What is this?

Questions and answers, because my friends and I have been doing a lot of asking and answering, in unequal measure, with more asking than answering. Because I’ve been distraught by the incessant stream of reductionist observations about Mozilla, each one like being punched in the heart with the hard fists of righteousness and conviction. Because questions and answers once brought me peace, when I was much younger.

Who are you?

A man with no titles. Formerly, one of the first technology evangelists for Mozilla, when it was still a Netscape project. A Mozillian.

Who is Brendan Eich?

A man with a title titles. An inventor. A unifier. A divider. A Mozillian. A friend.

What has Mozilla done?

From humble and unlikely beginnings, Mozilla entered a battle seemingly already decided against it, and gradually unseated the entrenched incumbent, user by user by user, through campaigns that were traditional and innovative, and increased consciousness about the open web. It became a beloved brand, standing firmly for open source and the open web, championing the Internet, sometimes advocating politically for these convictions. It relied, and continues to rely, on a community of contributors from all over the world.

What has Brendan done?

Many things intrinsic to the open web; he helped shape technologies used by countless numbers of users, including to write and read this very post. Also, a hurtful and divisive thing based on a conviction now at odds with the law of the land, and at odds with my own conviction: in 2008, he donated $1000 to California Proposition 8, which put on a statewide ballot a proposition to define marriage as strictly between a man and a woman in the state, thus eliminating gay marriage, and calling into question pre-existing gay marriages. The amount donated was enough to oblige him to list his employer — Mozilla — for legal reasons.

What are my convictions?

That any two people in love should be able to marry, regardless of their genders; that the marriage of two such people affords all legal protections intrinsic to the institution of marriage including immigration considerations, estate planning considerations, and visitation rights. That this is in fact a civil right. That matters of civil rights should not be put before a population to vote on as a statewide proposition; in short, that exceptions to the Equal Protection Clause cannot be decided by any majority, since it is there to protect minorities from majorities (cf.Justice Moreno).

How do such convictions become law?

Often, by fiat. Sometimes, even when the battle is already seemingly decided (with the entrenched weight of history behind it, an incumbent), one state at a time. State by State by State (by States), using campaigns that are traditional and innovative, to increase consciousness about this as a civil right.

How should people with different convictions disagree?

Bitterly, holding fast to conviction, so that two individuals quarrel ceaselessly till one yields to the other, or till one retreats from the other, unable to engage any longer.

For real?

Amicably, by setting aside those convictions that are unnecessary to the pursuit of common convictions I share with other Mozillians, like the open web. Brendan embodied the Mozilla project; he would have made a promising CEO. My conviction can be governed by reason, and set aside, especially since the issue is decided by courts, of both law and public opinion. His view, only guessable by me, seems antediluvian. Times have changed. I can ask myself to be governed by reason. We need never touch this question.

But I can do this because my conviction about the law, stated before, has never been tested personally by the specter of suicide or the malevolence of bullying; marriage equality is the ultimate recognition, destigmatizing lifestyles, perhaps helping with suicide and bullying. And, my inability to marry has never disrupted my life or my business. I cannot ask others to lay aside convictions, without recognizing the sources of pain, and calling them out. (Here, Brendan made commitments, and Mozilla did too).

What will the future hold?

Brendan has said his non serviam but calls out a mission which I think is the right one: privacy, also a civil right, especially privacy from governments; continued user advocacy; data liberation; a check on walled gardens (and an end to digital sharecropping); the web as mobile platform, even though it is under threat in the mobile arena, the battle seemingly decided, the entrenched incumbent slightly less obvious. This latter — mobile — is reminiscent of the desktop world in 1998. It’s the same story, with smaller machines. Perhaps the same story will have to be told again. I’d like Mozilla to be a major player in that story, just as it always has been a major player on the web. And I’ll be looking forward to seeing what Brendan does next. I’ll miss him as part of Mozilla. This has been crushing.

Coda: what have wise ones said?

“I don’t know why we’re talking about tolerance to begin with. We should be at acceptance and love. What’s this tolerance business? What are you tolerating, backpain? ‘I’ve been tolerating backpain, and the gay guy at work?’” — Hari Kondabalu (watch him on Letterman). And blog posts: Mozilla is not Chick-Fil-A; Thinking about Mozilla; The Hounding of a Heretic (Andrew Sullivan); a few others, discussing what a CEO should do, and what qualities a CEO should possess, which are out there for you to discover.

http://arunranga.com/blog/2014/04/faqtechism/

I am a gay employee of the Mozilla Corporation, and I support my company's decisions regarding the selection of CEO. This doesn't mean that I'm entirely comfortable with the selection, but not because I think Brendan Eich is a threat, but instead because of the public relations repercussions.

The CEO of a corporation is the public face of the company. It is easy for the public to conflate the personal beliefs of the person with the mission of the company. For this reason, I see that that the selection of Brendan is a public relations disaster. I'm sad that it appears this firestorm was not foreseen. However, the decision is made, we must move on to focus on the real work.

Mozilla's mission is to defend and nurture the free Web. If we're not going to do it, who is? The fervor of indignation regarding our new CEO is a distraction that we do not need. Our energy should be going to support or mission not spin the personal beliefs of the CEO. These are difficult times for the Web with threats from large corporations pushing us into silos and government overreach. The energy that we expend defending our selection of CEO is energy taken from our real mission.

I have friends that hold political opinions that are antithetical to me – I do not exclude them from my life, I embrace my friends. I neither support nor understand their beliefs, but doesn't mean that I throw them away. I cannot condone holding a grudge in perpetuity. To do so would be leaving a wake of enemies behind me.   Instead, I could have them as allies beside me where we do agree.

I do not agree with Brendan's support of Prop 8. However, that particular battle is one that Brendan lost. It's over. I don't know if his opinions have changed nor do I feel that I need to know. Technically, Brendan is a good choice for CEO: we need to be a technically driven company.

Mozilla has a vocal LBGT community. Brendan could not derail us if he wanted to. I don't think that he does want to because he's focused on the real mission: the free Web. He's working with us, I, for one, am willing to set aside my trepidation and work with him, too.

