LinuxConf Europe 2007

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Duxford Excursion (Monday)

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Kernel Summit 2007

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Tristan Nitot - Mozilla

The Open Web

As the Internet matures, it faces an increasing number of challenges. As a result, the use of certain web standards are needed to en sure that all individuals and organisations can connect to the Web using their preferred Operating System platform and Web browser. Web and Web 2.0 communities play an important role in the future development of the Internet.

With the Internet established as an integral part of everyday life, it could become very tempting for large companies to feel they have the right to own a slice of it and make it proprietary. Microsoft's announcement of Silverlight and Adobe's announcement of Apollo could be seen as examples of how this is starting to emerge. The implications are significant as the new proprietary standards created by these organisations could take the place of open source principles and potentially limit the Internet's capabilities.

This talk will explore what the open source movement, with the help of open standards, can do to prevent this, examining how innovation and community open source development could be a more cost-effective way to develop software products. In addition, an overview of the practicalities and logistics that are behind a worldwide open source project with 30,000+ contributors and 100 million product users in 40+ languages, and how the Mozilla project helps to co-ordinate the engineering, marketing, product and Website localisation needed will be presented.

To conclude, a case study of the upcoming launch of Firefox 3 will demonstrate how the technology developed will continue to enhance the power of the open web and the future of the Mozilla project.