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What makes Firefox open-source?

I’ve had this argument many times with Justin… defining what exactly makes something open-source.

He is confident in telling me that Firefox is not open-source, and (as I understand it) he believes this because the Mozilla Organization, which controls the source code for Firefox, does not easily allow people to contribute code. They keep a tight grip on who was their bits put into Firefox. And while it is true that there are pieces in Firefox that you cannot use elsewhere (branding elements, graphics, etc.) I still believe that Firefox is open-source due to the fact that it uses the Mozilla Public License which is considered an open-source license by the Open Source Initiative.

I asked the question on Pownce recently, Is the Firefox web browser open-source?

And I think it’s a question that most people who have a basic understanding of the term “open-source” would answer “yes” to, but… Is that the case?

I thought maybe searching for “firefox is not open source” would unveil some great conspiracy I was not aware of, but no such luck.

Personally, I don’t think allowing people to contribute code is a requirement of open-source. It may be an important component of community and “open-ness” but accepting someone else’s code into your project does not seem to be a requirement. Providing the source code, and allowing people to modify and use that source code does seem to be a requirement, and though I’ve always downloaded binaries, I just downloaded the source code to Firefox.

So what is the scoop here? Is Firefox open-source?



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Backing In

I tried recording a song but I couldn’t get the drums quite right so it turned into a 30 second intro with very minimal drums and mainly guitar and bass.

Anyway, it’s called ‘Backing In’ and you can get it from Ourmedia…

I would have scrapped the whole deal, but I wasn’t about to let this thing beat me. I need to experiment with the order in which I record things. For this piece the drums came last, which has often worked in the past, but not with this one. Life is like that sometimes…


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BarCampMilwaukee2 at Bucketworks

Bucketworks was a big part of making BarCampMilwaukee happen in 2006. Besides providing a venue, James (the leader of Bucketworks) got deeply involved, and he had a great time. BarCamp, with it’s un-conference like traits, is a perfect match for Bucketworks, which bills itself as “a health and fitness club for your brain”

Milwaukee is lucky to have a place like Bucketworks. For BarCampMilwaukee2 some of us are pitching in to help get the place ready. They just moved to a new building, and there is a lot of freakin’ work to do. Last weekend a few of us were there wiring the joint up, pulling ethernet through the ceiling and walls. Once that is complete, we’ll be adding wifi all around. Personally I’d like to see Bucketworks become the place for Milwaukee’s tech/art community to gather.

Who pays for all this? Members do pay a fee, but it’s ridiculously cheap in order to be affordable for everyone. Bucketworks isn’t a huge money making venture. Right now they are trying to raise money for the relocation, and they’ve got 6 people (I’m one of them) who have contributed just $360. Bucketworks is a non-profit, and donating will help ensure they stick around, so help if you can.

(You can see some photos of the new location on Flickr. If you’re lucky, I’ll have a video up soon. If you’re really lucky, you’ll attend Web414 and take the tour.)

If you’re willing to help, get in touch with me. Right now we plan on being there Sept. 1st, 2007 to do more wiring, and see what else we can do to prep for BarCampMilwaukee2, and every day at Bucketworks.




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A Decade of RasterWeb!

On this day, ten years ago, a weblog named RasterWeb! appeared for the first time on the internet.

Today, it is one of the the longest continuing running weblogs on the Internet.

This site may have played a big role in several important trends.

  • It may have helped bootstrap the blogging world.
  • It was the one of the early sites involved in podcasting.

Ok, with apologies to Dave Winer for the above, this is the 10 year anniversary of this weblog. When I say that, I mean that this is one of the original blogs. If you go to jjg’s the page of only weblogs and look at “ye olde skool” list, those are the folks who were around at the same time, pre-2000, and blogging regularly. Follow those links today, and many are gone, some are still around but on hiatus, and many have lost their archives due to moving to different weblog systems over the years. Scripting News started in April 1997, CamWorld in June of 1997, and RasterWeb! in August of 1997. For each of those you can still get to the archives, and the first posts. I consider this somewhat important. We’re bloggers, who believe in the long-term. I’ve seen people who say they’ve been blogging since 1996, and when pushed they say how they had a journal or a Geocities site that is long gone, or they changed sites 5 times or whatever. Blogging is somewhat about the permanence, the fact that you stand behind what you say, and people can link to it, and that link is gonna be there a month or a year, or 5 years later. I worked meticulously to re-write any links when I moved from zymm.com to rasterweb.net many years back. My first thought, as a blogger, was that I didn’t want to break the links of people who linked to things I was saying. I hated when big media sites did it, so I didn’t want to.

So while Dave Winer and Cameron Barrett are pretty well known, I am definitely not “internet famous” in any way. I don’t live in California, or New York, and haven’t done anything amazing to bring attention to myself, I’ve just been blogging for 10 years. I’m probably most well known as being the guy who told Drew (of Dawn and Drew fame) that he should try podcasting. That’s just fine with me. I’ve gotten a lot out of blogging over the years. No, it didn’t help me get a job when I needed one, or make any amazing business deals, but what it has done is help connect me with many amazing people over the years, people I consider my friends. This to me is much more valuable than anything else, the connections I’ve made, and the people I’ve met. That’s what it’s all about.

Now, on a less serious note, I’ve take Cam out of the list of “continually running weblogs” since he often goes months without a post, and then may only have 1 in a month, so really, after Dave’s Scripting News, I think RasterWeb! is the second longest continually running weblog on the internet with all archives still available and all old links still working” So there. As soon as Dave quits, I will earn the title! And that’s the real reason I keep doing this. (But not really, I’m just kidding about that part.)

So that’s it. 10 years. I look forward to another 10. See ya on the internets…

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vCard to CSV Converter

Cool app of the week: vCard to CSV Converter.

vCard to CSV Converter

We needed to print custom labels, so we had someone use Apple’s Address Book.app and clean up all the addresses, and then export them all as a .vcf file. From there I used the vCard to CSV Converter (running locally on my machine) to covert the .vcf file into a .csv file. Once that was done, it was pretty trivial to write some Perl-fu to take the .csv file and spit out an XPress tag file we could flow into QuarkXPress so the custom styles were applied. (Hey, we’re designers, we care about things like typefaces, leading, tracking, etc.)

The biggest problem was that I could not create multiple automatic linked text boxes in QuarkXPress 6.5. This is probably a limitation of XPress, but I worked around it by just using a single automated text box and then calculating the size of the lines in the addresses and adding blank lines accordingly. Oh, we also printed them on label sheets that were 8.75 inches by 11.5 inches, just for an added measure of fun.