I say to the larger community calling for the ouster of Brendan Eich, “please don't succumb to the knee jerk reaction.” I did at first, but with some thought, I realize that we need to focus on the future not exact retribution for the past.

http://www.twobraids.com/2014/04/back-into-light.html

A lot has been written about Mozilla in these last few weeks. Some of it is thoughtful, thought-provoking, heartfelt, helpful and necessary. Some of it is politically charged and sometimes factually plain wrong.

I have a hard time reconsolidating all that has been done, happened, said or not said over the last two weeks. I spent more time at Mozilla than at any other organization; I met some of the most brilliant people there; some of my best friends are or were there. I had the great fortune to spend my last year at Mozilla working directly with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s co-founder and chairperson.

When I first joined Mozilla, after spending all my life in startups, around tech entrepreneurs and as an investor, it took me a year before I even began to fundamentally understand what Mozilla really is. How it is different. How it is not just a company or a non-profit organization but something utterly unique. Dee Hock, founder and former chairman of VISA, coined the term Chaord for this structure: A system which is equal parts chaos and order, which allows for distributed decision making, nodal authority and encourages ways to route around the structure. Much like the Internet itself, Mozilla is set up not to be a spider but a starfish (to use another explanation out of Brafman and Beckstrom’s book “The Starfish and the Spider”).

And yet – during the last two weeks the world looked at Mozilla through the lens of any other organization. An organization which lives and dies by its leader. Where the leader is the focal point of its universe, much like the queen bee in a bee hive.

I don’t believe this to be true. Mozilla is a living organism, made up of its paid staff and vast volunteer base. Decisions are made in a meritocratic way. Mozilla deserves to be seen as what it is – a group of people coming together to make the Web better. Mozilla is not, and never was, its CEO; unlike for example Steve Jobs' Apple, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook or Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s Google. Mozilla’s former CEO John Lilly was fond of saying: “I must be the only CEO in tech who can’t dictate the color of a button in our product.”

I wish for us all to understand that Mozilla is different and treat it accordingly. And for Mozilla to grow new (starfish) arms.

To my friends at Mozilla: The world needs you. To everyone else: If you wish to understand Mozilla better, watch this speech by John Lilly on “Lessons from Mozilla” at WordCamp 2009, it’s hands-down one of the best explanations of Mozilla’s uniqueness I’ve ever seen.

http://blog.finette.com/on-mozilla

I wrote the bulk of this post shortly after the event but then due to a number of things, including work, forgetfulness and the recent events within Mozilla, I never edited and published it. In the spirit of ‘better late than never’ here it is:

Most mornings I would groan at having to get up at 5:30, and I would love to say one Saturday three weeks ago was an exception. Sadly, it wasn’t, but the grogginess of having to wake up so early had soon cleared away by the time I was on a rather empty train going down to Bristol.

That Saturday I spent my day helping out at a small event in Bristol, organised by the local Bristol and Bath Linux User Group, aimed at converting users of the soon-to-be EOLed Windows XP to a Linux distribution.

While the event wasn’t quite as well attended as the organisers had hoped, there were still a number of attendees I managed to talk to about Mozilla and Firefox, and the time not spent talking to attendees was filled with other interesting discussions.

I had a number of goals for the event but a few of these got thrown out of the window when the technological knowledge of most attendees was slightly higher than I expected. Because of this, rather than spend time explaining what a web browser was to people, I focused on telling the Mozilla story, and helping users with any problems they had in Firefox.

I also ended up imparting some Linux knowledge to attendees, being a reasonably longtime user of Arch Linux.

Only the other day I was invited by one of the organisers to a re-run of the event. I fully intend to attend, as with a few more people there, this event format feels like it could be very successful.

My thanks goes out to the organisers: the event was a great opportunity to talk to people about the Mozilla story, and meet some ‘real life’ Firefox users and help and discuss problems they had (one of which I intend to blog about when I get round to it).

Both images by David Fear used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

http://leomca.github.com/2014/04/05/LinuxLive-Bristol-2014.html

Thunderbird doesn't actually use the new code quite yet (as my current tree is stuck on a mozilla-central build error, so I haven't had time to run those patches through a last minute sanity check before requesting review), but the intent is to replace the current C++ implementations of nsIMsgHeaderParser and nsIMimeConverter with JSMime instead. Once those are done, I will be moving forward with my structured header plans which more or less ought to make those interfaces obsolete.

Within JSMime itself, the pieces which I will be working on next will be rounding out the implementation of header parsing and encoding support (I have prototypes for Date headers and the infernal RFC 2231 encoding that Content-Disposition needs), as well as support for building MIME messages from their constituent parts (a feature which would be greatly appreciated in the depths of compose and import in Thunderbird). I also want to implement full IDN and EAI support, but that's hampered by the lack of a JS implementation I can use for IDN (yes, there's punycode.js, but that doesn't do StringPrep). The important task of converting the MIME tree to a list of body parts and attachments is something I do want to work on as well, but I've vacillated on the implementation here several times and I'm not sure I've found one I like yet.

JSMime, as its name implies, tries to work in as pure JS as possible, augmented with several web APIs as necessary (such as TextDecoder for charset decoding). I'm using ES6 as the base here, because it gives me several features I consider invaluable for implementing JavaScript: Promises, Map, generators, let. This means it can run on an unprivileged web page—I test JSMime using Firefox nightlies and the Firefox debugger where necessary. Unfortunately, it only really works in Firefox at the moment because V8 doesn't support many ES6 features yet (such as destructuring, which is annoying but simple enough to work around, or Map iteration, which is completely necessary for the code). I'm not opposed to changing it to make it work on Node.js or Chrome, but I don't realistically have the time to spend doing it myself; if someone else has the time, please feel free to contact me or send patches.

http://quetzalcoatal.blogspot.com/2014/04/announcing-jsmime-02.html

I read this morning Andrew Truong's blog on planet:

I guess it's okay to speak out about how we truly feel when somebody resigns over a controversial topic but not to speak out during the controversy? We should ALWAYS speak out. Freedom of Speech.

The reason why I didn't speak up is, just like many other Mozillians I suspect, for fear of retribution. Seeing the attacks perpetrated on Brendan, a well-respected member of the Mozilla community, I can only imagine the torrent of hatemail that I'm going to get for publishing this blog post. (Update: so far, I didn't get any hatemail. It seems like the fears were unjustified.) The other reason is, I didn't want to further encourage a debate which I hoped would fade off after a few days. I somehow hoped we could go back to "business as usual". We were unable to, and thus I see no reason to hold back this blog post anymore.

I live in Europe. We tend to have a different opinion on these matters. But in any case, before you go any further down, I should just mention that I do support the right for anyone to marry the one they love, and I voted according to that belief for the last few elections in my country. I am a straight person, though.

I'm going to quote a few blog posts that resonate with me, and add a few comments.

Daniel wrote:

Who said "Mozilla Community"? Who said Openness? Pfffff. I've been a Mozillian for fourteen years and I'm not even sure I still recognize myself in today's Mozilla Community. Well done guys, well done. What's the next step? 100% political correctness? Is it still possible to have a legally valid personal opinion while being at Mozilla and express it in public?

From private conversations I had with other (mostly European) Mozillians, I know for certain that people have opinions that they are afraid to express in the Mozilla Community. Some people are religious, and will take great care _not_ to reveal that fact. Some people may have other beliefs that do not align with the dominant, Silicon-Valley progressive ideology. They also make sure that these are not apparent. Andrew Truong mentions freedom of speech. I believe there is freedom of speech in the Mozilla community as long as you happen to have the right opinions.

In my personal case, I fortunately happen to side with the prevalent ideology for most points, but I am now very afraid of slipping and expressing an opinion that is not considered progressive enough. I am now afraid of what is going to happen to me then: will I be kicked out? Will people call out for my name being removed from about:credits? Will people call on Twitter for my being ousted from Mozillians.org?

Ben Moskowitz wrote:

For the record, I don’t believe Brendan Eich is a bigot. He’s stubborn, not hateful. He has an opinion. It’s certainly not my opinion, but it was the opinion of 52% of people who voted on Prop 8 just six years ago, and the world is changing fast.

Again, my European point of view on the matter is simple: I interact in my daily life with many people who do not support same-sex marriage. I'm pretty sure some bosses up my hierarchy do not support that. I believe that, ultimately, there will be less and less such people, and that society will change enough that being against same-sex marriage will be a thing of the past. I also believe that as long as my bosses do their jobs, I'm fine with that. I do not care about the personal life of my president; I just care for him to run the country according to the values that his party adheres to. Same thing goes for Brendan.

Christie, who in a much better position that I am to speak about that, says:

Certainly it would be problematic if Brendan’s behavior within Mozilla was explicitly discriminatory, or implicitly so in the form of repeated microagressions. I haven’t personally seen this (although to be clear, I was not part of Brendan’s reporting structure until today). To the contrary, over the years I have watched Brendan be an ally in many areas and bring clarity and leadership when needed. Furthermore, I trust the oversight Mozilla has in place in the form of our chairperson, Mitchell Baker, and our board of directors.

The way people demanded a public apology reminded me of the glorious times of Soviet Russia and Communist China. What next? Should Brendan be photoshopped out of all the pictures? If we leave the matter as is, the only reasonable thing left to do is to add an extra round of interviews when hiring people: the political interview. There, we should make sure that the people we hire share the "right" political opinion. Otherwise, it seems like they is no space for them in the Mozilla Community.

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us.

While being a strong supporter of the movement, I really feel sad today: what legitimacy is there now for people who've been dragging through the mud an opponent, instead of treating them like a decent, human being? Is this what Mozilla is about?

(Comments are disabled on this post.)

http://blog.xulforum.org/index.php?post/2014/04/04/Freedom-of-speech-in-the-Mozilla-Community

This week I’ve been:

• Much happier and I’ve generally had more energy. I put this down to a combination of not drinking any alcohol or coffee, making sure I get enough sleep, and tracking everything.
• Trying to stay focused in the wake of all that’s been happening within Mozilla.
• Attending a SuperMondays event on ‘Makers’.
• Finishing off a Webmaker whitepaper. We’ll announce it and invite community feedback when things have calmed down a bit.
• Experimenting with going for a walk instead of running to see if it makes any difference to my migraines.
• Increasing the number of lengths I do at the swimming pool. I’m up to 56.
• Responding to feedback on my DMLcentral post about Open Badges.
• Messing around and testing out the private beta of BadgeKit.
• Re-publishing my post about ‘Super Mentor badges’ on the Mozilla Webmaker blog.
• Moderating this week’s #TeachTheWeb community call. It was a particularly good call this week, I thought. You can catch up here.
• Commenting on the Scottish Qualifications Authority’s new Digital Literacy Competency Framework.
• Responding to feedback on the WebLitMapper.
• Turning down requests to speak at events and run workshops. I’m enjoying travelling less at the moment (although I’ve got a bit of travel coming up over the next few weeks).
•  Talking with Bryan Mathers and Tim Riches about a ‘Digital Skills Sandwich’ idea and how it relates to the Web Literacy Map (now at v1.1.o!) and Open Badges.
• Starting work on applying Carla Casilli’s 3PBS badge system to Webmaker badges. I talked to her about it on Thursday, too.
• Creating resources for aligning with the Web Literacy Map.
• Replying to interview questions from Shreyas Narayanan, a Mozilla contributor. You can read the interview on his blog.
• Starting planning for the Oppi Festival next week.
• Working out my expenses for February and March.

Next week I’m at home on Monday and Tuesday, then I’m off to Helsinki, Finland for the Oppi Festival. I’m speaking and running workshops with Melissa Romaine and Emily Goligoski.

Image CC BY-NC-SA Daniel Kulinski

http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2014/04/05/weeknote-142014/

Out of everything I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.

- Ozzy Osbourne

The last few days were horrible. Not like my house burned down and I lost a limb horrible or people put me in prison and violating me horrible, but a lot of pressure, a barrage of anger and a feeling of helplessness. Also a feeling of betrayal and a feeling of being powerless.

All of this when my passion and my job is to be encouraging, to find the good, to emphasise it and to challenge people to find what makes them happy and effective.

Of course, I am talking about the issue with Brendan Eich being appointed CEO and his subsequent stepping down as CEO. Stepping down from the cause that drove him for 15 years and helped to a large part create the open web that made all of this possible.

