About Mozilla Europe

Mission

The Mozilla Project aims to maintain choice and innovation on the Internet. To achieve this, the Mozilla Project produces and provides the award-winning Mozilla web and e-mail applications suite as well as other products and technologies, such as Bugzilla.

The mission of Mozilla Europe is to support the Mozilla Project by developing, deploying and promoting the free Mozilla software, its by-products and related project within Europe.

Mozilla Europe's association's mission if fully described in its statutes.

Specifically, Mozilla Europe will work on the following items:

  • Join forces with local, regional and national Mozilla communities in order to promote Mozilla and its derivative products at a Europe-wide level;
  • Encourage independent developers, universities, companies and administrations to contribute to the Mozilla project, either by producing source code or by funding the project;
  • Increase usage of the Mozilla browser and its by-products by offering the services that may be needed in order to deploy the products.

Mozilla contributors' motivations

Each Mozilla contributor has his/her own reasons to devote time and energy to such a huge collaborative project. Among the most frequently heard answers:

  1. Providing a complete Internet Suite (Web navigation, e-mail, Usenet reader, IRC client) on a variety of platforms as well as corresponding standalone applications and their underlying technologies.
  2. Pleasure to learn from and contribute to implementing the latest standards and technologies such as HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, among a group of brilliant hackers backed up by a vibrant, efficient community.
  3. Ability to take part in a worldwide project, spanning cultures, languages, continents and timezones.

Mozilla Europe Board of Directors

Mozilla Europe is a non-profit organisation based on the Association Loi 1901 as enabled by the French Law. The association has been founded by several people who contribute to the Mozilla project, along with other Free software projects. The first Board of Directors includes:

Tristan Nitot, (President)
For the past 20 last years, Tristan has been working with computers and, more recently, the Internet. He held various positions in several domains such as computer training, technical support, pre-sales and business development. His last position was with Netscape where he spent 7 years, recently as the Technology and Standards evangelist for Europe. In his scarce free time, Tristan also founded the OpenWebGroup, which he still leads. Tristan speaks French and English.
Olivier Meunier, (Treasurer)
Olivier is a free software developer. As such, he has created and still maintains the DotClear project, a standards-compliant accessible weblog tool. Olivier is also an OpenWebGroup contributor, founder of the APINC Association, where he held the treasurer's position. Olivier speaks French and English.
Pascal Chevrel, (Secretary General)
Pascal maintains the Mozilla FAQ used by the French community. He recently launched Web forums in Spanish and a Spanish FAQ. Pascal takes part in the Mozilla Champions program. Pascal speaks English, French, Castilian (Spanish) and Catalan.
Peter Van der Beken
Peter was a contributor to Mozilla before he was hired by Netscape to keep contributing professionally. He is now DOM co-module owner and XSLT module owner, and he represented Netscape within the W3C XSL Working group. Peter is also a super-reviewer, which demonstrates his expertise in the overall Mozilla project. Peter is a Belgian citizen and speaks Dutch, French and English.
Axel Hecht
Axel holds a PhD in mathematics and is also a Mozilla contributor since 1999. He is module owner of RDF and has been working with Peter for several years to enhance XSLT support in the product. Axel has organised the European Developer Days in 2001, 2002 and 2004. Axel is a German citizen and speaks both German and English.
Jan Varga
Jan, a Slovak citizen, has contributed to Mozilla for several years. At his University, he authored a thesis which included client development based on XUL (the XML application used in Mozilla to describe the User Interface). Jan then joined Netscape to work on Mozilla. Jan lives in Ruzomberok, in Slovak Republic and speaks Slovak and English.