Mozilla

Mozilla uses CentOS for their Linux builders. They have up to this point also been running their unit tests on CentOS, but Armen has now switched the Linux unit tests over to 32- and 64-bit Fedora. This is a great win, because it means that Firefox will be tested against a more-current environment.

Greg, you've made some fantastic points, but now you and everyone interested in the teaching of Open Source need to get on the TOS mailing list so we can work on the solutions

It was great having the Mozilla DevDays at Seneca on Monday and Tuesday. Monday's sessions were aimed at getting new developers up to speed on the Mozilla platform, and Tuesday's sessions focused on testing. A good portion of the core Firefox devs were here on Tuesday, hacking up a storm (and bringing our wireless network to the edge of meltdown!), and Seneca students and Toronto-area developers had a chance to connect with Mozilla developers from farther afield.

I can’t really see anyone commercializing this or putting into some sort of binary extension, so I don’t think the GPL would really benefit me.

But I think that part of the question should be: Which license will lead to the widest possible use of my work? Conditional cooperation theory, the overall vitality and productivity of the community, gains in personal reputation -- all of these support choosing a license that will make it easy to reuse what you've done, which means a license that is compatible with the widest range of projects that may be interested in your code.

The most popular Open Source license is GPL2, so using the GPL2 ensures compatibility with a huge codebase. Unfortunately, its successor, GPL3, isn't nearly as widely used, and was rejected outright (at least initially) by some projects. The LGPL and BSD License are permissive licenses that encourage reuse. Specific open source projects will have their own licenses.

Perhaps the best option, then, is to select the licenses that are used by the communities closest to your project, and consider dual- or triple-licensing (this works for content as well as code). You'll be in good company -- after all, some very successful projects use a tri-license.

A new group of Seneca students is jumping into Open Source development! We've just selected (Mozilla-related) projects in the OSD600 course -- here's the list:

Over the next 10 weeks, these students will be taking these projects to a "0.3" (usable, maybe not perfectly polished) release. At the same time, David Humphrey is leading another group of OSD700/DPS911 students in taking their existing projects from 0.3 to 1.0 release.

If you're interested in following along on the progress of these projects, I invite you to read our opensource@seneca blog planet and the related wiki or stop by irc://irc.mozilla.org/%24seneca

• Open Source Development Courses at Seneca (Wiki): http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki
• Project list: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Project_List
• OpenSource@Seneca Planet - aggregated blog postings from current and former Open Source development students and faculty: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/~chris.tyler/planet
• Free Software and Open Source Symposium - a two-day event held in October each year: http://fsoss.senecac.on.ca/
• Seneca Centre for Development of Open Source: http://cdot.senecac.on.ca/