions:

To be truly disruptive I believe that Mozilla (or, rather, MailCo) will need to focus on both the e-mail server and client.

Gah?! Really? The last project I heard that was going to do that was called Chandler. I don’t even want to comment further but I will say this; simple works, simple wins. Client/server is about as simple as an Anna Nicole Smith paternity case.

Alright, alright … I’m being a little hard on Matt but I’m trying to make a point. The world wants to love Mozilla and for lots of reasons. Its a great group of people with a noble cause. However, I’m afraid they lack the ability to make hard decisions because of fear of ticking off their “community”. Sometimes you need to make hard decisions and sometimes that angers people. IMHO its better to make a hard decision for the sake of the community (and focus and mission and vision) than to skirt the issue by spinning out a company.

My advice to Mozilla? Do one thing and do it well. Ditch Thunderbird as a product and MailCo as a company. Its not your “main thing” and will only serve to bifurcate Mozilla’s focus. Thunderbird will survive if its meant to. Its an open source project. Focus on your main thing. You do that by encouraging instigators and thinking beyond the browser. Protocols, standards, web services and platforms. Not another answer to email and messaging.

Speaking of “subversive” … let’s not forget that Firefox was built by a couple of renegade (smart) punks that just did it. They said “we’re going this way, fuck process”. It was a small team that made decisions outside of the “best practices” in place at the time. There were other rogue elements that were doing things for the sake of the community outside of the control of the then fledgling MoFo. They all pissed off a lot of the folks at Mozilla/Netscape by going against the grain … and guess what? It worked. For MailCo to succeed they will need to do this too and that may mean biting the hand that feeds … will that be possible? I just don’t know.

My sole hope for success here lies in the fact that David Ascher (the head of MailCo) is a smart, no-nonsense and extremely capable guy. If he can really build an organization that is unique, truly separate from the mother ship and with the ability to quickly get to market, iterate even faster and build a passionate community then they have a fighting chance. The last thing we need is another “Chandler”. If your first goal is to reach out to the Thunderbird community to seek advice on the next best steps you’ve already failed. Whatever it is that changes messaging will be light, easy-to-use, easy to integrate with current workflows and leverage open standards and oodles of existing work. If it starts off with platform or consensus building its doomed.

I really do mean this when I say it; best of luck David and company.

I wanted to let people know that as of June 30th, 2006 I’ll no longer be working at the OSL. I’m moving on to head up a company in Portland called JanRain, Inc. You can read more about it from OSU’s press release.

I want to make it clear this is an amicable split and one that was simply a function of a great opportunity that I had to take. The OSL is in great shape and the University is still completely backing our on-going efforts here. The OSL will continue on and they will probably find somebody to replace me that makes me look bad … Ha!

This isn’t the end, just a change. I’m excited about the new endeavor but it was really hard to leave such an amazing team of individuals. Most of all, I have to thank Curt Pederson and more importantly Shay Dakan (sorry Curt, Shay’s got you beat on this one) … In all honesty, Shay has done more for the open source community than that community knows. She was the one who took the chance on my crazy idea and trusted Jason and I to run it. The OSL, all of its employees and the hosted partners all owe a deep debt of gratitude to Shay. Thanks Shay.

I’ve setup a new blog to start talking about the new gig and I really hope to keep in touch with all of the great people I’ve worked with here at the OSL and in the open source community. Hope to see all of you in Portland this Summer for OSCON!!!

Jason McKerr and I will be down in San Francisco on Monday through Wednesday night spreading open source goodness and hopefully getting some traction on the creation of a FOSS Foundation. More on that below.

Chris Messina has been kind enough to organize a meetup of folks in the Bay Area to have a beer or three and talk all good things around open source, etc. So if you’re downtown Monday evening, come find us at the Thirsty Bear.

On Tuesday afternoon, I’ll meet with several other folks will be meeting at the OSAF to talk about the possibility of creating a FOSS umbrella foundation. Originally we had talked of creating a Web 2.0 foundation to help the fledgling projects in this space but then realized we’d feel like fools when either a) the bubble burst or b) Web 3.0 hits.

At the OSL we help people with hosting their projects. From Mozilla to Debian to Freenode and many, many others. Hosting is just one more thing that rapidly growing projects should not have to deal with. It takes away from their “main thing” of developing a great piece of software or platform, etc. In our workings with these projects, we see them in the same place in terms of managing their finances, yearly accounting, defining their governance and even in the formation of their own non-profit foundations.

