In November, The Register revealed that 47% of its readership chose Firefox over other browsers.  El Reg seemed rather proud of this aspect of its audience, apparently we exhibit “a certain technical savvy you won’t find in the general population”.  Well, quite.

But are Register readers the savviest demographic out there?  Or can they be bested?  Do you admininster a site with more than 47% (or can you come close)?   We put together a group on SpreadFirefox where you can show off.

A few ground rules:

• Your site should have its own domain name (you own a .org, .com, .se, .cn etc).
• You should not have an official association with Mozilla (other than being an affiliate, of course!).
• You don’t break any laws or violate any rights by sharing this data.
• We do this for honour and glory, i.e. no cheating and, uh, no prizes.
• No adult content (if you aren’t sure…send it to me and I will check it out in the privacy of my own office).

Also, I have to give a special mention to Erick Leon Bolinaga, who is a student at the Universidad de las Ciencias Informaticas in Havana (UCI has around 13,000 students).  He has been spreading Firefox at his university, and his blog, “Firefoxmania” gets a whopping  66.8% of Firefox traffic.  Unfortunately, it is only available to members of the unversity, so The Register can breathe easy…for now.

But if you can down The Register’s score, please do visit SpreadFirefox and display your wares!

Lots of great coverage of Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 in the press today.  It’s almost hard to cast one’s mind back to a time when there was no such thing as a browser market, but it really is not that long ago.

Liverpool Fans in Athens, May 2007 (feltonf on Flickr)

3.1 Beta 2 has been declared JavaScript Speed Champion, and as Technologizer notes, 2009 is going to be a great year for browser fans.

How often is it that there is an article about football that really makes you think? I tend to read the football press in the immediate aftermath of Liverpool victories and avoid it at all other times.  But an article in the Independent today, the rather unpromisingly titled, How the Wearside messiah lost the plot in just 40 days, is a wonderful insight into an intriguing figure, Roy Keane.

Keane is arguably the outstanding player in Britain of the last 20 years: a brutish winner, occasionally a malevolent presence, and memorably described “a force of nature” .   In 2006, he went into management, and emerged as a calm, measured and thoughtful man.  Immediately successful, he achieved the holy grail of middle-ranking English clubs - promotion to the Premier League - in unlikely circumstances and at the first attempt.  All the while, he appeared level-headed and soft-spoken.

And so his abrupt departure after 5 erratic weeks is curious.  It almost seems that Keane’s internal dialogue wouldn’t allow him to go along with the grinding banality of football management,  the excessive celebrations and the public excuses for poor failures: giving succor to those who didn’t, by Keane’s measure, deserve it.

The despicable Eamonn Dunphy (ghost writer of Keane’s wretched autobiography) accused Keane of “beginning to believe the Roy Keane mythology”.  Rather, it seems that Keane was incapable of believing any mythology at all.

We were in Barcelona a few weeks ago for the excellent Mozilla Camp Europe. That was only my second trip to the city, my first being a holiday there in 2001 when I rather ambitiously took with me the complete Michel de Montaigne (over 1,200 pages).  Inspired by the recent trip, I felt it was time to revisit Montaigne too, after 7 years.

Michel de Montaigne was a public figure and essayist who, according to my edition, is

the bridge linking the thought of pagan antiquity and of Christian antiquity with our own

To which we might add, he is also very hard to put down - as I had cause to reflect at 2 o’clock this morning.  Blaise Pascal said he gained thirty years of study and reflection from reading Montaigne: consider that before picking up the latest Malcolm Gladwell.

What is great about this book is the immediacy of it: the way that Montaigne feels direct, fresh and relevant, even though he was writing over 500 years ago.  In one essay, (On the inequality there is between us), he contemplates how inequality in wealth and status can lead us to overlook that which is really important.  According to Monaigne, we should be asking the question,

Is he wise, lord of himself, not terrified of death, poverty or shackles? Is he a man who stoutly defies his passions, who scorns ambition? Is he entirely self-sufficient? Is he like a smooth round sphere which no foreign object can adhere to and which maims Fortune herself if she attacks him?

That kind of man is miles above kingdoms and dukedoms. He is an empire unto himself.

Compare with him the mass of men nowadays, senseless, base, servile, unstable, continually bobbing about in a storm of conflicting passions which drive them which drive them hither and thither, men totally dependent upon others: they are farther apart than earth and sky. But so blind are our habitual ways that we take little or no account of such things, when we come to consider a peasant or a monarch, a nobleman or a commoner, a statesman or a private citizen, a rich man or a poor man, we find therefore an immense disparity beween men who, it could be said, differ only by their breeches.

