Few minutes ago Tristan and I delivered a presentation on Mozilla presence in Europe and because not everyone could join us, I was asked to push our slides online. Here you are:
Enjoy 🙂
Tag: planet.m.o
Last half a year was amazing for me. I joined Mozilla Corp., reignited my participation in Mozilla project, worked on several exciting projects and it’s an amazing coincident that this half a year is almost over exactly now, when I’m sitting at Whistler, with 400 creative, innovative people and we’re all listening to Mitchell Baker speaking about our open source roots, and the trunk of the project being about “Human interaction with the Internet”… It’s thrilling.
There are several projects that I’m trying to launch related to Mozilla, I will be speaking about them during the Firefox Summit, and I will blog about it once the summit people share their feedback on it.
One of the elements of Mozilla ecosystem that has been super exciting for me is localization and internationalization. And the great news is that there’s a lot happening around L10n in Mozilla these days. We’re improving the l10n build system, l10n processes, but there’s one very visibly missing area in L10n land – tools. We finally have a project that is going to target this – Verbatim. Verbatim is a project aiming for a webtool that will allow localizers focus on the translation instead of having to spend time trying to figure out how to do the actual translation. If you’re in Whistler, we have a presentation on Verbatim today 🙂
But that’s not all! There is one project that was something I’ve been coding over weekends and while at the airports and on flights and in many other places. It’s inspiring and challenging for me enough to keep working on it over evenings, nights, sundays, and holidays which I have to apologize for to my girlfriend 🙁
Yesterday, I tagged stage2 of the project which means it’s more or less ready to go public and be reviewed by you all, and has a chance to explain itself to the level that may attract others to join me and participate in it.
The project name is Silme, and it is a python localization library that has been structured in a multi-abstract level model. Thanks to it, the library works natively with DTD, Properties, GetText, can work with XLIFF, L20n, ini files and any other l10n data format. Beside, it can work with files stored on drive, in SVN, in CVS, in MySQL, SQLite and virtually any other data source.
On the other hand it’s extensible and flexible enough to work in web app, command line tools, or GUI tools. It’s not only for Mozilla, as any other project can build apps on top of this library. Be it Songbird, Miro, Seamonkey, Firefox, Thunderbird, Addons.mozilla.org, Flock, GNOME, KDE, etc., etc.
If you find above description interesting, please read the original announcement and join the project. It’s totally open and very alpha. If I try to express where I am with it, I think I just passed the mark when the code self explains the idea. Nothing more.
Beside, it’s a lib. Unless people like to localize directly in python env, we need apps on top of it. And it’s at least as challenging as a library itself, but if you want to write a localization app, I think it’ll be easier if you will be able to focus on UI and features of the app, and minimize the work on sole entity operations that Silme does cover.
So… here we are. I’m confident I will keep working on it, and some small simple apps will be created for my own use, but it’s very, very far from being useful, and need a lot of work to get there. Ultimate goal will be to work smoothly with an exciting project that is being mindcrafted in Mozilla these days – L20n.
Please, remember that it’s a hobby library for now, a product of several years of work as localizer, countless nights spent with my friends from Aviary.pl – Polish Localization Team, and the creative environment of Mozilla project. It’s up to you all what will happen next with it 🙂 So mail me, or reach me on IRC if you want to discuss things about possibilities that Silme opens!
Tomorrow, I’m comming to Moscow to meet with Mozillians 🙂
We’ll be in Rosie pub (google map) starting from 16:00 I think (at least me, because of my flight).
So, if you’re in Moscow these days, and have a free afternoon/evening tomorrow, and you think you might be a little bit thirsty – join us, I’d like to use this opportunity to meet as much of you as possible!!! 🙂
Then, on Monday, we’ll be going to Protva Open Source conference in Obninsk, where I’ll be presenting the vision Mozilla has on the Internet and the future of open web. It’ll be exciting for me to be there with all those people who work on the open source in the country that is currently doing a huge step toward open source schools, and if you combine with how big Russia is… amazing 🙂
So feel free to join us tomorrow or see you at the conference!
With the recent announcement by OpenNews.ru we got a chance to look at the browser market in Russia.
Firefox is just breaking the 20% mark there which means up 5% during recent 5 months (15% in the end of January).
The other good news is that the modern browsers are up by 11% and especially Firefox 3 is really received well with over 6% of the market in less than 2 weeks from the release!
In other countries in the region, Firefox 3 is also getting good grades from the users. In Poland over 5% of the Internet users have switched and in Hungary it’s almost 6%!
What’s interesting in those number is where the users came from. So in case of Poland, Firefox 3 raised 4% in two weeks, 2.9% came from former Firefox 2 users, 0.7% from IE6 users and 0.3% from IE7 users!
