Mobile Market Reports

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“thinkinsights” and Google have released some fascinating data about smartphone usage, gathered from detailed consumer surveys.

All the presentation reports (right hand column) have roughly the same format. Why not download the report for your country, and the one for Brazil (the launch country for B2G) and see how different things are there compared to where you live?

Compared to the UK, in Brazil:

  • Far fewer people have smartphones (14% vs 51%)
  • Smartphones are used less often (40% vs 59% daily)
  • They are used on-the-go less often (64% vs 86%) – poorer network coverage?
  • Social networking is proportionately more popular than email
  • Smartphone gaming is significantly less popular (39% vs 62%)
  • They use fewer apps, even free ones (14 vs 23 installed)
  • Almost all smartphone users are urban
  • Cohabitation is significantly less common (20% vs 11%)

Thoughts: reading between the lines, network coverage is poorer and data-on-the-go is harder to find. We need to make sure B2G phones and apps are solid in absence of a good network connection. Also, the phone will be the only computing device for many users.

The ‘other-licenses’ Directory: Don’t Use It

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This is a public service announcement. There is a top-level directory in mozilla-central (and similar repos) called “other-licenses”. Don’t put any more code in it. Really. There’s now even a README saying so.

Longer version: this directory is not for non-MPLed code, it’s for non-MPL-compatible code, of which we have very little. There is some stuff in there which shouldn’t be, but let’s not make it worse, OK? :-) Keep your code where it logically lives; don’t make your life harder than it needs to be. If you really think you are importing code which needs to be in there, you should be talking to licensing@mozilla.org first (as with any code import) and explicitly saying you think that this is where it should go, so they can tell you that you’re wrong ;-)

WikiProject Mozilla: Help Wanted

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A week ago I lamented the sad state of the Mozilla-related articles on Wikipedia, and suggested it would be good to form a “WikiProject Mozilla” to clean them up. Robert McKay was kind enough to write a proposal on Wikipedia for such a project. If you are an existing regular or semi-regular Wikipedia editor and would like to help Mozilla by working on this, please add your “~~~~” to the Support section of that page, and keep an eye on its progress.

Mozilla Grows Too Big For Summit

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A quick Public Service Announcement, just in case anyone still has their summer plans on hold: Mozilla is now too large (yay!) to get us all in one physical location. So there won’t be a Mozilla Summit this year. Instead, the hard-working Contributor Engagement team is stepping up the pace on regional MozCamps – we’ve already had one in Latin America, and they are planning one for Europe, one for Asia and one for Africa/The Middle East before the end of the year. I won’t steal their thunder; look for more details very soon :-)

Lindholm’s Law

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If you are a software engineer, or in fact any sort of engineer, I strongly suggest you take careful note of what I will call “Lindholm’s Law”:

Never send a recorded communication containing a statement of opinion or decision on an IP-related legal question to someone who is not a lawyer.

Tim Lindholm’s unfortunate statement, contained in an email which was the subject of heavy legal argument in Oracle vs. Google, was:

We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.

Even though one of the addressees of the email was a lawyer, and even though the email said “Attorney Work Product” and “Google Confidential” at the top, the court ruled that it was not attorney-client privileged, and could be used by Oracle in court. Read why.

GSoC 2012 Project List

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The Google Summer of Code kicked off two weeks ago, and I am pleased to list the 18 projects being done under the Mozilla banner. This is a 50% increase on last year; we are very grateful to Google for being so generous with slots. The name of each student is linked to the location where they will be posting weekly updates on their progress, if you want to follow along with a project you are interested in. (Apart from those students who have not yet sent me this information; consider this a public reminder.) I’m sure they would appreciate any help or advice you have :-) Please make them feel welcome!