And in conclusion he writes:

Each man’s morals shape his destiny.

Tonight Liverpool host Olypique Marseille in Champions League Group D, while Chelsea travel to Girondins Bordeaux in Group A.

If you clicked on this, it’s quite probable that you want such a thing.  When I joined Mozilla, one of the first items Jane and I discussed was the need to help the community do as much of its own marketing as possible.  One of the most inspiring things about Mozilla is the energy and enthusiasm: it is the antidote to the oft-repeated and jaded view that open source software is only about money: many people want other people to use Firefox because it is good software that is good for them.

Shortly after I joined Mozilla, Alba, who is a good friend of mine, contacted me to tell me she had taken part in the Firefox Download Day world record attempt.  We had never spoken about Firefox before, but I think it’s likely that if Alba is motivated to join that campaign, there are other things should would like to do to spread good software.

Now, in Europe, we are a diverse bunch of people.  Culturally, we tend to consume our own first, American culture second, and other European culture third.  The exception to this is the Russian diaspora in former Eastern Block countries, which partly goes to explain Russia’s impressive showing in the Eurovision Song Contest (with all due respect to the talents of Dima Bilan and Serebro).  But the point is, marketing Mozilla software to these countries requires more than just a translation of talking points.  It requires an understanding the culture.  We held a discussion on this topic at MozillaCamp Europe, and David Ascher made the very strong point that “localising” amounts to far more than translating.

James Surowiecki never watched the Eurovision Song Contest

So for me there are two purposes to creating a guide to Mozilla Community Marketing.  For one thing, Community Marketing is big.  Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.  We need a Hitch Hikers’ Guide to Mozilla Community Marketing: to all the different sites, information, resources, projects and teams that are out there.

And while the stories of disastrous attempts at cross-cultural marketing are typically urban legends (the Chevy Nova sold just fine in Mexico), we need to give people freedom - as much freedom as possible - to market Mozilla software in their way.  In the way that makes sense for where they live, for what they do.  Naturally, this has to be done responsibly: Mozilla needs to make sure anything “official” is accurate and honest, but that does not mean that Mozilla has to control what the community does in marketing.
So, I have two questions to anyone interested in community marketing in Europe and beyond:

• What do you need that you don’t have today?
• What do you have today that is especially effective?

Any thoughts are welcome, as comments here or on email to patrick (at) mozilla.com.

There has been a flurry of criticism for the internet for, er, internet critic Andrew Keen’s essay “Economy to Give Open-Source a Good Thumping“.  Mr Keen predicts (with no little relish) that an economic downturn will see people reassessing the value of their labour, which will in turn lead to an end to what we might term the shared information economy.  He goes to suggest that this economy of sharing will be recorded as

a “mania,” these mid-21st-century historians will explain, like the Dutch Tulip mania of the 1630s

In fact, contemporary thinking is that the “Dutch Tulip Mania”, if such an event transpired at all, was wildly exaggerated: the principle record is a single source, published in Scotland over 200 years after the alleged mania.  But we digress.  Mr Keen’s point appears to be that open source consists of people irrationally “giving away” the fruits of their labour.

There are three points that Mr Keen lacks in his understanding of open source:

1. Utility (the dismal science’s placeholder for that which is desired) can take forms other than money (otherwise we would all work 24 hours a day);
2. Not all open source code is written “for free”;
3. In the software market the cost of unit production is close to zero, and network externalities are extremely powerful in determining the value of software goods and services.

Against this backdrop, we might consider that an economic downturn will be a good thing for open source software.  While Mr Keen evidently sees the rise of open source as a sign of decadence, in fact the emergence of the commercial open source sector coincided with the so-called dotcom bust.  Open source software tends to represent a rationalised method of production, which can reduce the frictional cost of the proprietary software model, which contains a large rump of undifferentiated and duplicative software.

What is more, software is (or can be) an industrial good.  Low-cost software means that economic activity can be stimulated with substantially less investment than in the proprietary model: just what the credit-crunch ordered.

All well and good.  But some of the refutations of Mr Keen are equally wide of the mark.  In particular, CNet’s Matt Asay (a chap never short of an opinion), who responded that open source is

a free market, capitalist phenomenon that depends upon M-O-N-E-Y.

I know others share this view, indeed, I’ve had this very discussion with no less an authority than Ian Murdock.  There is some merit in Mr Asay’s position: open source clearly is a method of market disruption in a competitive (or indeed, uncompetitive) software market.  It has the potential to decrease the value of the market and then to capture a large share of that market quickly; it can also greatly reduce the barriers to entry for suppliers and to exit for consumers.

