One heck of a meeting with Mozilla
April 17th, 2005It seems pretty apparent that the “secret” we were keeping at the OSLUG meeting is out in the open now. The original plan was for Chris Beard, Chase Phillips, and Dave Miller to come and talk about their experiences with the Mozilla Foundation. Instead Chris was left in California, Chase was locked onto his laptop for some unknown reason, and Dave was left alert and ready to talk.
Near the beginning of the meeting Chase received a phone call, in which he quickly went out into the hallway. After about ten minutes Chase came back into the room. He promptly said something to the effect of, “If you can wait about 30 minutes, I will tell you in detail what a Mozilla release is” he continued “You also have to promise to not talk about this until we have an official release out.” We all agreed, Chase went back to his computer, and Dave promptly continued to talk to us about his work on Bugzilla.
Dave was very through about Bugzilla. One interesting point was how bugzilla cannot release very often because most of the users are large cooperations. Every time they release it requires the clients to prepare and upgrade migration plans that often take a lot of time.
Once he was ready, Chase went wild explaining what he was up to. Just that night there had been a zero-day exploit released on a public mailing list about effecting all versions of firefox. Being the release engineer he had built the first releases of 1.0.3 during our LUG meeting. Yep, Chase said we could say he built Firefox 1.0.3 during the meeting. Pretty wild!
The meeting ended up going roughly 3 hours all said and done. Pretty long, but well worth it. It seemed like everyone who participated had a good time. Also, everyone who participated gets a Mozilla shirt! I got an email a few days ago saying that the shirts are in the mail and will be on campus soon. Thanks Mozilla!