Project Student Mentor
Thunderbird: ‘No Reply’ Reminder Han Lin Jonathan Protzenko
Thunderbird: App Tabs Nguyen Ngoc Trung Mike Conley
Calendar: Improve Invitation Support Christian Kulpa Ludovic Marcotte
Dynamic MathML – Support <maction> Andrii Zui Fred Wang
HTML5 and CSS3 Examples on MDN Vikash Agrawal Jean-Yves Perrier
Get ISPDB Into Production Sergio Charpinel Blake Winton
Graphical Timeline of Browser Events Girish Sharma Panos Astithas
Improve Gmail Interoperability Atul Jangra David Bienvenu
Instantbird: Account Import Wizard Will Nayes Florian Quèze
L10n Tool for Standardization of Terms Gautam Akiwate Philippe Dessante
Meemoo Improvements Vilson Vieira Forrest Oliphant
Native Webapps Support on Linux Marco Castelluccio Felipe Gomes
Networking Dashboard Jiten Thakkar Patrick McManus
OpenBadges Back End Improvements Matthew Ramir Chris McAvoy
Port SuperTux to the Web Xingxing Pan Alon Zakai
Slide Drive Improvements Jeremy Banks Greg Wilson
User-Specified Content Security Policy Kailas Ravsaheb Patil Tanvi Vyas
WebSocket Testing Tool Robert Koch Yvan Boily

“Witness” Web App: Hackers Wanted

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We need a “witness” web app which provides proof that person A has agreed to legal document X.

There are loads of applications for this:

  • Proof that a Mozilla contributor has agreed to our Committer’s Agreement
  • Proof that someone has agreed to the IPR policy necessary for contributing to a standards body mailing list
  • Proof that someone has agreed to a trademark licence

These things can be done without an app, but it’s dull and tedious for the person doing the paperwork. Much better to get a computer to do it.

In its simplest form, the app would just require a Persona login, show you the document, have you click “I Agree” and then store that information, with metadata such as time, IP address, document hash etc., perhaps sending a data bundle off to a timestamping service to prove it couldn’t be falsified later. There would also be a confirmation email sent out to the email account which would allow people to repudiate the agreement within a certain length of time. in case something had gone wrong.

There are loads of potential additional features – extra logging, a mechanism to email everyone to come back if the document is updated, notification of the document uploader when someone signs it, etc. But the basic idea is very simple, and could be really useful.

I asked for help on this at the start of last year, and got one response, but then the person turned out not to have time. Are there any web app hackers out there who would like to build a generally-useful piece of open source software?

Moar Crashes Please

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I’ve heard it would be helpful to the Fennec Native team if they had more crash data. So I’ve written the world’s simplest random website loader. Load it up on your phone or tablet and just let it go. It loads a new random page every 10 seconds. Glance at it every 10 minutes and submit any crashes that appear, or hit “Back” if a frame-busting script broke it. You can test Fennec while doing something else! :-)

I’ve been running it on my phone and tablet for an hour and a half, and submitted 2 tablet crashes (one Flash, one in libdvm).

Of course, it may not produce a high crash volume because it doesn’t interact with the page. Ideally, it would be an add-on, so frame-busting wouldn’t affect it, it could dismiss pop-ups, follow links, crash reports would have the correct URL, and perhaps it could even auto-submit crash reports and restart itself. Suggestions for better tools to use would be most welcome.

Accepting Zimbra Meeting Invitations

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I use Google Calendar, and am very happy with it (I can share it with my wife and vice versa, which is helpful). I use Thunderbird, and use the excellent “Google Calendar Tab” extension. All my Mozilla mail forwards to my own mailserver, and is not stored at Mozilla.

I regularly get meeting invites from Mozilla employees, which are sent out using Mozilla’s Zimbra installation. They come as a plain text summary plus an attached .ics file. How do I make the meeting owner happy by indicating that I am attending?

There’s no link in the email to click to say “I’m coming”. I can’t log into Zimbra, find the message and click “Attending”, because copies of my email are not stored at Mozilla. I could change that, but it seems like a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and anyway, it would be a pain to have to log in and find the mail. Also, it should be a regular occurrence that people not using Mozilla’s Zimbra get invited to Mozilla meetings – what do they do?

I don’t want to switch to using Lightning, and I’m not sure it would solve the problem even if I did.

Is this even possible? Does anyone know?

As a bonus, it would be awesome if I could double-click on the .ics attachment and have it passed to Google Calendar and added to my calendar. Do we yet have the technology for that sort of thing?

