In this post, you do call out Chris for making sweeping comments that were very rude. We both know those were misquotes by the reporter, as Chris mentioned in the dev-l10n mailing list the morning the article printed. As you mention, Chris “gets it”…you won’t find a more dedicate member to the Mozilla community than Chris. He is passion is pretty contagious.

But, I thought I would write a more general post about Mozilla l10n process and community.

Here it is: http://blog.mozilla.com/seth/2008/06/25/199/

Thanks for your post.

I agree with you and have posted in several places that the mozilla project needs to redouble its efforts to recruit contributors globally. I’m a firm believer that this is critical to the long term success of the project. We have some success, and some failures trying to recruit people in the past and I think we just need to learn from the failure and putting more energy into this will help a lot. Seth Bindernagel and I are pretty committed to trying to make this happen and want to talk with others that can help.

> a large number of projects tend to fall into the box of being too much interested in localization and not much in anything else.

I don’t think this is true of the Mozilla project. Any place that we have had the time and effort to try and engage new contributors. Look back at the Mozilla project day at FOSS.in as an example. Two sessions on localization, and the rest on building applications on the mozilla platform, understanding the mozilla core technology, accessibility feature work in our core technology, web and project evangelism, and our experience with open source marketing. http://www.spreadfirefox.com/node/358 A lot of these sessions were hosted by active contributors from India in each of the specific areas. Beyond the project day we also held a hacking session where Myk and I worked with Anant Narayanan and a few others to go through the process of looking at and fixing a core mozilla bug, and getting the patch attached to a bug for peer review. His patch was accepted later in the week and made it into Firefox 3. Anant is here in Mt. View this summer working on an internship in Mozilla Labs before going back to grad school in the fall. Efforts like this are not uncommon and it sounds like its the kind of stuff you would like to see from Mozilla and across other projects. Me too!

The kind of things we are doing at Mozilla and we agree are important.

I didn’t get the kind of complaint feedback that you mentioned that was floating around about FOSS.in so if you or anyone else wants to post here or mail me, seth, and mary colvig about what they saw as negative parts about Mozilla’s participation at the conference we would be happy to hear about those things so we can improve.

I’ve also posted to some comments made over on runab’s blog on some some ideas she had there and I’m interested in feedback on those too.

-chofmann