Some believe that open source as a community is dying and the layoffs at Mozilla bode ill for the open web – Explica

The mower that is 2020 continues to take things ahead. A couple of days ago Mozilla Corporation announced the layoff of 250 employees citing the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on your income.

It is another hard blow for the company that already in January had laid off 70 employees due to lack of income. With this measure basically projects significant enough for the developer community have been removed or lost, and the future of Firefox looks increasingly dark for the browser that represents almost the only light that keeps the web open.

The layoffs at Mozilla affect teams that worked on Firefox Devtools, Servo, MDN, WebXR, Firefox Reality, and / or DevRel. Servo is the rendering engine that Mozilla started building from scratch several years ago and for which the Rust programming language was created. MDN is a learning platform for the technologies and software that the web works with, and a huge resource for developers.

These layoffs have basically killed those projects, and Mozilla will shift to focus on creating new commercial products in order to mitigate the damage and generate new sources of income. Examples of this are your VPN, Pocket, or Hubs.

And is that even before the coronavirus crisis, Mozilla was already suffering, the first layoffs came because they underestimated the time it would take them to create these new income-generating products, and worst of all is that we are talking about an organization whose main source of income is a direct competitor which is basically taking over the web: Google.

Mozilla needs to focus on commercial products that generate income and this leaves many open source projects that benefited the development of the open web orphans

Agreements with search engines (Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China, Google in the rest of the world) to be included as search engines in Firefox represent more than 90% of Mozillas revenue. But Firefox keeps losing users and market share and it is not difficult to ask How much longer can Mozilla survive like this?

The only hope for Mozilla is to become something like the antithesis of what it originally was: a corporation more focused mainly on commercial projects that generate profits and not on the open source community and the open web, because they have something to eat.

If Mozilla lost the proceeds from its Google deal it would go straight to the graveyard. And this is just another taste of the almost absolute control over the web that large corporations have.

For many, cases like Mozillas are simply another example of how open source as a community is falling apart. The open source of this era is one that is too intertwined with the business strategies of large corporations.

Linux is an exampleAs Lunduke himself commented in his annual Linux Sucks 2020 talk, he is not the only one who believes that the Linux community has become a committee controlled by corporations. The Linux Foundation lives off the contributions of giants like Google, Microsoft, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Sony, VMWare, Uber, etc., and has to please everyone to pay Linus Torvalds salary.

Not long ago these same corporations announced their new great initiative: OpenSSF, a project within the Linux Foundation to foster open source software security and accelerate cross-industry collaboration. Between industries, not between the community or the people.

Today Open Source is more about corporate business strategies than independent communities collaborating with each other

Google controls the development of Chromium, an open source project that already brings all other popular alternative browsers to life that are not Firefox, if Firefox dies what else is left?

The same Microsoft that once hated open source, each day claims to love open source more, and it shows. They already own GitHub, and recently own npm too, a move that basically makes them control the entire workbench of thousands of JavaScript developers, the most widely used programming language by programmers in the world.

The Mozilla that many of us knew seems to be slowly and painfully disappearing. Its most iconic and important product is hanging by a thread, and with Firefox in jeopardy, the open web suffers too. We are increasingly heading towards a world where we all access the web from the same engine created by a megacorporation that has been governing standards for a long time, favoring its products and limiting competition.

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Some believe that open source as a community is dying and the layoffs at Mozilla bode ill for the open web - Explica