Labs night: It’s cool when third parties build on our stuff

This photo has nothing to do with the article. I just thought the blog needs more pictures.

Last night was Labs Night, a kind of show-and-tell (with pizza) that we do here once a month, open to the public. We encourage people from outside Mozilla to attend and give presentations on their own projects.

Last night was especially rewarding because we had two such community presentations. One was from Edwin Khodabakchian of Feedly, a Firefox extension which “weaves your favorite content into a magazine-like start page”. The Feedly team has developed a set of Ubiquity commands to act as a command-line interface to Feedly, which is pretty cool.

The second was from Guillaume and Sebastian, the Paris-based creators of Play!, a Java web-application framework. Among other things, they demonstrated how they’d written a bridge between Play and Bespin so that they could edit source files in Bespin and see the results of the changes instantly on the same server.

So it just so happened that both projects presented had done cool things by building upon or integrating a Mozilla Labs project in some way. It’s extremely gratifying, not to mention flattering, to see our work used in this way. Because that’s what open source is all about (well, one of the things): The ability for all of us to build on each other’s code.