(Oh, oh, oh, when oh when will be the part when the writer says that he is pro or against gay rights? Where is the punch line, where can I copy and paste my angry comment in?)

Yes, this is important to mention: without the work of Mozilla we’d not have the open web we have now. Social media wouldn’t have happened. The web would be a business thing: grey boxes in offices and people not having the choice to write and publish but people being paid to twist and turn words until the most catchy and debate-arousing headline comes out.

Brendan did a personal thing: he supported to a political cause that prevents a social change. That is his right. I defend that right. I don’t have to agree with it. This is the moral high ground we have to take. I find it personally disgusting that you can just donate money to a cause this controversial and with high impact on human lives – to me a flaw in the legal system. It makes political social decisions a marketing show where the ones with the most money win (at least a first round).

Of course Brendan’s donation was public record, but not many would have either found it or talked about it nearly as much as we did now on the web. The thing Brendan built up allowed people to easily find ammunition to attack him. “You can’t stop the signal, Mal”.

Curious, isn’t it? Other people posted thought experiments on this.

I was and am utterly torn by this as it affects three things I firmly believe:

• Equality – allowing anyone to be themselves and to love another and show that publicly without repercussion is something that is pretty much defining evolution to me. It is the final agreement to allow others to be different. You grow beyond fear and hate and the arrogance that your way of loving someone else is the only one out there. We need children in order to move on as mankind. We need children who are brought up by people who love them and show them how being nice to another works out. That’s a family and the gender of the parents to me is irrelevant as long as the children are loved and learn. I believe in equality. I don’t believe in bullying and equality meaning that you need to agree with everybody else. Equality means you have the same rights, it doesn’t mean you all need to be the same. That would be stand-still.
• Free speech. I once was at a party by some directors of companies in India. As one of the party games people were asked to sing songs from their parts of India who mean a lot to them. The foreign guests were asked to do the same from their countries. Of course I was the one of our group who had to do it. What I chose was “Die Gedanken sind frei“, a song from 1810 describing the power of thoughts and that they are one’s own and nobody can destroy them. An anthem to the freedom of thought and speech. I believe deeply that you are allowed to think whatever you please, and to say whatever you please. In the latter case, you have to be aware of the consequences though. You have the freedom to speak, but you also should do the human thing and consider what your words do to other people and how they may be perceived. This is damn hard, especially when you are in a world where words are all you see, not the other 80% of human interaction that makes up how we communicate (facial expression, body language, tone of voice…). It also keeps back-firing. Things I say often offend people and I am confused as to why. I don’t know about your frame of reference, and asking for it in many cases lead to unearthing a misunderstanding and agreement and embarrassment on both sides. Don’t assume malice when a lack of information or your current mood might be what makes things appear strange. Ask questions. That’s how we learn.
• The open web. I was a radio journalist. I always adored words and messages. The web as it is moved media to another dimension. You can publish, you have a voice, you don’t need to ask for permission to publish and reach millions of people world wide. You can be the next citizen journalist, inspiring thinker, great writer or painter or musician without being stifled by having to have a degree or get a job where people get paid to be a voice.

All three of these things were perverted and abused and a vehicle for hate, misinformation and soap-boxing the last few days. The trolls ran rampant, the baits were thrown, the truisms spouted silenced the few timid voices of reason and sensible debate.

When the outrage was how a person with a different belief and – to me – very doubtful political action got made CEO people ganged up on Mozilla, my colleagues and friends and me how that could happen and how we can allow that.

This was unfair. I neither donated (again, I find the concept of paying to support a political cause unethical as it makes politics a marketing and budget game rather than ideas game), nor did I vote for Brendan as CEO. Accusing me of supporting the same ideas my CEO has makes me a sheep, not a knowledge worker. I have colleagues who say things publicly I disagree with. Great. Let people decide who to agree with.

It gets even more unfair when you are continuously asked to give your opinion with loaded questions created to lead you to agree with the asker. That’s bullying. It doesn’t help a cause. If you already know the answer you want give me a command to say it. Don’t expect me to comply though. If you want answers, ask questions. Not the equivalent of a loaded gun to my chest. I am not the one whose decisions you are disagreeing with.

It gets even more annoying when your attempts to ask for people to grant others to have a right of their own opinion (“I disagree with you but I fight for your right to have your opinion” anyone?) get pushed into impossible to defend emotional space. This happens over and over again: “How can you say $x is OK when $horriblething happens to $targetgroup and you never experienced that?”

For a cynical person, this would be a great way out: “OK, I am not $x, so it is not my problem, you just claimed that I have no right to an opinion as I never experienced the suffering. Done.”

To someone who cares, this makes one feel like shit and powerless to respond. No, I don’t want to agree with you by disallowing others to have another opinion. This is not black and white. If you win by silencing others you don’t win. You make them angry, go back into their world of fear and hatch more brutal responses.

Cue the change after Brendan stepped down. Now Mozilla, my friends and colleagues and me get badgered by the “Conservatives”. Some good voices there, some amazing points and on the whole more eloquent debates (once you deleted the 80% of utterly insane hate mail). This is attacking my deep belief in free speech as this is the thing people wave in my face.

Here’s my view on this: free speech is a gift, it is a force to tell people what you think and make them your allies. You have the right to just shout and scream and spout hatred but with this you sully what free speech is about. It is not a way out for me to allow you the right to hurt other people and limit their freedom of expression. That leads to circular reasoning as that would mean their right to freedom of speech is limited.

You would expect that in this new round of noise and screaming and accusations my former attackers would chime in. You know, a “the enemy of your enemy is your friend” kind of scenario. But that doesn’t happen much. Instead, most of the mood seems to be “we won, but this is sad”.

Where does that leave the situation? I was accused of supporting a cause I don’t because I don’t speak out against someone who I believe can have his own opinion. I was told that because he was hired in an assumed hierarchy above me. That makes me feel angry. You are telling me I have no ideas of my own but just because I don’t disagree, I follow. You also assume that the person was not professional and brought his beliefs to work. Which makes you question how the place I work in functions. I outlined that you couldn’t be further from the truth.

