Licensing Edgecases
While I’m not a lawyer – and I’m definitely not your lawyer – licensing questions are on my plate these days. As I’ve been digging into one, I’ve come across what looks like a strange edge case in GPL...
View ArticleTime Dilation
[ https://www.youtube.com/embed/JEpsKnWZrJ8 ] I riffed on this a bit over at twitter some time ago; this has been sitting in the drafts folder for too long, and it’s incomplete, but I might as well...
View ArticleQuality Speakings
Unfortunately my suite of annoying verbal tics – um right um right um, which I continue to treat like Victor Borge’s phonetic punctuation – are on full display here, but I guess we’ll have to live with...
View ArticleA Summer Of Code Question
This is a lightly edited response to a question we got on IRC about how to best apply to participate in Google’s “Summer Of Code” program. this isn’t company policy, but I’ve been the one turning the...
View ArticleThe Evolution Of Open
This started its life as a pair of posts to the Mozilla governance forum, about the mismatch between private communication channels and our principles of open development. It’s a little long-winded,...
View ArticleOccasionally Useful
A bit of self-promotion: the UsesThis site asked me their four questions a little while ago; it went up today. A colleague once described me as “occasionally useful, in the same way that an occasional...
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Synchronous Text
Let’s lead with the punchline: the question of what comes after IRC, for Mozilla, is now on my desk. I wasn’t in the room when IRC.mozilla.org was stood up, but from what I’ve heard IRC wasn’t...
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Goals And Constraints
I keep coming back to this: “Open” in this context inextricably ties source control to individual agency. The checks and balances of openness in this context are about standards, data formats, and the...
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The Next Part Of The Process
I’ve announced this upcoming change and the requirements we’ve laid out for a replacement service for IRC, but I haven’t widely discussed the evaluation process in any detail, including what you can...
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Ten More Simple Rules
The Public Library of Science‘s Ten Simple Rules series can be fun reading; they’re introductory papers intended to provide novices or non-domain-experts with a set of quick, evidence-based guidelines...
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Forward Motion
This has been a while coming; thank you for your patience. I’m very happy to be able to share the final four candidates for Mozilla’s new community-facing synchronous messaging system. These...
View ArticleDuty Of Care
A colleague asked me what I thought of this Medium article by Owen Bennett on the application of the UK’s Duty of Care laws to software. I’d had… quite a bit of coffee at that point, and this (lightly...
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80×25
Every now and then, my brain clamps on to obscure trivia like this. It takes so much time. “Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel...
View ArticleThe State Of Mozilla, 2019
As I’ve done in previous years, here’s The State Of Mozilla, as observed by me and presented by me to our local Linux user group. Presentation:[ https://www.youtube.com/embed/RkvDnIGbv4w ] And Q&A:...
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Historical Reasons
I’ve known for a while how to override bash builtins, but it was something I’d long filed under “ok but why” in my mental repository of software esoterica. Until I saw this comment I hadn’t considered...
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Over The Line
[ This first appeared over on the Mozilla community discourse forums. ] You can scroll down to the punchline if you like, but I want to start by thanking the Mozilla community, contributors, industry...
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Dexterity In Depth
I’m exactly one microphone and one ridiculous haircut away from turning into Management Shingy when I get rolling on stuff like this, because it’s just so clear to me how much this stuff matters and...
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Synchronous Messaging: We’re Live.
After a nine month leadup, chat.mozilla.org, our Matrix-based replacement for IRC, has been up running for about a month now. While we’ve made a number of internal and community-facing announcements...
View ArticleBrace For Impact
I don’t spend a lot of time in here patting myself on the back, but today you can indulge me. In the last few weeks it was a ghost town, and that felt like a victory. From a few days after we’d...
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Notice
As far as I can tell, 100% of the google results for “burnout” or “recognizing burnout” boil down to victim-blaming; they’re all about you, and your symptoms, and how to recognize when you’re burning...
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