OStatic

The Mozilla Foundation has posted its financial statements and tax info for 2008, and a FAQ on the topic for those of us with short attention spans. While plowing through financial statements may not be the most exciting topic for Free and Open Source advocates, it's worth taking a look at what Mozilla has achieved as an independent project, where it's going, and how other projects might be able to emulate Mozilla's success to fund more and more FOSS development.

The good news is that, as of the end of their 2008 fiscal year, Mozilla is weathering the lousy economy pretty well. According to Mitchell Baker's post, reported revenues were up 5% from 2007, and the bulk of that revenue comes from the Firefox search functionality linking back to Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. But Moz got dinged by the financial crisis in 2008, losing nearly $8 million of its long-term portfolio.

Mozilla is out with version 2.0 of its SeaMonkey hybrid browser and email platform, based on Firefox and Thunderbird. There is a long list of additions to the new version, which you can peruse here. SeaMonkey didn't use the exact same core as the Firefox browser before, but now shares the the core of Firefox 3.5.4. Among other things, that means extensions should work more dependably than they did before. Here are some of the other important improvements.

Mozilla Labs has unveiled a new project, Raindrop, that it characterizes as an open experiment in messaging on the web. From the messaging team behind Mozilla's Thunderbird email project, Raindrop uses a mini web server to sift conversations from various sources such as mail, Twitter and RSS feeds, then attempts to pull out the important parts and have them rise to the top. It works with Firefox, Safari or Chrome, and though it's still in its infancy, the open source project looks promising and bears some very rough resemblance to what Google is trying to do with Google Wave.

We've been following the beta releases of Mozilla's e-mail application Thunderbird 3 pretty closely over the last few months. It's a terrific free, cross-platform, open source alternative to the native e-mail apps that come bundled with Windows and Mac OS X. Thunderbird 3 also integrates nicely with Gmail, making it a great option for people who want to stick with their Web-based email but want the additional features of a desktop email app.

Mozilla released Thunderbird 3 Beta 4 this week, and it sports more than 200 changes over the past beta release, including new search tools, tabbed email messages, and better IMAP folder synchronization. I've been playing around with the new beta version for a couple of days now and I like what I've seen so far.

Beta 3 of version 3.0 of Mozilla's Thunderbird open source e-mail application is now available for download, for Windows, the Mac and Linux. You can get it here, although it's still classified as for testing purposes only. There are also release notes, and a list of known issues available. Version 3.0 is a major upgrade, and has been in the works for more than a year. Here are some of the enhancements.

Occasionally, we at OStatic round up our ongoing collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. These educational resources are a big part of the learning mission we try to preserve at the site. We regularly collect the best Firefox extensions, free online books on open source topics, free tools for developers, resources for working with and enjoying online video and audio, Linux tutorials, and much more. In this post, you'll find an updated set of more than 40 collections and resources. Hopefully, you'll find something to learn from here, and the good news is that everything found in this post is free.

Every so often, we here at OStatic like to round up our ongoing collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. These educational tools are a central part of the learning mission we try to preserve at the site. We regularly round up the best Firefox extensions, free online books on open source topics, free tools for developers, resources for working with and enjoying online video and audio, Linux tutorials, and much more. In this post, you'll find more than 35 collections and resources. Hopefully, you'll find something to learn from here, and the good news is that everything found in this collection is free.

In November, I wrote about Ulteo's Open Virtual Desktop, an open source desktop delivery utility. Simply described, the Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop (OVD) is a browser-based operating system and applications suite that is controlled and configured, ideally, by your organization's systems administrators. This makes managing, working, and collaborating from remote locations possible so long as there is a computer nearby with a Java-enabled browser and internet connection.

This week, Ulteo announced some major updates to its OVD, including the ability to deliver Linux and Windows applications (or a mix of both), Active Directory and LDAP authentication capabilities, several file server options, and collaboration support.

Since OStatic's inception, we've done regular roundups on everything from the best Firefox extensions, to free books on open source topics, to top FOSS applications for working with video and digital music. Many of these are good ways to dive into open source applications, plug-ins and communities that you may not know about. In case you missed any of these or are new to the site, here are the eight most popular roundups we've done, including hundreds of our favorite apps and extensions.

Mozilla recently released Thunderbird 3 Beta 2, another stop along the road to the release of the Thunderbird 3 open source e-mail client. Thunderbird handles HTML mail well, lets you keep images turned off until you want them to load, has good protocols for dealing with spam, a decent search engine, and allows the user to specify manual checks of individual mail accounts (handy if you have many accounts configured). Our friends over at TheAppleBlog have a look at the second beta--check it out. Also check into our favorite add-ons for Thunderbird.?