All in all, this is not how dealing with people you disagree with works. For example:

I understand that there are circumstances that can make people be racist. I don’t have to agree with that. I see that as a challenge to find out what made them who they are. Maybe I will learn something that way.

Don’t boo the Klansman when he speaks. Listen to him, find out how your enemy thinks. If you boo him though, he’ll just ‘sieg heil’ and storm off the stage.

– Henry Rollins

Now I get the conservative camp to accuse Mozilla, my friends and colleagues and me about killing free speech.

I want to give up. I feel an urge to say “fuck it” and go and build a closed app that allows you to take photos and put some crap on them, sell it to another big company and live on a beach for the rest of my life. Or I could start a “tech news blog” that lives on borderline libelous headlines and causing controversy in the tech bubble and get my money from ad clicks and impressions.

Nobody, really and utterly nobody who is in this won anything here. All that happened is that a man who we have to thank for a lot of his work stepped down and stops being in the company he started.

The LGBT movement didn’t win anything – all it is seen now is as a bully that disallows free speech, kerosene on the fire of those who talk about a “gay agenda”.

All that happens is that the already rivaling and disagreeing parties become more aggressive and the people in the middle have to deal with it. And that the open and free web is used once more to make each other feel shit by not even caring about starting a conversation.

Governments try to censor the web, companies try to make you charge for it. Your voice, your freedom of speech, your incredibly powerful and simple to use channel out. And they might just succeed if you keep allowing the hooligans of the web to be the loudest voice out there.

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

- Albert Camus

I will not give up. I will stand with my friends and colleagues and I will try my best to keep this going. It is important, it is good. It gives people a voice and I deep down believe people are good and have great things to say. I will concentrate on these people. And I want people to think hard of what you achieve by a storm happening every few months in social media and tech about human issues. Is it worth getting the short attention or would your work be more fruitful if you really did something for the cause you really care about rather than clicking a “like”, re-tweet an unverified but outrageous “fact” or repeating trigger words?

We have Godwin’s Law that states is commonly used as an opportunity by admins (thanks for pointing out my error, Mikael) that if you try to argue with a Nazi analogy on the internet, you lost the argument. Can I offer “Heilmann’s law”?

If you use the word “bigot” or “thought police” you lost the internet argument.

Presumptious? Maybe. But I dislike people being lazy in their argumentation. Especially when it is about important issues.

http://christianheilmann.com/2014/04/05/torn-and-weary/

I started learning japanese calligraphy a few months ago, with no prior experience with a brush and ink. It is an interesting endeavour. For various reasons, I had to skip class for a few weeks, but after the past ten days, I needed some stress relief on paper.

http://glandium.org/blog/?p=3254

Hi. My name is Gervase Markham. I’m a supporter of traditional marriage, and I work for Mozilla. In fact, as far as being on the record goes, I believe I’m now the only one.

Many people who agree with me on this issue are very upset about what happened to Brendan Eich, our co-founder and, for two weeks, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation. Brendan was appointed and then, after 10 days under the Internet’s lens of anger based on his donation in opposition to the redefinition of marriage, stepped down and stepped away from Mozilla – to our great loss.

I am assured by sources I trust that Brendan decided to leave of his own accord – he was not forced out. My understanding is that the senior management of Mozilla (many of whom disagree with him on this issue) worked very hard to support him, even if I would not agree with all the actions they took in doing so. However, he eventually felt that it was impossible for him to focus on leading if he was spending all of his time dealing with the continued, relentless news and social media storm surrounding the donation he made. In other words, he wasn’t forced out from the inside – he was dragged out from the outside.

So, here’s my plea: please don’t be angry with Mozilla. Mozilla and what it does and stands for is too important to the future of the free web to allow this to do it damage. It was us who brough innovation back to the web browser market and started the process which led to the awesome web you use today. And now, we’re trying to do the same with the closed smartphone market. I believe that connecting billions of people in the developing world to the web at minimal cost and with full fidelity will lead to the next great advance in human flourishing, as people can use the information they discover to make their own lives better. That’s our goal.

If you can’t find it in your heart to forgive them (the course I would recommend), then your anger is best directed at those outside Mozilla who made his position untenable. The press that twist and sensationalize without investigation, social media which magnifies and over-simplifies without consideration, and those who rush to judgement without understanding. I’m not going to name names or organizations. But as far as Mozilla itself goes, please, please continue to support us.

I am determined to work to make all Mozillians of whatever beliefs – and whatever actions they take outside of Mozilla in support of those beliefs – confident that, if they can work with other Mozillians as Brendan did so well for 15 years, Mozilla is a place for them. How successful we’ll be at that depends on how our community deals with what just happened – but it also depends on you. If you jump to paint Mozilla in the colours of ‘the opposition’, that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the world will be poorer for it.

Mozilla is caught in the middle of a worldview war. Let’s not make the free web a casualty.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/HackingForChrist/~3/lGNogXu-dkU/

http://featherweightmusings.blogspot.com/2014/04/some-thoughts-on-data-structures-in-rust.html

http://www.jnchen.com/blog/2014/04/let-s-not-protest-protesters

We’ve been trying to figure this out for Webmaker. Here’s a proposal:

• 1) Start small. Figure out our product testing strategy *for Q2.* (Instead of “everything we need to do to get better at testing.” Which feels too overwhelming.) What are the most important things to test and learn this quarter?
  • Proposal: start with the key Engagement Ladder stuff. We’ve said those calls to action are the most important — let’s make sure they’re clear and feel good for users, and identify where they’re bailing or getting stuck. For example:
    • Sign up. Create an account.
    • Create an event.
    • Make a teaching kit.
    • Issue a mentor badge.
  • Why start here? Because we’ve said these pathways are the *most* important. In terms of reaching our 10k contributors goal. We should do usability testing to see where users are getting stuck here, and ship incremental improvements to address those.
• 2) Focus on testing with lead users. People teaching the web. These users are signing up for Webmaker training, and will be using and offering feedback on Webmaker stuff over the next several weeks. This is a prime opportunity. What do we want to feed in there? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webmaker/Testing
• 3) Unstick usertesting.com. aka:

Let’s make it easy for people to test whatever the hell they want, all the time.