The goal of this as-of-yet-to-be-determined FOSS Foundation is to help with the other things that projects need in order to get to where they are going. Every project will have a different journey. Some will become their own non-profits, some will want to stay under the umbrella. Others might want to land under another umbrella group like the Apache Software Foundation. What ever it is, let’s keep people focused on their “main thing” and continue to accelerate the pace of innovation within open source.

Please contact Chris Messina or me if you’re interested in attending the meeting on Tuesday. Hope to see you there.

What if we had a “best viewed in Firefox” day? The idea here is to have people sign up to switch their sites for one day only to a page that says “best viewed in Firefox”. On that page they would have links to download the latest version of Firefox and a link to the main site. Ideally you’d have some magic in there to just let the people who already have Firefox to by-pass onto the main site. Imagine if Google did this for just one day?

The goal of this campaign would be to raise awareness of Firefox to users of all of the other browsers. We’ve hit a critical mass and doing something like this on some bigger sites might actually help drive further adoption.

Happy New Year Everybody!

I’ve got OpenOffice on-the-brain today. I already talked about the value proposition of OpenOffice, now I want to talk about some ideas for the future of the application. Note: these are just my random musings but I get full credit for them when they happen!!! (I say this because of the now infamous-in-my-mind Apple DVR posting I did that actually became a reality).

Alright, so I digress. I think we would all agree that Firefox kicks ass. So why has it been so successful? What is it exactly that has triggered the 120 million downloads of Firefox?

Firefox can (and I’ll probably get some grief from folks on this) attribute most of its success to Microsoft. Microsoft has yet to really “get” the Internet. The answer has always been “let’s hook exciting-new-technology X into Windows”. However, not everybody wants to run Windows and looking across the emerging markets it doesn’t even make sense to run Windows. A Windows license can cost the good part of someones annual income in certain emerging markets. The fact that Internet Explorer has been the Swiss cheese of applications and it was tied to directly to the operating system helped matters even more. De-coupling any application from your operating system is just a smart thing to do. It’s like layers of defense; you wouldn’t stitch your clothes directly to your skin, would you?! What if you spilled something on your clothes?! Do you know how painful it would be to put yourself through a spin cycle?! Alright, so we get it. Microsoft, through poor execution on its Internet strategy, has helped paved the way for Firefox. What else?

Quick and painless features. Firefox has gone through several major revisions in the last two years. Each revision gets us more features, better functionality and increased security. User input is leveraged to make a better browser. Shortening the transaction time from developer innovation to end-user satisfaction is the “secret sauce” that enables open source and has helped make Firefox so great. The other advantage of this is a better reaction to the market. It’s probably best known as the v2.0 problem (I say best known because I don’t know another term for it so I made one up). The v2.0 problem refers to the translation of user input to actual software. You develop v1.0 based on some user requirements and then you actually get them in front of it for what’s called v1.0. Then the users have this what can best be described as “duh” moment when they realize that they really wanted X, Y and Z. But they wouldn’t have ever learned that had they not had v1.0 to help make them realize that.

Customization. This is the biggie IMHO. Within the XUL extension framework, people can customize the heck out of their browser. It’s like leveraging the long tail for your browsing experience. You can build something that meets, say 60% of users’ needs but you need a great deal of customization to really meet the needs of those other 40% of users. So why not leverage those people? Well, Firefox has. Head over to Addons with your Firefox browser and see what they have to offer. You can customize your browser to your hearts content. And all at little incremental cost to Mozilla (after all they did have to develop the XUL framework in Firefox and build the Addons site).

Taking the customization piece even further, look at what a lot of these extensions for Firefox do. They connect your browser to web services that enable you to de-couple yourself from your desktop. Take a look at StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and even Outfoxed. Here we have some great web services that are directly built into a standards based web browser. We’re seeing this cottage industry form around Firefox that is enabling so many more people to take advantage and more importantly, make a living on-line. Looking specifically at Outfoxed, you’re talking about a web service that enables you to leverage your social network to have a better browsing experience. You just cannot accomplish that without the tools to connect users to each other.

Alright, so Firefox is great. You can see I feel pretty strongly about that. What does that have to do with OpenOffice? I’m glad you asked (technically you didn’t ask but you’re still reading this so I guess you did ask).

OpenOffice is in a unique position right now. I mentioned the value proposition and its a pretty attractive one IMHO. So why hasn’t OpenOffice taken off like Firefox? Especially given that the Firefox value proposition is replace browser costing $0 US with browser costing $0 US? Let’s compare the Firefox factors for success from above to OpenOffice and see what we find.

