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European Mozilla Developers Meeting 2003 Notes and Slides

by BRIAN KING | What follows is a brief account of the happenings at Fosdem 2003 in Brussels, 8-9 February, from a Mozilla perspective.
  • The Mozilla sessions were well attended, with outside interest up considerably this year. This was in part due to better advertising on our part, including posters around the campus. The speakers had to deal with a couple of hiccups including a locked garage (Jonas) and sporadic network connections (Gerv's talk relied heavily on this). Everything fell into place in the end. There were talks on some existing modules (XSLT, SVG ...) and new projects (Native Database Support, The Bitflux Editor), and technical content was excellent. We will make every effort to get the slides online this week. The place to look is:
    http://eu.mozdev.org/Brussels2003/talks/.
  • Brian and Kai's main talks were well attended and well received. There was considerable interest in Mozilla including from mainstream Belgian TV show (http://cybercafe.tv/), a student group from Germany doing a sociological study on the Free and Open Source movement, and brisk sales of the O'Reilly Mozilla book.
  • The responsiveness to problems and the hospitality of the Fosdem team was excellent. The atmosphere was one of organised chaos, but it seemed to work. It succeeded for a conference run by volunteers that takes no registration fee.
  • There was ongoing talk over the weekend about the future of the Mozilla project. There have been been recent "rationalisations" at Netscape and some developers have been moved off the project or into different modules. Are external developers becoming more important? Should the module owner list be reviewed? Mozilla will survive but now is a time for re-grouping.
  • I want to especially thank Kai for his tireless work in organising the event, and Andreas Otte for the help he gave before and during the weekend.
  • On a related note, the January (print) issue of Linux Magazine has an article on creating Mozilla applications by Jerry Peek.
    http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-01/toc.html
    The story does not appear to be online yet.
- Brian

P.S. Does anyone pronounce XBL as "zibble"? Answers on a postcard please to Daniel Glazman, c/o Netscape, Paris!

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