Open source is hardly inherently anti-capitalist then.  If anything, open source frequently reflects the sharp end of the market, where competition is intensified and profit margins shrink.

So what is the problem with Mr Asay’s piece?  It is two-fold.  For one, Software development and political economy are orthogonal concepts.  For example, if we consider how software development might look in a command economy, some form of a shared codebase under a copyright license from the code owner would seem likely.  Indeed, many of the world’s most leftist governments have policies specifically designed to foster open source developement and consumption.

But lastly, we return to the point that utility is not in all cases pecuniary.  Not all free software is a loss-leader.  Many people derive great satisfaction from others using their software, from others reading their translated documents, from others benefiting from their help, indeed, from changing the world.  It is hard to put a price on such an experience.

This blog is nothing if not a support for the underdog, an answer back for those who have no voice of their own.

And so I feel the need to report that my journey through Heathrow’s infamous Terminal Five was nowhere near as miserable as advertised.  Security checks were efficiently organised, maintaining the mandated level of intrusiveness while managing to dispense with the shoutiness that I expect from modern air-travel security.  I was able to buy Savalon, (now known amongst my Swedish family as “Patrick’s miracle salve”) a splendid first-aid product not seemingly available anywhere else in the world.  Even the queue to buy a paper didn’t present a significant obstacle.  Of course, it wasn’t all good: I didn’t find the famous glass walkway that enables one to look up passing females’ skirts, but in general, I gave Terminal 5 a thumbs-up.

Then I saw this:

And I had to restrain myself from walking in, verbally abusing people, humiliating those not highly proficient in the preparation of food and generally being a bit of a Gordon Ramsay.  After all, that is the Gordon Ramsay brand, is it not?  That is the hook upon which he hangs his celebrity, the name upon which that restaurant was trading.

Of course, had I gone in and started gratuitously swearing in Mr Ramsay’s tedious manner, I should have expected to be ejected but not without first spoiling one or two meals for other diners.  Now I am not anti-swearing, but I am pro-civility.  Gordon Ramsay, like the French Connection’s no-longer witty “FCUK”, screams obscenities at us that we simply don’t need to hear or read.  There are many places for that kind of language, (many of which I frequent), but the pointless and public hurling of profane abuse for the sake of notoriety, for one’s own celebrity, for one’s market share, cheapens us all.

I don’t care how good you are at cooking.

But you can’t deny, they have a sense of humour.

After all, nothing concerns the browsing population more than the family accidentally finding out about that special gift.

Or more specifically, the BBC’s coverage of it.  During Match of the Day’s broadcast, we were treated to the kind of image normally associated with the advertising concerning the wisdom of taking out life insurance, or twenty years ago, for the soothing properties of Hamlet cigars:

Quite why the BBC’s Steve Wilson felt the need to adopt an earnestly concerned tone, and tell us,

Oh, that’s the wrong shirt to wear there.  That really is the wrong shirt to wear there.  Good luck.

I do not know.  The chap in red is clearly sitting with a close friend or possibly a relative, and he does not seem to be in any trouble whatsoever.  Surely it’s better to reflect (as Canal+ Sweden’s coverage did) on how pleasant it is to see football supporters being able to behave in such a civilised manner (”the friendly derby”).  Liverpool against Everton is characterised by a great deal of rancour on the pitch - indeed no other fixture in the league genrates as many red cards.  And certainly, the manner of Liverpool’s walkover on Saturday will have put many Bluenoses out of joint.  But rather than cajole fans into unpleasant aggression by giving them violent and intolerant reputations to live up to, would it not have been better for the BBC to applaud the amicable nature of Liverpudlian rivalry away from the pitch?

While a Sun employee, I found The Linux Foundation’s disingenuous pot-shots at Sun and the OpenSolaris project quite tedious.  Of course I would.  I am no longer a Sun employee, but I still find this level of fudding within the open source community to be inappropriate.

From first-hand experience, there is a healthy respect for Linux within Sun, and a desire to make OpenSolaris a distinctive open source operating system that does things Linux cannot do, just as Linux distros do things that OpenSolaris cannot do.  I would have thought that this is a good thing.  But not according to the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, who castigates anyone with the intellectual curiosity to learn about ZFS or DTrace:

That’s literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground.

Both DTrace (winner, Wall Street Journal Innovation Award 2006) and ZFS (winner, InfoWorld Storage Technology of the Year 2008) are, or will shortly be, available in a multitude of operating systems.   And so people can make up their own minds if such an unkind analogy is reasonable without even entering Mr Zemlin’s burning building.  But there is one thing we can all agree on: Mr Zemlin does not know the meaning of the word “literally”.