We’ll start by comparing Microsoft Office and its accompanying software to that of OpenOffice. MS Office is continuously being upgraded with new “features” that may or may not be wanted by the end users. At the end of the day, Microsoft is interested in selling more copies of Office and to do that they need to release new versions whether the users want it or not. The latest version of Microsoft Office on the horizon is code-named Office 12. The reports are pretty mixed. It appears that most reviewers love the new interface but drilling down into actual user comments we see a different story. We see that Microsoft is trying to innovate the user interface to give companies and users a reason to upgrade. However, doesn’t that mean they are creating an opportunity for someone like OpenOffice? There would be an incremental cost (in addition to the new licenses) on top of deploying MS Office 12 that would include user training and education. If an organization is going to have to eat that cost, why not just migrate directly to OpenOffice? I see this as an advantage for OpenOffice.

Next one on tap is how good is OpenOffice at delivering new and improved features to the end-users? Looking at their release schedule, I would say not so good. Advantage here would go to the existing Office suites. OpenOffice 2 has took quite some time to deliver although patches to the existing v.1.x suite have been quick and effective. The big question would be, how can you increase the pace of adapting to user needs, etc? I think the answer lies in how Firefox solved it; customization.

OpenOffice does have the ability to write things like templates and macros. Finding them is another story all together. And what about connecting OpenOffice to web services? If you had a simple framework, much like Firefox, you could enable all sorts of new tools and extensions for OpenOffice. This could help address the problem from above; getting new features and driving the product forward faster for the end-users. You would effectively be using the long tail to help drive adoption and use of OpenOffice. I think this could be the biggest driving force behind making OpenOffice the next killer app (and by killer I mean killing the incumbent).

“But why would I need web services for my productivity suite?! I’ve never needed them before!! Why now?!”, you say. Fair enough. I’ll give this a go. What if there was a web extension for OpenOffice and associated web service that allowed you to translate documents on the fly in real-time? You could collaborate with people from different countries and that speak different languages on the fly. What about collaborative tools? Wouldn’t it be great if you could “share” documents and truly collaborate on their editing via simple, easy-to-use tools that connected users to each other through the actual application? It is, after all, a freakin’ “productivity” suite … wouldn’t that make you more productive if you didn’t have to “track changes -> make edits -> send to collaborators -> accept changes -> repeat”?! The possibilities are limitless and more importantly we don’t even know the of the best extensions because they haven’t been created yet.

If OpenOffice could build a framework for enabling people to plug their own functionality into the application they would be perfectly poised to take advantage of the next major release of Microsoft Office that is going to force companies to incur a major transitional cost to deploy. The time is ripe and the opportunities for OpenOffice abound to innovate their way past the competition.

I’m excited to let folks know that the Bus Project will be headed down to the Open Source Lab on Friday September 30th, 2005 (this Friday). The Bus Project is a grass-roots political activism group based out of Portland, OR.

Several months ago I offered up to the POSSE folks to visit the OSL. Well, they recently teamed up with the Bus Project to make a trip of it. The goals of the event will be to tour the Open Source Lab and see what we’re up to as well as raise awareness of open source and why its a “good thing” to local legislators. Finally, we’ll be talking a bit about Government Open Source Conference and what we’re trying to accomplish for the public sector.

It looks like we have some great local legislators lined up (the folks that brought us Oregon’s first open source bill should be in attendence) as well as some press to hopefully promote the event and GOSCON.

If you’re interested in “getting on the bus” get in touch with David Pool or get in touch with the Bus Project directly.

It’s really frustrating to see spin making “news”. David Sykes, the Symantec Australia Managing Director stated in an article in the Australian IT that “the time from the announcement of a vulnerability to its subsequent patching had ‘blown out’ to 54 days … ”

I love spin. The title of the article (”OSS Means Slower Patches”) makes me think “gee, all open source must have a slower patch cycle.” Okay, so, where is the evidence? When one says “blown out”, they usually have a point of reference … blown out from what?! The answer to this one is pretty simple and they clear it up in the article: “Symantec had not published previously statistics on the average time required to produce patches, but Mr Sykes said data showed the lag had previously been about 30 days.” Ahh, well, we’ll just take your word for it Mr. Sykes … you simply have no motivation in the matter.

The next quote just cracks me up: “Mr Sykes said the increasing popularity of open source software, such as the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser, could be part of the reason for the increase in the gap between vulnerability and patch, with the open source development model itself part of the problem.” Ahh, right. This also makes complete sense. Afterall, we all know those lazy lots over at Mozilla don’t do a thing when a vulnerability is announced. “We’ll get it with the next service pack” I often hear them say. Not. C’mon, really? Is this Sykes guy for real?! Or is his head in the sand? The Mozilla Foundation is the most vigilant at responding to security vulnerabilities; far better than their rivals in the matter.

