My Intro To The Mozilla Community

On 19th Jan,2016 Like everyday I was returning to my room after a tiring Tuesday schedule, when I got a call from Arkodyuti who was a prominent  member in the Mozilla community and had already conducted several events. I was bugging him from the past year to teach me and give me materials on ethical hacking. He gave the proposal to start a Mozilla club in my college campus, Vellore Institute of Technology. I was pretty oblivious to the Mozilla community then and proceeded with the idea just for the sake of a new experience.

Next day, I met Vardaan and Vaibhav tech enthusiasts, who were more than eager to join the club. The club grew radically as I recruited more enthusiasts and a solid team of 9 stood ready by the end of the week. I called up Arko and asked him I was ready to form the club officaily. I filled up the club captain form from mozilla.org and mailed a few letters to the great dun3buggi, Shreyas Narayanan Kutti, my regional cordinator. After a review and a long waited silence of 3 days, I was approved as the club captain of Mozilla Innovation Club.

I was intoduced into the mozilla learning forums and also the various interesting teaching kits. I constantly received updates from my mentor and held events in my campus aiming at expanding the mozilla community. HTML, CSS,  JS were a few topics we discussed at the meetings. I understood that the events and meetings were more than teaching, it was sharing, sharing of ideas and new tech crunches among peers. It was awesome!!!

Over the next month of February, enthusiasts like Ayan, Komal, Vrinda, Alish, Shubham, Rajat and other 16 members joined our Mozilla Innovation Club. Everything was awesome but the only problem was we didn’t have the permission to hold events from the college authorities.

So on 18th March, Ayan came to my room and said,”Bro, check it out we have a firefox Club in our campus which has college permission, what if we collaborate and hold events?”. And it was an amazing success. The Club Lead Tejaswini was very co-operative and allowed us to hold events at our freedom. Over the time, we have held 5 small sessions in our campus and helped in the organization of Make With Mozilla Event from VIT.

By – ALBIN SUNNY

 

All about Open Source!

Blogs are meant to be really boring and depressing but i am trying to make it interactive so play along guys!! So all you guys reading my blog, take a minute and answer as to what open source really is??  Well, open source is all about re-usability. A software in which the copyright holder gives permission to read, write and distribute it to anyone and for any purpose is an open-source software. You have just officially earned a mozilla goodie if you would have attended the session in Vellore Institute of Technology which was conducted on 22 April, 2016. So how does Mozilla promote open-source? Mozilla wants the web to be even better, wants more people using it for more reasons. If you are teaching a kid about open-source and web, he will be like,”Is that it?”. Well, we need to change it. He should be gaping with an “awesome” expression. The internet has potential and we need to utilize it. If you have created something new, make it open and share it to the world for everyone to see. You will be the inspiration to something even more better and the cycle will go on.

Can you guys name some of the open-source projects by Mozilla?

1.Firefox OS- the most popular project by Mozilla. An entirely open-source operating system for mobile devices

2.MozillaFirefox browser- The all friendly, easy, lightweight browser and not to mention it packs a lot more speed than others.

3.Gaia- A set of web apps that make up the front-end of Firefox OS.

4.NSS(Network Security Services)- a set of libraries designed to support cross-platform development of security-enabled client and server applications.

5.WebAssembly language- Currently in experimental stage efficient low-level programming language for in-browser client-side scripting. Is a potential replacement for Javascript!!

If you guys knew atleast 3 projects, you earned another goodie. !

Well, we have discussed a lot about open-source. Lets move on to something more interesting. How many of you love Facebook? Well apparently a lot of them likes FB. Let me say you they are not so colorful as their app. Facebook appears to be on a lookout for potential disruptive threats over the past years, particularly from other platforms. When Instagram demonstrated that sharing photos on mobile devices is a new social media platform, FB acquired it. When WhatsApp demonstrated that messaging is well and alive in a pure form, FB acquired it. In each case, FB paid handsomely but did little less. They paid off their competition, they didn’t innovate to compensate for their shortcomings. How many of you are planning a startup? Wow, a lot of you guys are quite eager. What if your product is much better than fb? It connects people on a global scale, much more secure, much more faster? Well, how will FB tackle that threat? How many of you heard of Free Basics? Yes, free basics is a policy proposed by Facebook where they will provide free internet to certain regions around the globe. Well guys, its very misleading. Free internet? Not so much as you are expecting. Facebook will dictate terms as to what they will provide. FB will have exclusive rights as to provide users free access to specific apps and also websites. Let me give you a demo scenario. Let’s say you are going to buy a new mobile phone, and you like one in the store. What’s the first question you ask the shopkeeper? Yes, What’s its spec?

You get an utterly ridiculous answer such as,”Sir, it has facebook, whatsapp and Instagram. It also has CNNIBN.com, NDTV.com and two more websites”.

Is this how we want to picture the web to be? NO.

We want the web to be free. Free enough so that users can connect to whatever they like on the cloud. If that’s not the case, Internet will no longer be Internet!

The event TECHJAM was conducted in VIT vellore and it was a success with the participants having an active debate on the how open-source can shape the tech-industry of the future.

By – TAMOGHNA Maitra.