• It doesn’t seem like we’re really making full use of usertesting.com as an asset.  Let’s figure out why. (e.g., not sure of process / don’t have log-in / don’t have time / need training / ?) How do we make it easy and permissionless for our devs and designers to play there?
  • For example: when Aali wants to test right-to-left in Popcorn, why can’t he just go ahead and do it? How do we make running a test on usertesting.com as easy and standard as writing a blog post?
• 4) Optimize the process for sharing out the findings. Understanding what we’re learning from this testing. And then feeding it back into the product. That’s always the hard part. I think we win there by doing usability testing on the small number of things mentioned in (1), rather than “let’s test everything.”
• 5) Update the Webmaker get involved page. This is where we’re sending folks now. Review and optimize.

What’s missing / wrong? Please comment here.

http://openmatt.org/2014/04/04/product_testing/

I know a lot of us, no matter hailing from whatever cultures, old-timer or otherwise, volunteer, employee or otherwise, will pull ourselves through.

And we’ll survive and emerge stronger.

http://garykwong.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/too-much-has-happened-recently-in-too-little-time/

The Release Readiness Dashboard chose Elastic Search as the source of Bugzilla data because it was fast and provided a convenient means of retrieving historic information for plotting trends. However, the native queries used to request data from Elastic Search clusters are long, ugly, and horrible JSON objects.

To solve the issue of dealing with ugly Elastic Search queries, the administrator of Bugzilla’s Elastic Search cluster has set up a helpful Javascript library for web developers. It acts as a middle layer for requesting data from the Elastic Search cluster using Qb queries instead of native Elastic Search queries. The RRDashboard uses the Qb Javascript library.

Qb queries, similar to Elastic Search queries, are JSON formatted objects. One might now ask the question of what Qb queries are, and how it has an advantage over native Elastic Search queries if both are just about as obscure as the other. Qb queries for one, are much shorter than native Elastic Search queries. They are also a lot more read-able.

Coming from an obscure background, the problem with writing Qb queries still persists. The release management team will have significant difficulty in adopting the RRDashboard if they are unable to form Qb queries that request the same data they are currently pulling using the Bugzilla search interface. I am now ready to introduce the Qb query builder.

When the release management team builds a query using the Bugzilla search interface, a long Bugzilla URL is generated containing the query parameters. As an input to the Qb query builder, this Bugzilla URL can be directly translated into a Qb query after specifying some other required parameters like the cluster to query against. In the background, here is what actually happens.

Upon submitting the form on the Qb query builder, a big Javascript event handler is triggered. The search parameters are extracted from the submitted Bugzilla URL, then re-appended to the Bugzilla search interface’s URL. Using a CURL request, we receive an enormous HTML string containing the Bugzilla search interface’s page filled with user-specified search parameters. Scraping then occurs on each individual page element to extract the search parameters, which are then appended into a JSON object formatted as a Qb query.

The benefit of such an implementation is that this is as simple as it will ever get for an end-user to work between Bugzilla and Qb queries. Unfortunately, there are also significant limitations to this implementation.

Scraping HTML of the Bugzilla search interface implies that the Qb query tool is very dependent on how the views of Bugzilla are generated. If the HTML layout of the Bugzilla search interface changes, the Qb query builder will lose its accuracy and start missing search parameters in the output Qb queries. A possible alternative is directly parsing the Bugzilla URL without doing a CURL request to get the HTML. However, this can be a potentially complex task to handle and will require more time beyond what I current have as an intern.

Another limitation to the Qb query builder is that it can be buggy. Bugzilla’s search interface is a mature product that can handle many different combinations of search parameters. The Qb query builder, on the other hand, is new and may not be able to handle as many varieties of querying as Bugzilla can. As a result, until the Qb query builder matures enough to handle all the corner cases that Bugzilla may throw at it, users of the tool may occasionally have to modify the output Qb queries manually to get what they want.

http://blog.williecheong.com/release-readiness-dashboardqb-query-builder/

What’s the best way to support Mozilla right now?

5 simple suggestions:

1. Tweet some love using #mozlove or #standwithmozilla
2. Use the “MozLove” avatar. You can download it here: http://mzl.la/mozlove
3. Download Firefox. Or encourage others to switch http://www.mozilla.org/firefox
4. Make a donation. Mozilla is a non-profit community dedicated to protecting the open web. http://mozilla.org/donate
5. Get more involved with Mozilla’s non-profit mission. http://www.mozilla.org/contribute

http://openmatt.org/2014/04/04/shiplove/

Major highlights:

• Kim started evaluating options for hosted Mac hardware.
• Aki started standing up builds for “Flame”, the first Firefox reference device.
• Rail long standing manual parts of our Firefox release process.
• Massimo revamped our builder prioritization to make it easier to prioritize l10n builds properly, and make prioritization more dynamically adjustable.

Completed work (resolution is ‘FIXED’):

