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Mozilla has today released the Firefox 3.6 Alpha.

The first developer milestone of the next release of Firefox – code named Namoroka Alpha 1 – is now available for download. Namoroka is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform, which forms the core of rich internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only.

This Alpha of Namoroka / Gecko 1.9.2 introduces several new features:

• Compositor (Phase 1), which moves Gecko to using one native widget per top-level content document. See this blog post or bug 374980 for more details.
• A new focus model, described here and tracked in bug 178324
• The chromedir attribute has been replaced with a pseudoclass
• Several new CSS3 properties including background size and gradients for background images
• Speed improvements to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine
• Startup and responsiveness improvements throughout the application

Anyone interested in Namoroka should read the article about Firefox 3.6 for developers on the Mozilla Developer Center. For a full list of changes, see this list (it’s big).

Please use the following links to download Namoroka:

• Windows: Namoroka 3.6 Alpha 1 Setup.exe
• Mac OS X: Namoroka 3.6 Alpha 1.dmg
• Linux: namoroka-3.6a1.tar.bz2

the above was extracted from https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2009/08/07/firefox-3-6-alpha-1-now-available-for-download/

Over 60 open-source companies and organizations have established Open Source for America.

OSA have 4 Principles which are

“Open Source for America and its members agree to the following founding principles.

1. While respecting the right of every developer to choose the license that it believes best reflects its desires and needs, we support the four freedoms in the Free Software Definition.

1. • The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0);
   • The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this;
   • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2); and
   • The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

2. We applaud the commitment of the Administration to make the U.S. Federal government more transparent, participatory, secure, and efficient, and urge the U.S. Federal government to pursue this goal by leveraging the advantages of free and open source software.

3. We believe that the community can drive collaborative innovation in the U.S. government space, resulting in greater efficiencies and national competitiveness.

4. We believe the decision to use software should be driven solely by the requirements of the user, and not by a mandate for a particular brand, vendor, or development model.”

On the OSA board we have some big players including

Mark Shuttleworth – The creator of Ubuntu

Eben Moglen, – GPL Legal

Jim Zemlin – Linux Foundation executive director

and  Michael Tiemann -  Red Hat’s vice-president of open-source affairs

The OSA’s Founding Members are: