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Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

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Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#91

I'm out of the loop, I knew they were in trouble but Mozilla is carving up the talent pool? I really wish we could come up with sustainable models for not for (much) profit tech companies that was beyond our current systems of volunteer and "strategic partnerships" (as in, it's a side effect of a larger business strategy). Basically in this model, engineers would make maybe 80-160k. No options, no equity, no "going p…

Sounds like government work

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#92

My money was on Cloudflare to have hired them wholesale. Regardless, congratulations to everyone involved! This deal has got me thinking... whether a right way to "lay-off" a supremely talented bunch is to actually see if other companies are willing to offer them jobs? Kind of how player transfers happen in Football (soccer). Either the team goes to the newer company wholesale or you help find your engineers suitable…

This actually happened to me and 11 other colleagues back in 2002. I was working for a mid-tier IT consultancy and a bunch of us were working at a utility on a long-term program. Having delivered the initial version of this core system, and still hanging around doing a lot more dev work (many more features and fixes), the utility turned around and did a deal with the consultancy for a dozen of us to "go native", presumably with a suitable financial compensation as well as the promise of a level of continued engagement beyond our transfer.

The surreal part came when the CEO of the consultancy and the CIO and CFO of the utility took the dozen of us out to dinner at a very upmarket restaurant. There were multiple times that night when a few of us felt like chattel. I almost felt like I should be baring my teeth so the new owner could check me out. Very weird, but it was a win-win and I stayed at the utility 7 years doing some really interesting work.

EDITED TO ADD: I should point out that our salaries went up, but for the utility that was still cheaper than the T&M rates they were paying.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#93

I'm out of the loop, I knew they were in trouble but Mozilla is carving up the talent pool? I really wish we could come up with sustainable models for not for (much) profit tech companies that was beyond our current systems of volunteer and "strategic partnerships" (as in, it's a side effect of a larger business strategy). Basically in this model, engineers would make maybe 80-160k. No options, no equity, no "going p…

Sounds like government work

I have friends at JPL and NASA. You're not that far off.

I want a more general version

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#94

I have mixed feelings about this. In one side, I'm happy that some of the people affected by the Mozilla layoffs have now secured a job. On the other side, now almost all the power of the WASI standard is concentrated into the Fastly corporation (with wider penetration thanks to the WASI integration in Rust). The main and only player of the Bytecode Alliance becomes Fastly as well (as Mozilla is out of the server-sid…

By attempting to trademark WebAssembly you've outed yourself as a hostile actor. You don't then get to go and complain that the community isn't treating you well. They're right not to trust you. You use Oracle's JS trademark as precedent, but that's woefully ignorant of how it came about. JavaScript was not a four year old open standard when Oracle came along and scooped it up. JS was a Java branding deal between Sun…

[deleted]

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#95

I have mixed feelings about this. In one side, I'm happy that some of the people affected by the Mozilla layoffs have now secured a job. On the other side, now almost all the power of the WASI standard is concentrated into the Fastly corporation (with wider penetration thanks to the WASI integration in Rust). The main and only player of the Bytecode Alliance becomes Fastly as well (as Mozilla is out of the server-sid…

By attempting to trademark WebAssembly you've outed yourself as a hostile actor. You don't then get to go and complain that the community isn't treating you well. They're right not to trust you. You use Oracle's JS trademark as precedent, but that's woefully ignorant of how it came about. JavaScript was not a four year old open standard when Oracle came along and scooped it up. JS was a Java branding deal between Sun…

The Bytecode Alliance veto of Wasmer happened the same day it was announced, on November 12 2019 (via direct message by one of their well-known members -now working at Fastly- to a Wasmer investor). Back then, the trademark was not even filed by the lawyers (if you look to the USPTO filings), so I'm not sure how the hostile actor argument could apply here (if we really buy into that argument).

As reflected in other comments in this thread, it's not in Wasmer intent to trademark WebAssembly. And we successfully course-corrected any actions way before it was even public.

We have been continuously pushing the limits of WebAssembly since we were founded. The success of Wasmer as a company solely depends on the success of WebAssembly as a technology, and is on our best interest to continue pushing it forward.

In fact, I'd argue that Wasmer has been pioneer in:

    1. Open-sourcing the first working Rust WebAssembly runtime (wasmtime existed when I created Wasmer, but was not able to run anything [1])
    2. Creating a Package Manager for WebAssembly [2]
    3. Creating WebAssembly embeddings for non-js languages (PHP, Ruby, Python, ...)
    4. Running WASI fully in a browser, including an online shell [3]
[1] https://github.com/wasmerio/wasmer/issues/142#issuecomment-4... [2] https://wapm.io [3] https://webassembly.sh

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#96

I'm out of the loop, I knew they were in trouble but Mozilla is carving up the talent pool? I really wish we could come up with sustainable models for not for (much) profit tech companies that was beyond our current systems of volunteer and "strategic partnerships" (as in, it's a side effect of a larger business strategy). Basically in this model, engineers would make maybe 80-160k. No options, no equity, no "going p…

Mozilla already announced their new strategy, they are shifting into a "Product" focused company. Which why is they laid off all these teams. The browser is no longer the focus. Indeed they laid off the Servo team.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#97

I have mixed feelings about this. In one side, I'm happy that some of the people affected by the Mozilla layoffs have now secured a job. On the other side, now almost all the power of the WASI standard is concentrated into the Fastly corporation (with wider penetration thanks to the WASI integration in Rust). The main and only player of the Bytecode Alliance becomes Fastly as well (as Mozilla is out of the server-sid…

[deleted]

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#99

I'm out of the loop, I knew they were in trouble but Mozilla is carving up the talent pool? I really wish we could come up with sustainable models for not for (much) profit tech companies that was beyond our current systems of volunteer and "strategic partnerships" (as in, it's a side effect of a larger business strategy). Basically in this model, engineers would make maybe 80-160k. No options, no equity, no "going p…

Mozilla already announced their new strategy, they are shifting into a "Product" focused company. Which why is they laid off all these teams. The browser is no longer the focus. Indeed they laid off the Servo team.

The browser is absolutely their focus which is why they laid off the Servo team. Servo is a research project, Gecko/Firefox is their browser. It's also a massive money sink. Firefox itself has zero income and yet keeping up with Google is fantastically expensive (even Microsoft decided to throw in the towel).

So they cut teams that a) weren't directly working on their core browser and b) doesn't make money for spending on their browser.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#100
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla already announced their new strategy, they are shifting into a "Product" focused company. Which why is they laid off all these teams. The browser is no longer the focus. Indeed they laid off the Servo team.

The browser is absolutely their focus which is why they laid off the Servo team. Servo is a research project, Gecko/Firefox is their browser. It's also a massive money sink. Firefox itself has zero income and yet keeping up with Google is fantastically expensive (even Microsoft decided to throw in the towel). So they cut teams that a) weren't directly working on their core browser and b) doesn't make money for spendi…

As a Mozilla employee, I can say that this is a fairly accurate assessment.
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