• Balrog: Backend
• No update served while aurora update frozen
• Buildduty
• Windows 8 tests failing across all branches
• EC2 test spot instances with 15GB disk running low on (or completely out of) available disk when checking out gaia-1_4, gaia-1_2 and gaia-central under /builds/hg-shared/integration
• General Automation
• Android clobber clobbers things such that ant can’t be found
• Change birch config and add jacuzzis
• Add ssltunnel to xre.zip bundle used for b2g tests
• Schedule Android 4.0 Debug M4,M5,M6,M7,J1,J2,J3 (only) on all trunk trees and make them ride the trains
• mozharness’ unit.sh should list ‘mock’ as a dependency
• Schedule Android 2.3 mochitest,xpcshell,robocop tests (only) on all trunk trees and make them ride the trains
• mozharness should treat warnings containing “SyntaxError” keywords as warnings
• decommission (releng side) aws buildbot masters migrated to scl3
• Add configs for debug B2G Mac OS X desktop builds & enable on mozilla-central and mozilla-aurora
• Please remove hamachi.zip and the out folder from the ril build for hamachi
• Make –enable-debug gecko device builds for B2G
• Mozharness install step should catch failures due to insufficient disk space
• Rename cppunittest to cppunit in mobile_config.py
• AWS manager can’t reach buildbot masters
• [Flame]figure out how to create “Flame” builds manually
• Please schedule desktop jit-tests on all trunk trees and make them ride the trains
• stop importing WithProperties in buildbot-configs
• Add configs for debug B2G linux64 desktop builds
• enable_nightly is in birch twice
• Schedule desktop tests only on Holly
• Please build b2g and gaia parts for the Tarako build based on bug 956631 output
• Add tooltool support to Windows builds
• Increase free space requirement for linux debug builds
• purge_builds needs to know about different partitions
• Loan Requests
• please loan jmaher an ec2 machine equal to a linux32-spot instance
• Other
• Stage MozillaBuild 1.9.0
• releng jenkins is down
• Upgrade ASan Clang in Q1
• ReadTheDocs not regenerating slaveapi documentation
• Stage MozillaBuild 1.8.0
• Use pymake by default on Windows
• Use mozmake for b2g win32 builds
• Use mozmake for some windows builds
• Platform Support
• Switch 32-bits linux builds to x86-64 mock environments
• do initial planning on “chunks” of machines to move.
• Releng Config/Automation support of staging run of scl1->scl3 move
• Release Automation
• xr_postrelease failed for 29.0b4
• Generate 1.3T Tarako builds twice a day (9am China time – UTC+8)
• Update firefox-latest, firefox-stub, firefox-latest-euballot bouncer aliases as a part of post-release builder (and same for beta)
• run xulrunner post-release task automatically after Firefox post-release
• Releases
• Bad link on ftp.mozilla.org to xulrunner builds
• Show Australis tour page upon update for en-US on Beta
• Releases: Custom Builds
• Version bumps for FF 28 builds
• Repos and Hooks
• Create hg mirror of gaia 1.3t branch
• Tools
• Can’t assimilate loaner instance on aws-manager1.srv.releng.scl3.mozilla.com
• Add jittest to trychooser
• update beta2release to current working version
• Display Most recent 10 slaveapi calls, not oldest 10
• self-serve agents eat exceptions, causing stalls
• Remove cppunittest for Android as option in TryChooser
• host instance: ‘None’ stopped for 1348 hours.

In progress work (unresolved and not assigned to nobody):

• Buildduty
• Please add t-mavericks-r5-002 and t-mavericks-r5-003 to graphserver
• General Automation
• Make blobber uploads discoverable
• Port TryBuildFactory to Mozharness for fx desktop builds
• branch gaia l10n repos
• Do debug B2G desktop builds
• m-c b2g version should be 2.0, not 1.5
• disable confusing double runs of mochitest-bc for linux debug
• Mozharness test configs should live in-tree
• Bengali in 1.3t builds
• fx desktop builds in mozharness
• generate “flatfish” builds for B2G
• Fully decommission no longer used buildbot masters
• prioritize l10n nightlies below everything, regardless of branch
• revamp b2g upload configs
• Run additional hidden 3 debug mochitest-browser-chrome chunks and b2g reftests
• Cloning of hg.mozilla.org/build/tools and hg.mozilla.org/integration/gaia-central often times out with “command timed out: 1200 seconds without output, attempting to kill”, “command timed out: 1800 seconds without output, attempting to kill”
• Enable all mozharness desktop build linux variants on Cedar
• Get e10s tests running on inbound, central, and try
• Make it possible to run gaia try jobs *without* doing a build
• Updates not properly signed on the nightly-ux branch: Certificate did not match issuer or name.
• Don’t require puppet or DNS to launch new instances
• Decommission the ionmonkey tree
• Split up mochitest-bc on desktop into ~30minute chunks
• Run jit-tests from test package
• Loan Requests
• Slave loan request for a VS2013 build machine
• Loan t-w864-ix-003 to jrmuizel
• Slave loan request for a tst-linux64-ec2 machine
• Slave loan request for a w64-ix machine
• Request Loan Machine for tst-linux64-spot
• Other
• [tracking] infrastructure improvements
• s/m1.large/m3.medium/
• Platform Support
• Upgrade Valgrind on build machines to 3.9.0
• [tracker] Move away from the rev3 minis
• Run unittests/talos on OS X 10.9 Mavericks
• clean up mobile_config.py
• Release Automation
• Thunderbird Windows L10n repack builds failed with pymake enabled
• cache MAR + installer downloads in update verify
• release repacks needs to submit data to balrog
• Releases
• Add SeaMonkey 2.26 Beta 1 to bouncer
• Repos and Hooks
• find RFO for git.m.o OOM condition in bug 985864
• Tools
• update relman scripts based on notes from first usage
• vcs-sync needs to populate mapper db once it’s live
• Update SlaveAPI sphynx docs to reflect recent changes
• Add an option to trychooser to select Talos profiling options
• Using slaveapi to reboot a machine on the slave health page results in “list index out of range” under ‘output’
• tool to compare different sources of slave and master data
• slaveapi’s shutdown_buildslave action doesn’t cope well with a machine that isn’t connected to buildbot
• Add Windows support to aws_stop_idle.py
• db-based mapper on web cluster
• legacy vcs-sync process doesn’t auto retry when it should
• SlaveAPI should be more precise on request TS
• legacy vcs-sync doesn’t AUTOFIX git hangs

http://hearsum.ca/blog/this-week-in-mozilla-releng-april-4th-2014/

A large number of external applications have grown up around Bugzilla serving a variety of purposes. One thing many of these apps have in common is a need to get updates from Bugzilla. Unfortunately, the only way to get notifications of changes was, until recently, to poll Bugzilla. Everyone knows that polling is bad, particularly because it doesn’t scale well, but until recently there was no alternative.

Thus I would like to introduce to the world Bugzfeed, a WebSocket app that allows you to subscribe to one or more bugs and get pushed notifications when they change. It’s rather a small app, based on Tornado, and has a very simple interface, so it should scale quite nicely. It relies on a few moving parts to work, but I’ll start with the basics and explain the whole system later.

The production version is at ws://bugzfeed.mozilla.org. I also made a very simple (and ugly) example app for you to use and examine. A development version of Bugzfeed is available at ws://bugzfeed-dev.allizom.org; it’s tied to the development Bugzilla server, so it’s a good place to experiment if you’re a Mozilla contributor; you can make whatever changes you need to bugzilla-dev without worrying about messing with production data. You’ll need to get someone in #bmo on irc.mozilla.org to reset your password, since we periodically refresh and sanitize the database on bugzilla-dev, and email is disabled so you can’t reset it yourself.

