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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

#321

Post by shock »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #34
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…

For Apple, Microsoft, and Google, their open source activities are all loss leaders for their profitable ventures. Apple sells hardware, and most of their software offerings, like MacOS, their office suite, and Safari, and given away to convince people to buy that hardware. Also, it's not like they're spending a whole lot of time making Sarafi the best browser around. Microsoft's web browser was created (and bundled)…

> altruism alone wasn't enough to pay the bills.

That certainly depends on how big the bills are.

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

#322

Post by spoopyskelly »

capableweb wrote: post #235
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.

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.

Maybe AWS is going to do something useful with it instead of just rewriting all established tools.

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

#323

Post by The_rationalist »

steveklabnik wrote: post #314
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…

Past the edit window, so I'll just add this: https://twitter.com/rustlang/status/1294024734804508679

When can we see an * up to date list of the affected core team members? There's at least three and not two like said before (I'm referring to the addition of alexcrichton)

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

#324

Post by zelly »

stonogo wrote: post #184
blub wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The projects which are essential for Mozilla. These were all side-projects which maybe a FAANG can afford, but not a normal company. Mozilla was operating a long time under the mistaken assumption that they're a tech powerhouse when they're obviously not. You can lie to yourself only for so long before the market corrects your assumptions the hard way.

They fired the Servo team. Servo's CSS engine is shipping in Firefox. Servo's rendering engine was supposed to become the primary Firefox graphics engine. It's weird to call that a side project when it's clearly development aimed at becoming the basis of their primary product.

If they could use a different, off-the-shelf rendering engine (cough Blink cough) that's actually faster and battle-tested, then they aren't losing anything at all. I've been hearing about Servo for years but nothing's come of it. I installed Servo once and it crashed within a few minutes (on Linux). Though I'm not an expert in it, my impression is that development has been blocked. From a business perspective it doesn't make sense to keep a project on board for years and years when it hasn't produced any deliverables.

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

#325

Post by zelly »

harrygeez wrote: post #131
thayne wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run, these changes will hurt the user experience of firefox. If you ignore developer tools and similar, then developers will be less will be less willing to develop for and test on your browser, especially if your browser already only has a minority of user share. And it doesn't matter how cool your chrome is, if websites don't work in a browser, user's aren't going to use it.

This has been said many times outside of the tech circle: 2020 is all about survival. Orgs need to stay lean so they can navigate through this pandemic and the resultant economic crisis. Just because Mozilla is pausing these efforts now doesn't mean they're stopping for good. Maybe these are all short term necessities for Mozilla, and when things get back to normal they'll pick up where they left off. One can at leas…

The reason that has been said outside of the tech circle is because it doesn't really apply to big tech, whose stock prices just hit a new all-time-high a few days ago. We can debate the reasons why that is or whether it's a good thing, but it can't be used as an excuse for Mozilla's failures. How can, say, Dropbox make a ton of money during covid when people are forced to use computers but Mozilla can't? Also, how can you say Mozilla is doing this to stay lean when the CEO makes $2.5 million a year?

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

#326

Post by [deleted] »

iaml wrote: post #91
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 don't understand why they don't just create a patreon/github sponsors/bitcoin donations for core ff/rust/mdn teams salaries and call it a day. I'm sure they'll get more than enough contributions to make it viable.

[deleted]

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

#327

Post by zelly »

nitrogen wrote: post #252
zamadatix wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has always made the Lion's share of the income and Safari makes billions per year on the same Google search deal so the model did not disappear or change on them. What happened is Firefox usage share went down the drain (particularly due to mobile usage share being something like 0.5% but desktop isn't too hot either) so they can't negotiate the same deals they used to or cash in on the rising value of the se…

There's sort of a catch 22. There should have been a lawsuit against Google for their anticompetitive tactics for promoting Chrome, but you can't bite the hand that feeds you.

Even if they won it would have been a one-time settlement. That would give them a couple months of runway. And that'd be the last money they ever see, unless Microsoft would throw them a bone with a Bing deal. You can't undo history. Chrome users aren't going to switch to Firefox.

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

#328

Post by zelly »

rglullis wrote: post #33
outworlder wrote: post #18

I wonder if Rust has enough momentum to sustain itself now.

Wasn't Microsoft hinting that it was going to adopt Rust for some projects?

Microsoft has Rust bindings for WinRT and I think some internal tools at Azure. But Microsoft has a long history of creating programming languages for every niche, so they'll probably make one in the tradition of Rust.

https://github.com/microsoft/verona

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

#329

Post by steveklabnik »

The_rationalist wrote: post #323
steveklabnik wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Past the edit window, so I'll just add this: https://twitter.com/rustlang/status/1294024734804508679

When can we see an * up to date list of the affected core team members? There's at least three and not two like said before (I'm referring to the addition of alexcrichton)

I feel slightly weird about being so specific about it, but there were only two people at Mozilla who were on the core team: Niko and Manish.

Alex hasn't been on the core team since February. He's still on the Cargo teams and the wasm WG though.

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

#330

Post by cordite »

andrewflnr wrote: post #244
cordite wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still WebKit under the hood isn’t it? The JS engines are different though

No, IIRC Firefox's render engine is called Gecko, and it's a completely separate (older I believe) lineage from Webkit. Ed: I may have misunderstood which "it's" you were referring to. Oh well.

I meant between Safari and Chrome. Saying Apple maintains their own, yet they share tech.
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