It’s even worse when receiving invites from Exchange, which does happen occasionally when I’m on a call run by Microsoft people. That _just_ comes as a icalendar file, and the date and time are not in the plain text, so I have to base64-decode it manually and then read the source and do the timezone maths to work out when the meeting is! I think Lightning handles these better, but as I said, I don’t want to use Lightning…

Orchestrated Agreement Is Often OK

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There’s a difference between [all the developers from a single company] actually being decentralized and simply striving to appear that way. Under certain circumstances, having your developers behave in concert can be quite useful, and they should be prepared to coordinate behind the scenes when necessary. For example, when making a proposal, having several people chime in with agreement early on can help it along, by giving the impression of a growing consensus. Others will feel that the proposal has momentum, and that if they were to object, they’d be stopping that momentum. Thus, people will object only if they have a good reason to do so. There’s nothing wrong with orchestrating agreement like this, as long as objections are still taken seriously. The public manifestations of a private agreement are no less sincere for having been coordinated beforehand, and are not harmful as long as they are not used to prejudicially snuff out opposing arguments.

– Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software

Wikipedia On Mozilla

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I recently read an article on Science Daily entitled: “Most Wikipedia Entries About Companies Contain Factual Errors”, which noted that companies often found it very hard to correct articles about themselves.

I noticed a while ago that there are several articles on Mozilla-related topics on Wikipedia which are out of date, poorly authored, uneven in coverage or all three. Some examples:

  • Mozilla: I cleaned up this article a bit in December, but it still needs further work – the order of items is chronological rather than in order of importance, and there are significant parts out of date (e.g. references to Minimo).
  • Mozilla Foundation: this page is quite accurate, but very incomplete. It says nothing about the Foundation’s most recent projects, the Webmakers initiative or the Mozilla Festival.
  • Mozilla Application Suite: this article is in the present rather than the past tense, suggesting that the Suite is still viable software.
  • SeaMonkey: this article contains far less detail than the Mozilla Application Suite article, despite being a current project.
  • Firefox: this is better than many, but has many “may be out of date” annotations, and needs someone familiar with Mozilla’s current doings to improve it.
  • Thunderbird: some good stuff but also a useless list of historical system requirements.

We’re a significant feature of the Internet and contemporary life, and we should have better quality coverage than this. Are there any Mozillians who are also Wikipedians who would like to form a “WikiProject Mozilla” or similar effort to clean these up? This is not a case of doing a few drive-by edits; that’s probably how the articles got the way they are now. It would need some commitment and proper sourcing and research. But it is important.

On The Internet, No-one Need Know You’re Unstructured

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Consider this: the only thing anyone knows about you on the Internet comes from what you write, or what others write about you. You may be brilliant, perceptive, and charismatic in person—but if your emails are rambling and unstructured, people will assume that’s the real you. Or perhaps you really are rambling and unstructured in person, but no one need ever know it, if your posts are lucid and informative.

– Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software

Blinded By Greed

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A recent email exchange I was involved in:

To whom it may concern,
I have recently had email with Mozilla firefox logos stating I have won £750,000 and I have to travel to Spain to collect the payment. Also I have to pay a fee to collect such winnings. They claim I have won a competion and won’t transfer the winnings into my bank account til I travel to Spain and collect. All I want to know is this true or false because I feel I have been scammed and I not in a position to leave my location.
Please can you confirm and respond in any emails.

It’s a hoax. Do not respond and don’t send them any money.

Gerv

I have just had a phone call askin for my bank account details and they will transfer via bank and it was from Mozilla uk to fax my details to them. You may say hoax I’m not sure as they did not ask for money up front.

Look, it’s a hoax. You were foolish to give them your phone number, and are foolish to continue contacting them. Stop. We are not giving away money!

Why did you ask Mozilla about the truth of this claim if you are not going to believe our answer?

Gerv

Mozilla and Patents

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Harvey Anderson, Mozilla’s General Counsel (that is, chief lawyer), has written a couple of blogposts recently on Mozilla and software patents.

  • The first was about the Microsoft purchase of the AOL/Netscape patents;
  • The second contains some more general thoughts on Mozilla’s patent strategy.

Also noteworthy is Twitter’s announcement today of the “Innovator’s Patent Agreement” (IPA), a model agreement for companies to come to with their employees, such that the company can still file for patents on the employee’s inventions but those patents can only be used defensively. You can read the draft IPA on GitHub, and even fork it and submit pull requests :-)