(This makes me think that there should probably be a Bugzfeed instance tied to Landfill; maybe I’ll look into that, in particular if we implement middleware other than Pulse (see below).)

Client commands, responses, and notifications are all in JSON format. The project wiki page has the full list of commands. Here’s a little example of what you need to send to subscribe to bugs 1234 and 5678:

{"command": "subscribe", "bugs": [1234, 5678]}

The server will send a simple response, including a list of all the bugs you are (now) subscribed to:

{"command": "subscribe", "result": "ok", "bugs": [1234, 5678]}

Now you can just wait for notifications to be pushed from the server to your app:

{"command": "update", "bug": 1234, "when": "2014-04-03T21:13:45"}

Wait, you are probably asking, that’s it? That’s all I get?

The short answer is yup, that’s it. You can now use the regular REST API to get further details about what changed.

The longer answer is yup, that’s it, because security. Bugzilla has evolved a very fine-grained security system. We have bugs, attachments, and even comments that can only be seen by a privileged few, due to security, legal, and other considerations. Furthermore, many of the variables involved in determining whether a particular user can see a particular bug/attachment/comment can change at any time: not only can elements of a bug shift between public and confidential, but so can a user’s groups, and the groups themselves. Monitoring for all those possible changes would make this app significantly more complex and brittle, so we opted for the most secure notification, which is also the simplest: just a bug ID and a timestamp. All the other work is handled by the standard Bugzilla APIs.

(You might also be asking “why is ‘update’ considered a command?” and, to be honest, I’m not sure, so maybe that’ll change.)

There are other commands, and some limited caching of changes in case your client disconnects; see the project wiki page for more.

So how does it work? Here’s a system diagram created by contributor musingmario:

The four main pieces (with links to source) are

• ZPushNotify, the Bugzilla extension.

• bugzilla_simple_shim, a Python app that consumes from the Bugzilla extension and publishes to Pulse.

• Pulse, a RabbitMQ server (with a supporting Python package).

• Bugzfeed, the WebSocket server.

On the Bugzilla side, the BMO team created an extension which writes the bug ID and timestamp to a table when any bug changes. A simple Python app polls this table and sends all the updates to Pulse, cleaning up the table as it does so.

Pulse is a Mozilla RabbitMQ server with a specific configuration and message format implementing the publish/subscribe pattern. The usage is somewhat Mozilla specific, but it would be pretty easy to set up a similar system or even modify Bugzfeed and the Bugzilla shim to use RabbitMQ directly, or a different AMQP system like OMQ.

Notifications from all bugs flow through Pulse; it is Bugzfeed, the WebSocket server, that does the filtering for its clients to notify only on subscribed bugs. Subscribing to individual notifications from Pulse is possible via topics, but this requires one channel per bug, so I doubt it would be any more efficient if hundreds of clients are connected to Bugzfeed.

While you could have the Bugzfeed server read directly from the Bugzilla database, eliminating the shim and the queuing system, having an intermediary allows us to easily stand up more Bugzfeed servers if load gets too high, as each Bugzfeed instance would see the stream of changes via its own subscriber queue. We can also easily interface new applications to the notification stream, such as the BMO Elastic Search cluster.

Enough technicalities; go out and play with it! And if you want to adapt it for your own Bugzilla installation, I’d be more than willing to help out.

http://mrcote.info//blog/2014/04/04/bugzfeed-bugzilla-push-notifications/

With Brendan resigning from Mozilla, like many others, I have mixed emotions. It's tough to have the past haunt and chase you but trying to keep strong at the same time is hard. As a volunteer moderating the Facebook page, it was evident that we had many users complaining and very little supporters. Now that Brendan has resigned, everybody has all of a sudden come out from a shadow. Unexpectedly to say at the least, is that we've got users telling us that we were no longer protecting Freedom of speech and that rights are taken away. Where have these people been hiding?

I guess it's okay to speak out about how we truly feel when somebody resigns over a controversial topic but not to speak out during the controversy? We should ALWAYS speak out. Freedom of Speech.

http://feer56.ca/?p=111

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” -John Stuart Mill

I used to be involved in Mozilla… In the run up to Firefox 1.0 10 years ago I was responsible for developing the early verson of the Mozilla Add-ons website. Things change.Later, I became responsible for firebot, after the other IRC bots gradually went offline, I took over mozbot development, such as it is, as owner of the most used bot on the platform, it made sense. Again, things change.

I still maintain firebot, but I don’t actively develop it. Now, I’m a student and photographer at my university and my life has moved away from being involved in the tech. community. I still use my technical skills to help where I can, which is why I accepted a position doing web development and technical management for student media this past fall. Its been a challenge balancing a mostly visual medium and a technical one at the same time. Things changed again.

Since my involvement long ago I also became comfortable with being gay and am lucky enough to have been in a relationship with a guy I love and I know loves me. It takes courage to face adversity in society, and that’s not a virtue I possess much of. Though I’ve come to value difference. Though at the same time, its important not to see valuing difference vs. valuing similarity as a dichotomy where you have to choose only one. We’re all similar in so many ways and sometimes, the difference is small. Embracing the difference can over time, create even more difference. Its harder to see how we’re the same as somebody else than it is to see difference.

I’ve also come to realize that change, isn’t always progressive, and what looks like progress can hide other dangers. Progress is self-validating for the thing labeled progressive, and its too easy to dismiss those that seem to stand in its way but that is no more right than any other form of censorship, of devaluing one way of conceiving of an idea, like what it means to be attracted to someone, or how to construct their lives together, as opposed to another.

I’ve seen recently, too many comments that want to devalue people who stand in the way of progress as exactly the thing that they are trying to fight. LGBT issues were marginalized, and oppressed by society. Oppression is wrong, but don’t be too quick to think that marginalized groups can’t marginalize others, pushing views aside because they fail to meet socially acceptable criteria, whether that criteria is progress, equality or religion and heteronormativity. We might just all realize that for all someones faults, combining ideas, and not combating them, might just result in a new idea, a new change for all.

http://www.psychoticwolf.net/2014/04/things-change/