"Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla • Hacker News Board

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#301

Post by zelly » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

joshlemer wrote: post #155

rvz wrote: post #15

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…

I've been saying for years that Mozilla should have a services department to do consulting and corporate support for Rust. No idea why they'd leave millions of dollars on the floor like that.

I've said on here for years that Mozilla will only be remembered for Rust and they should double down on that (to the exclusion of FF if necessary) and people got mad. It's their only product people are enthusiastic about, the only product of theirs that has a positive slope on Google Trends. They could have been what JetBrains is to Kotlin. They could have sold support, training, consultantcy, IDEs, tooling, hosted conferences, etc.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#302

Post by joepie91_ » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #286

joepie91_ wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always wondered if it actually took time away from improving Firefox or other products. > I can't imagine that from a standpoint of time investment and technical improvement Rust ever made sense for Firefox to be honest. To put it bluntly: without Rust, Firefox would have very likely not existed anymore. It was severely behind in terms of performance, and no good tooling was available to fix that without incurrin…

The fact that all the other browsers don't have performance problems and are written in C++ completely refutes your statements.

"All the other browsers" are basically Chrome, Safari, and IE/Edge. All of which are developed by three of the wealthiest tech corporations on earth, and even one of those gave up on it because they couldn't keep up.

While Mozilla is financially healthy, it is very much not one of the wealthiest tech companies on earth.

They cannot afford to spend the kind of money on maintaining a big pile of unsafe parallelization code that Google and Apple can, and so the remaining option was to make the maintenance cheaper - which is what Rust is for.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#303

Post by Silhouette » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 8:14 PM UTC

kanox wrote: post #79

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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 they should turn into a Rust consultancy of some sort. I don't know. " The odds of them being able to build a business that that replaces the several hundred million they get from Google (which is essentially pure profit, not even revenue) are…

> The instant Google decides they're no longer useful, Mozilla is going to go poof. People keep repeating this but couldn't Bing replace Google as the default? The "default search engine" position is actually worth money.

The "default search engine" position is actually worth money.

But the amount it's worth is probably roughly proportional to the number of Firefox users. With Firefox having less and less market share, the attraction to search engines of supporting it -- particularly those whose operators also make their own browser -- must be diminishing rapidly as well.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#304

Post by newen » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 8:49 PM UTC

jlokier wrote: post #295

newen wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when it is. This should be obvious. Not even sure why I'm spelling this out. Say total amount of money an organization has is $X + $Y. Group A is assigned $X in funding. Group B is assigned $Y in funding. Group A gets $Z in donation with conditions attached so it only gets used by Group A. Then the organization assigns $X - $Z funding to Group A and assigns $Y + $Z funding to Group B. Group A is happy because it…

Counterpoints, which I'm surprised I have to spell out, are: 1. Limits. The above doesn't apply when $Z > $X, above which the attachment has full effect. 2. Reputation. The sources of recurring $X + $Y have decision making powers with a time lag. They may not be willing to give $X + $Y again if they know it was entirely spent on group B last time. 3. Anticipation. Organization decision makers know 2. Which makes dona…

I simplified a lot obviously but an organizational can last years and years before seeing the effects of reputation pressure. And above applies fine even if $Z > $X modulo nitpicking.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#305

Post by powersnail » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #224

fabrice_d wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you finance its development?

I would start by being better at building goodwill than Mozilla has been in the last few years, and ceasing the bait/switch strategy for funding that torpedoed Canonical. It is very, very okay that ubiquitous and greatly loved projects do one or two things well.

Goodwill is of course lovely. But that's not a plan of financing the project. No money, no full-time employee, not enough developer-power to keep up with the ever-evolving web standard, and hence not competitive against the chromium family.

And even if this better-will project is formed, and funded, and worked, there is nothing stopping the team from picking up all the bait-and-switch, corporate speak, etc., when they are wearing the same shoes as Mozilla.

In any rate, it's not as simple as someone with better-will to fork the project. I'd rather stay with Mozilla for now, because 1) they are a public entity who cannot commit an evil deed and simply ghost everyone, so they have the motivation to not be hated too much, and 2) they are the only player other than Webkit family and the Chromium family on the browser market, while nobody else has the power to even enter the competition (at least for now).

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#306

Post by sjwmozilla » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

Oh man Microsoft or some other less activist company needs to sponsor rust

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#307

Post by sjwmozilla » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

mcqueenjordan wrote: post #196

steveklabnik wrote: post #111

Hi everyone, the Rust core team has been talking about making a statement on this, but I left this comment in a personal capacity yesterday: ------------------------ Mozilla employs a small number of people to work on Rust fulltime, and many of the Servo people contributed to Rust too, even if it wasn't their job. They also pay for the hosting bill for crates.io. They also own a trademark on Rust, Cargo, and the logo…

Totally agree, Rust will survive. AWS is investing heavily in Rust. If anyone who is reading this was affected by these layoffs and you want to continue to work in Rust, get in touch with me. We have many Rust opportunities open across the company on a variety of different teams.

I hope they will get toilet breaks?

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#308

Post by blub » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 9:14 PM UTC

joepie91_ wrote: post #302

blub wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that all the other browsers don't have performance problems and are written in C++ completely refutes your statements.

"All the other browsers" are basically Chrome, Safari, and IE/Edge. All of which are developed by three of the wealthiest tech corporations on earth, and even one of those gave up on it because they couldn't keep up. While Mozilla is financially healthy, it is very much not one of the wealthiest tech companies on earth. They cannot afford to spend the kind of money on maintaining a big pile of unsafe parallelization…

Opera gave up because they literally couldn't keep up. Microsoft didn't give up because they couldn't keep up, it's just that they came to a realization which Mozilla's also about to come to: nobody cares what's underneath the browser UI as long as the branding and features are there.

And in the end ~500 million dollars per year should be more than enough to maintain one software project. Come on, they're not trying to send people to Mars.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#309

Post by sjwmozilla » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

mcqueenjordan wrote: post #246

capableweb wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any Rustaceans who have been working at Mozilla, have probably done so for the mission that Mozilla work on (publicly), not too earn a ton of money. Amazon/AWS, who's main goal is closed down infrastructure, is the opposite of that mission. Worth keeping in mind when trying to recruit people from the opposite spectrum of yourself.

Thanks for the feedback. I disagree with your premise and your characterizations, but that's what opinions are for! I believe the success of Rust, as a technical goal, can transcend the business goals of whatever organization uses it. Solidifying the future of Rust is a noble goal, and it would be a huge win for our industry.

It's interesting that you decide not make an actual argument in disagreement, perhaps knowing well that you don't have one.

Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla

#310

Post by infogulch » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

regularfry wrote: post #153

rumanator wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At a Microsoft sized company I'd get it because they can basically blow billions on that sort of thing It also helps that Microsoft is in the business of selling IDEs.

Interesting question: why isn't Mozilla in this business too? They've got a cross-platform desktop app toolkit sat right there , and big enough developer mindshare to be interesting. There's room for a Firefox-flavour web dev IDE in the market, surely? Firefox dev tools, only with edit-in-place and live debugging for server-side assets. Seems odd to me that they've never gone that way, given everything else they've t…

Yes, I think a lightweight servo/webrender cross platform UI toolkit a la Electron would offer a fast stable core to build any number of apps, including an IDE.