Sharing and Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 03, 2026

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Mozilla

    • [Old] Michael Taggart ☛ The Mozilla Cycle, Part I

      If you search for "Firefox" or "Mozilla" on social media, you'll find no shortage of complaints about the organization (or corporation, or both) prioritizing the wrong thing, or making choices that are counter to the principles Mozilla is supposed to stand for.

      Before diving into details, let me state the thesis plainly: Mozilla is pursuing its primary objective, which is the survival of Mozilla. Its mission statement is more than broad enough to accommodate that, and Firefox is not a real priority. The community should accept that and stop waiting for Mozilla to be the hero they deserve.

    • [Old] Michael Taggart ☛ The Mozilla Cycle, Part II

      I was listening to my favorite Linux podcast the other night, putting away dishes, as is my evening ritual. Podcasts make light work of chores, don't they? As they lamented the current direction of Mozilla, one of the hosts exclaimed, "Why can't Mozilla just focus on what we care about?"

      Mozilla moves away from Firefox, we respond with anger. They move again, we respond again. This is the Mozilla Cycle, but it doesn't have to keep being this way.

      The people who care about Mozilla actually care about something vastly different than Mozilla itself. If you're reading this, I expect you, too, care about Mozilla. And what comes to mind when you think of Mozilla?

      If you said anything other than Firefox, you're lying. It's Firefox. It's Firefox. Just Firefox. And maybe the MDN, but that's a distant, distant second.

    • [Old] Michael Taggart ☛ The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy

      Regrettably, I was unable to take my own advice on the last part. So here we are yet again, marveling at Mozilla's dedication toward eroding decades of goodwill in the community they purportedly serve. To quote one of my sacred texts, it's a focus and intensity normally seen only in successes.

• Education

  • Andy Baio ☛ Launching a permanent archive for XOXO

    Last week, we launched XOXO Explore, a permanent archive for XOXO, the Portland-based festival and conference I co-organized with Andy McMillan for eight years between 2012 and 2024.

    This was a huge undertaking, bringing together every lineup, schedule, recap video, conference talk, and standalone website that we ever made into a single permanent archive, filled with little photos and ephemera from the festival. It includes the final versions of our policies, which we refined over several years and released under open licenses, along with an archive of our guide. We even finally made a proper About page.

    This is something we first started talking about back in 2015, and attempted three times, but it was never finished until now.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Why Eurovision stays unpredictable after 70 years of copycats and rule changes

      A research team around Dirk Helbing, Professor of Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich, investigated how participating nations and organizers have learned from one another over the decades and how this collective learning has manifested in the competition itself. The project started when complexity scientist Luis Amaral, a professor from Northwestern University, visited Helbing's team during one of the ESC competitions.