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

Mozilla has decided to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" as a business strategy.

I doubt anyone knows what the impact will be, all we can do is speculate. In the very short-term, I would definitely be surprised if we don't see it have a negative impact on the development of Rust and certain Rust projects such as wasmtime. In particular because so many of the top contributors appear to be full-time Mozilla employees[1].

1 - https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/graphs/contribu...

Time to put your eggs in Swift! :)

The HN community is going to hate on me for this but it's partially their own fault for spending money trying to differentiate in the browser.

They should just focus on Chromium. It's going to win anyway. Mozilla has a small market share percentage and eventually the gap is going to be large enough they will have to abandon the FF code base anyway.

It's looking like they're going to focus more on the consumer market and building consumer products and less on infrastructure.

FF as needed back when all the browsers were proprietary.

Sure... Google can do evil things with Chrome but Chromium is Open Source - it can always be forked. There's nothing advantageous in maintaining FF as a dedicate code base. It's just duplication.

One of the major points of OSS is to prevent people from competing on things that are non-differentiating. If's OSS so they can fork it and make their own changes if they want.