Good! Rust us woke SJW garbage!
"Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
201–210 of 352 posts
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Mozilla's revenue is $400M a year. A few million dollars in consulting revenue isn't going to move the needle.
Consulting would offer an avenue for growth. If you do well, you can hire more people and make more revenue.
Both of Mozilla's likely search revenue partners in the US are also competitors and both use anti-competitive means to push their own browsers.
Building their own search revenue stream isn't going to happen on $400M annually. And I don't think Yandex or Baidu are planning to seriously address the US market.
Also, I could be wrong, but I thought ad spending was way down this year.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doubtful at standard software engineer rates living in SV[0]. I remember being kinda surprised my first visit to SF, that Mozilla had an office right on the waterfront. Seemed kind of wasteful. They've also continuously lost lots of good will they had in the mid to late 2000s, both from end users and developers. I'm sure a lot of people would be happy to declare good riddance if chromium ever got a decent extensions…
Maybe it is time for Mozilla to move away from SV then. It is not as if there are no competent developers who would be willing to work on Firefox for $50k/year in other states or even countries. Heck, the money that they get from google per year is enough to pay for 1000 developers paid at $100k/year each for 5 years.
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Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Where are you getting 90% from? AFAICT it's closer to 50% or 60% [1] [2]. 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/goo…
The 90% number probably comes from Mozilla's financial report, last released for 2018 [1].
"Approximately 91% and 93% of Mozilla’s royalty revenues were derived from these contracts for 2018 and 2017, respectively, with receivables from these contracts representing approximately 75% and 79% of the December 31, 2018 and 2017 outstanding receivables, respectively."
Since for 2018 'Royalties' income was about 430 million, and reports are[2] that the deal was 300 million per year from Google, it's still a massive chunk of Mozilla's operating income, but you're right, it's not 90%. It's more like two thirds of their revenue coming from their market-dominant direct competitor.
Also note that while this specific contract is a four-year deal, Google had been paying Mozilla millions even before then; in 2006 most of Mozilla's money came from Google (note the source is a now-deleted blog post from the current CEO of Mozilla)[3]. It is indeed a decades-old source of revenue, but it remains to be seen if it's dried up; word is they're renewing the contract, but we'll have to wait for Mozilla's next financial report to get more information.
1- https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...
2- http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almos...
3- https://www.cnet.com/news/a-dangerous-conflict-of-interest-b...
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Mozilla's revenue is $400M a year. A few million dollars in consulting revenue isn't going to move the needle.
We're talking 10s of millions here. Plenty of consultancies make 20million+ per year in revenue. It could even be the start of a new branch with value adds like Confluent, Databricks, which are more in the range of $150-200million.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#206> The internet is the platform now with ubiquitous web technologies built into it, but vast new areas are developing (like Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance vision of nanoprocesses). Our vision and abilities should play in those areas too. Two days ago, the CEO said that focusing on technologies like Wasmtime was one of their plans for the future[1]. Now we find out that they're actually getting rid of the team. The…
Firefox is open source and it doesn't need to be tied to Mozilla. Maybe a fork is necessary.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#207> The internet is the platform now with ubiquitous web technologies built into it, but vast new areas are developing (like Wasmtime and the Bytecode Alliance vision of nanoprocesses). Our vision and abilities should play in those areas too. Two days ago, the CEO said that focusing on technologies like Wasmtime was one of their plans for the future[1]. Now we find out that they're actually getting rid of the team. The…
Firefox is open source and it doesn't need to be tied to Mozilla. Maybe a fork is necessary.
How do you finance its development?
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#208Mozilla tech brought value right? MDN bright value right? Wasm, rust etc, brought value.
But no profit.
Could it be that profit isn't synonymous with value? Just a thought.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#209From many of the comments in this thread, one might think that FAANG companies invented the concept of open source software or that software doesn't exist outside the context of a "profit model." Whatever is going on at Mozilla right now, the notion that a piece of open source software even needs to be profitable (let alone supported by a single large company) in order to continue existing is ridiculous. I'll concede…
> but is that really something that can only happen when one big company/organization is funding the project? Have you any examples of any large OSS projects that don't have this problem? > As for Rust, maybe someone could point me in the direction of the one benevolent large company that's backing GCC/G++ or CPython or Ruby? gcc [0] has a list of maintainers, which features a lot of redhat email addresses. The ruby…
To the parent commenter's credit, none of those companies own the rights to the GCC/CPython/Ruby trademarks like Mozilla does with Rust.
Re: "Much" of the Rust/Wasmtime team hit by layoffs at Mozilla
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doubtful at standard software engineer rates living in SV[0]. I remember being kinda surprised my first visit to SF, that Mozilla had an office right on the waterfront. Seemed kind of wasteful. They've also continuously lost lots of good will they had in the mid to late 2000s, both from end users and developers. I'm sure a lot of people would be happy to declare good riddance if chromium ever got a decent extensions…
I like Mozilla, I like Firefox, I like Rust, I like that they offer a remote work option, that they're kind of the anti-Google in a way (even while taking $$ from Google, but whatever). I like their whole philosophy at a certain level. But when I interviewed with them last year I honestly could not understand where the money was coming from to pay for all the perks and compensation and the offices and the bi-annual c…
All of the money was coming from Google's antitrust lawyers.