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

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

#271

Post by liability »

Ygg2 wrote: post #142
dx87 wrote: post #101

> 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…

Why call it corporate speak, when it's plain old lying?

"Corporate speak" is itself an example of corporate speech. It's autological.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autological_word

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

#272

Post by jlokier »

criddell wrote: post #105
est31 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google can do evil things with Chrome but Chromium is Open Source - it can always be forked. It takes more to maintain a Chromium competitor than its source code. You also need engineers to implement new features of the rapidly changing web. If Google decided to close the source code in 2030, nobody would be able to do anything about it. Mozilla would have laid off its last engineers by 2025 and they'd have found n…

> You also need engineers to implement new features of the rapidly changing web. What kind of things are rapidly changing these days?

JavaScript itself (ES language changes), APIs callable from JavaScript (there are a lot), CSS, HTTP(s)/TLS and evolving security, ever-evolving compatibility requirements to keep popular pages working, performance expectations of the rendering model (what must be smooth nowadays didn't used to be and it's expected by sites), things like WASM, WebGL (new version on its) & WebGPU, the sandbox, evolving security patterns (HTML/HTTP/JS security model is complex) and dealing with new security issues (it never stops), compatibility with OS version releases (always new issues), compatibility with GPU drivers (always new issues), video codecs.

These things by themselves require a well-funded team to keep the browser relevant to modern sites. Well-funded because they take a lot of time and ideally to be done to a professional standard. The number of spare-time or independently-wealthy volunteers around to do the work seems thoroughly insufficent compared with what it would take to keep up.

That list doesn't even have new user-visible features (so nothing to "sell" to users except "we still work with current sites").

They are just moving-target "basics", minimal expectations by users and sites to remain "current" on the web. I'm sure I've left off a lot too, it's just off the top of my head.

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

#273

Post by deklerk »

stonogo wrote: post #204
deklerk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 millio…

Thanks for these great links! This is very informative.

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

#274

Post by rvense »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #222
alwillis wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wonder when the other shoe will drop. maybe as part of the ARM and iOS/macOS consolidation. There’s no other shoe. There's no known technical reason why all the major browsers shouldn't be available natively when ARM Macs start shipping in a few months.

There's no technical reason for iOS to not support alternative browsers from the start. It's not about technical reasons.

Exactly. I don't care about the size of the screen. It's my damn computer, I should be allowed to put whatever software I want on it.

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

#275

Post by cxr »

nonbirithm wrote: post #219
debacle wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is open source and it doesn't need to be tied to Mozilla. Maybe a fork is necessary.

"Open source" doesn't necessarily mean "practical to maintain." Can an open source organization maintaining a fork of Firefox in their free time in addition to the obligations of their regular job keep up with the hundreds of webcompat issues being filed and over 3,000 open issues on the preview version of Firefox on Android alone? And there also is a fork of XUL-era Firefox already, called Pale Moon, which various p…

> "Open source" doesn't necessarily mean "practical to maintain."

Mozilla has certainly done a lot over the past decade that effectively guarantees that neither Firefox nor Gecko can realistically exist without the continued existence of the Corporation.

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

#276

Post by mcqueenjordan »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #257
mcqueenjordan wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would AWS ever consider hiring someone full-time to work on the compiler itself?

Get in touch with me. (@amazon.com email is in my profile.) I know the right people to get you in touch with to figure out if this could work. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me.

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

#277

Post by username90 »

asddubs wrote: post #223
adsjhdashkj wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people consider that synonymous. Hell, if anything i tend to consider corporate speak to be even more damning than a lie.

to me corporate speak is empty platitudes trying to bury the lede, whereas lying is lying (and both are dishonest)

Saying "we care deeply at X" can't be proven to be false since they can say "We care about X, we just care more about other things so we fired the X team, it wasn't a lie".

That is corp speak, they say stuff that can't be proven to be lies even though they almost surely are lies.

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

#278

Post by jlokier »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #238
outsomnia wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it's dying because the Internet is simply moving on away from it. > love to go back to Firefox if they would get real with the times Ffox is super up to date with latest and next-gen web technologies... what do you even mean by "get with the times"?

When will I be able to zoom and flick back and forward with the TouchPad? Firefox is desperately behind, at least in usability.

Total side point, but using FF on a Mac flicking back and forward with the touchpad works for me. I've been using it so long I can barely remember a time when it didn't work.

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

#279

Post by wolco »

zettadam wrote: post #177
AsyncAwait wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, the fact that in the U.S. your healthcare is tied to your employer is absolutely nuts.

In other countries your health insurance payments are deducted automatically from your paycheck before you get it. Is it not the same or very similar?

Health insurance? Sounds like a scam. It comes from income taxes and other revenue in Canada.

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

#280

Post by [deleted] »

jpgvm wrote: post #216
maccard wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

PostgreSQL is probably the best example. It's maintained by many people from many different companies.

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