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Does anyone know what the consequences for this will be? WASM was what motivated me to learn Rust.
He just added another tweet to address this question: "Another thing to clarify: Rust, Wasmtime, and the Bytecode Alliance will all be more than fine! [...] They all have a bright future!"
Mozilla solves the problem by killing development of developer tools insuring Firefox is an afterthought.
Is there anyone in Mozilla management that has a technical bone in their body?
I wonder if Rust has enough momentum to sustain itself now.
This shows that open-source in general is expensive for Mozilla but cheap for the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google who own their own Web browsers and have other open-source programming languages maintained by some of their employees full time. The actual reality of this is that they are still kept alive by a direct competitor for decades and haven't made anything to generate significant sources of revenue. Maybe…
Apple sells hardware, and most of their software offerings, like MacOS, their office suite, and Safari, and given away to convince people to buy that hardware. Also, it's not like they're spending a whole lot of time making Sarafi the best browser around.
Microsoft's web browser was created (and bundled) specifically to prevent the web from disrupting their monopoly on the desktop, and their new browser is just a fork of Chromium.
Google's browser was a way for Google to drive web technologies in service of their advertising platform.
Mozilla's open source efforts are/were a loss leader for ... nothing. Their work was motivated by altruism, not profit, and that turned out to be, well, not profitable. That's why they're pivoting; altruism alone wasn't enough to pay the bills.
Does Mozilla not make enough money to sustain long term investments?
They make 90% of their revenue from Google paying to have Google be the default web search on FF. A deal which is expiring in 2021 and hadn't yet been renewed.
And, note, that deal was only a 4 year deal from 2017-2021 [1]. It's not like a decades-old source of revenue that's dried up.
And even though the deal is expiring, they've had deals before (yahoo etc), and will certainly have more in the future.
1: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3240008/mozillas-recor...
2: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-firefox-search-deal-gives-m...
What's the focus of Mozilla now given the layoffs of Rust,MDN,Wasmtime and Servo? Is Mozilla/Firefox becoming VPN company?
They're refocussing on the user experience of the browser. They're stopping their more developer friendly endeavours and research projects such as servo. The VPN client and Pocket are just ways to make money to fund browser development. Firefox itself does not and can not make money (and not from lack of trying). It turns out people don't want "ads", "nags" or "suggested content" in their browser.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mozilla Corp currently doesn't make much money at all, hence their problems. The majority of their funds come from a recurring Google donation, which has to be renewed every few years.
It's not a donation. They pay for being the default search. They throw billions at Apple for the same, but nobody paints that as charity.