The one bit … the tiniest shred of truth in this article (and thus the horrendous spin on it) comes from one simple sentence: “In practice, large companies with around 10,000 employees were now looking at 50 days between vulnerability and the installation of patches across systems” Sykes said. Bingo. Now there is a statistic that I can reckon with. I’ll be the first to admit that managing Mozilla’s applications on an Enterprise scale is a bit difficult but not impossible. It is the same problem that organizations have with rolling out and updating any application that isn’t tied to the Enterprise update schedules and mechanisms. The fact is, Enterprise is still trying to figure out how to roll out Firefox and OpenOffice and keep it managed across their environments.

All that being said, we can see the spin. Firefox gains popularity. People start installing it across the Enterprise. People don’t pay attention to the nagging little red icon in the upper right-hand corner. People don’t upgrade. Yep, that sucks. So spin it. “OSS Blows Chunks” or “OSS Users are Doomed” or even “The End Cometh”. Yeah, that makes sense.

Through all the nonsense and spin there is the truth. The update mechanisms in open source software are maturing at a phenomenal pace. Windows Update is nice but what about all of your Linux or Mac users? The anser isn’t “sucks to be them”.

The spin merchants will peddle their wares and the open source community will continue to work diligently towards a better software stack that doesn’t suck.

Yesterday at 4pm PST (aka 00:00 GMT) the “Hour of Doom” hit the Mozilla infrastructure as it does at the start of every month. However, this time we were ready.

I worked with Dave this past week to get the application servers for our PHP services behind the LVS cluster here at the OSL. With OSCON and Linux World Expo coming up I knew we would not have many cycles to get it done until after. Getting this built out now would allow us to brace ourselves in part for the deluge of requests to addons.mozilla.org as well as to prepare for what has been deemed the “hour of doom”.

The best way to describe the “hour of doom” is like having to pay down a bill every month on something silly you did while drunk months and months ago (note: the author has never done this, but he had a friend once that did …). The silly thing we did in this case was a bug in Firefox that would cause older clients (it has been fixed now) to continually phone home for the first 7 days of the month starting right on the nose at 00:00 GMT. We discovered this bug in January (somebody correct me if I’m wrong there) and have been having to deal with it ever since.

In the past few months, Dave, Polvi and Corey have been bustin’ their humps getting the new LVS clusters (yes, its plural) up to handle these bursts in traffic as well as have a roadmap for growth over the next few years for the MoFo. Polvi made some great configuration scripts for managing the clusters and Dave has been a maniac with the Red Hat Network configurations (its pretty darn slick now — we can change the role of any server behind the cluster in a matter of minutes). Corey has been a trooper fixing boxes here that were broken in shipping as well as moving earth to help get the cluster into place in a timely fashion.

So yesterday at 00:00 GMT it hit and although there were a few hiccups, the monster held together through an amazing deluge of traffic (upwards of 100 Mbit of just AUS traffic). Dave and Polvi did some final tweaking that brought the load down considerably and should have us ready for next month … here’s to smooth sailin’ and butt kicker SA’s … Good job guys …

On Netcraft’s main page they mention that “the Mozilla Foundation site has been experiencing intermittent performance problems, which began early Sunday.”

Over this past weekend, while doing software upgrades, our static content web servers in one of our LVS clusters was mistakenly updated. We run Apache 2.0 using the worker mpm. This is the threaded mpm and thus does not work well with the PHP module (technically PHP is not thread-safe). The static content web servers (3 of them behind our OSL cluster) mistakenly had PHP installed and then removed. However, during the system update process it got re-installed. This caused our Apache instance to not want to start properly. This, plus the intersection of some vacation time for the systems folks meant this slipped through the cracks.

It should be noted that as soon as it was discovered the fix was trivial and service was quickly restored:

This also revealed gaps in our monitoring via our Nagios instance which also have been resolved.

I thought I would follow-up on this as it was in fact a mis-configuration on our part and not so much a capacity issue.

I wanted to pass along the information that Rafael Ebron is going to be heading up the development of UMO (a.k.a. addons.mozilla.org) effective immediately. Rafael brings with him experience from the Netscape SmartUpdate project as well as being a full-time Mozilla Foundation staff member. He is going to be an excellent leader of this project.

I haven’t been able to dedicate the time needed to UMO in the last few months and its been affecting the progress of the project. To that end, I’m going to be stepping away from UMO completely except in regards to any capacity planning/management, etc that has been coming with the OSL’s work with the MoFo and their infrastructure.

I’ve enjoyed my time working on this project with you all; this is an amazing project and one that I think has some amazing potential. Sorry for my delinquency in the last few months.