In all countries of the CEE region that we track, we can see from 4 to 6% of the market taken by Firefox 3 users in such a short time after the release. The response is amazing and it’s the best prove that the work of Mozilla project matters. Congratulations to MozillaRu, Aviary.pl, Magyar Mozilla Project and all of you who contributed to this achievment!
p.s. Just to compare, it took Firefox 1.0 over 10 months to get 6% of the market share in Russia, it took Firefox 2.0 over 5 months to break 6%, and it took Firefox 3.0 around two weeks.
We did it!
Poland has over 100 000 pledges on Download Day campaign!
Isn’t it crazy?
And Russia which joined the campaign in the last minute has over 45 thousand pledges! We all know how big Russia is, but at the same time, we’re just starting winning the hearts of Internet users in Russia and Ukraine, so we’re proud to see them joining us in such big numbers!
Of course Western Europe is traditionally strong, France is rushing to join us above 100k (us=Poland, Italy, Brazil!) 🙂
It’s so amazing time. Pretty often journalists ask me how has Firefox changed Internet. Beside of web reincarnation, prove of open model concept etc… there’s one more thing. We brought back FUN to the web. Creating open and free browser may be a great and exciting journey for us all. And our astonishing community is the very best prove of it in todays world. Welcome to Generations Y‘s world 🙂
P.S. it’s less than 4 hours…!
Small bookmarklet that makes reading hg.mozilla.org log easier: linkify hglog.
And a userscript for greasemonkey users.
I sent the message to few places, but in case not everyone is following ActiveMembers mailing list:
Mozilla Europe is organizing a summer internship program this year! We are looking for two additional participants. The internship is paid, and is flexible in terms of timing. Please read the full announcement:
Mozilla Europe is launching a summer internship program this year, and I’d like to announce that we’re looking for two people from any European country to join us in Mozilla Europe head quarters for July/August to work on selected Mozilla related project!
We’re open and flexible with timing and project and would like you to consider this as an opportunity to spend time with us, in Paris, using comfortable environment to work on your pet project that you always wanted to have more time for 
We’ll help you with all operational issues like accommodation or transport.
Please, don’t hesitate to email me with any questions, concerns and of course applications
Wiki article on this topic: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Europe/Internship2008
Of course we know we have a great community in Poland! And yes, Mike and Jane have been with a part of Aviary.pl at Pierogarnia when the Download Day campaign started…
But we did not expect that we’d be topping the list after the first day! Beating 10,000 pledges!!!
That’s exciting and crazy! 40-million country is showing what is capable of when provoked! 🙂
My favorite comment from today’s is “They ask for a DDoS? We’ll give them one to remember!” 🙂
I’m wondering if basing on this we can claim more seats in UN, European Parlament or demand our piece of the North Pole (North – Pole… got it? I believe it’s a strong argument).
I want to thank all the people who help us, who are with us, and who’re sharing with us the same beliefs and values. We promise not to fail your trust. 🙂
p.s. dear Germany, in a few days you’ll have a chance to beat us in something else, don’t worry 😉
update: Poland was also the first (except US) to pass 20k and 30k despite huge pressure from Brazil. 🙂
I’m at the UDS Intrepid 8.10.
I’ve joined a group of over 150 people from all around the world (including reed) at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. The schedule is stuffed, and they’re very modularized for me, but I’m learning fast 🙂
I’m watching Ubuntu project pretty close because they seem to be definitely one of the most promising open source projects, with a clear vision and huge community network. I believe there’s a lot we can learn from them, and at the very same time we can guide them through nasty traps we’ve been facing with our project several years ago.
It’s amazing how many overlaps there are between what’s going on in Ubuntu and the atmosphere in Mozilla project around 2003 or 2004… they feel the potential they have, they know they need to polish before exposing themselves and they do see the light at the end of the tunnel.
The difference is that they have who to look at for a case of successful hybryd of open source and market success 🙂
p.s. weather report. prague. rain. pitty.
We’ve met with stas once again to do some co-working. Stas was supposed to be nailed down by his stuff, I was supposed to be nailed down by mine, so we decided to meet and disturb each other. In reality, it was extremely creative even if we failed to reach the peak with productivity.
We’ve been localizing, coding, planning database architecture, localizing, talking about communities, and working on the WorldControl product as always.
But we know that one picture is worth thousand words, so we’ve set up a camera and did a shot at random intervals.
We both believe that the result slideshow gives a nice overview on the day of mozilla localizer’s work 🙂
Saturday evening, somewhere in Warsaw… 🙂