B2G OS and Gecko Annoucement from Ari Jaaksi & David Bryant

[Julie McCracken]

TO: B2G OS community (for their weekly Tuesday meeting)
SUBJECT:  B2G OS and Gecko
========================================================

By the end of 2015 Mozilla leadership had come to the conclusion that our then Firefox OS initiative of shipping phones with commercial partners would not bring Mozilla the returns we sought. We made the first of a series of announcements about changes in the development of Firefox OS at Mozilla.  Since then we have gradually wound down that work and, as of the end of July 2016 have stopped all commercial development on Firefox OS. This message recaps what transpired during that period of time and also describes what will happen with the Firefox OS code base going forward.

In particular, through various channels we announced:

• We would stop our efforts to build and ship smartphones through carrier partners and pivot our efforts with Firefox OS to explore opportunities for new use cases in the world of connected devices.

• Firefox OS was transitioned to a Tier 3 platform from the perspective of support by Mozilla's Platform Engineering organization.  That meant as of January 31, 2016 no Mozilla Platform Engineering resources would be engaged to provide ongoing support and all such work would be done by other contributors.  For some period of time that work would be done by Mozilla’s Connected Devices team.

• We had ideas for other opportunities for Firefox OS, perhaps as a platform for explorations in the world of connected devices, and perhaps for continued evolution of Firefox OS TV.  To allow for those possibilities, and to provide a stable release for commercial TV partners, development would continue on a Firefox OS 2.6 release.

• In parallel with continued explorations by the Connected Devices team, we recognized there was interest within the Mozilla community in carrying forward work on Firefox OS as a smartphone platform, and perhaps even for other purposes.  A Firefox OS Transition Project was launched to perform a major clean-up of the B2G code bringing it to a stable end state so it could be passed into the hands of the community as an open source project.

In the spring and summer of 2016 the Connected Devices team dug deeper into opportunities for Firefox OS. They concluded that Firefox OS TV was a project to be run by our commercial partner and not a project to be led by Mozilla. Further, Firefox OS was determined to not be sufficiently useful for ongoing Connected Devices work to justify the effort to maintain it. This meant that development of the Firefox OS stack was no longer a part of Connected Devices, or Mozilla at all. Firefox OS 2.6 would be the last release from Mozilla.

Today we are announcing the next phase in that evolution. While work at Mozilla on Firefox OS has ceased, we very much need to continue to evolve the underlying code that comprises Gecko, our web platform engine, as part of the ongoing development of Firefox. In order to evolve quickly and enable substantial new architectural changes in Gecko, Mozilla’s Platform Engineering organization needs to remove all B2G-related code from mozilla-central. This certainly has consequences for B2G OS. For the community to continue working on B2G OS they will have to maintain a code base that includes a full version of Gecko, so will need to fork Gecko and proceed with development on their own, separate branch.

We realize that these decisions are painful for those of us who had high hopes and dreams and work tied up in Firefox OS — in the idea of an open source, user-centric, Mozilla mission-based operating system for the mobile space. We also recognize that this decision makes it much harder for the b2g community to continue its work. We wish we could have found another way. However, we believe that these have been necessary decisions and the best possible way for Mozilla to continue on its mission.

Ari Jaaksi

David Bryant

[Luca Perri]

Dear Ari an David,

I'm sure you, at Mozilla, are doing your best to keep the Foundation functioning, optimizing resources, energies and time at your disposal. I also think you've done what you could to find another - a better - solution to keep alive both Mozilla's interest and community's one.

Obviously, I also have to thank you for the development of Firefox OS itself, and, of course, for the help you gave us during the transition phase of the project.

Nonetheless, let me say I find really strange we have different priorities - we as a community, and you as the Foundation. It sounds weird, or at least unnatural considering that, in the end, the Foundation itself is made by the Community.

I don't find this is a good move: Mozilla needs it's community, and the community needs its Mozilla.

Divided we are weaker and our efforts will take a lot more to reach any results.

Today, I really hoped you would give us some good news, such as a bigger involvement of Mozilla in the reinassence of b2g os for smartphone.

Unfortunately this is not the case, but I really hope you can go back on yourself sooner or later.

Best,

Luca

[Gabriele Svelto]

On 27/09/2016 00:42, Julie McCracken wrote:
> Today we are announcing the next phase in that evolution. While work at
> Mozilla on Firefox OS has ceased, we very much need to continue to
> evolve the underlying code that comprises Gecko, our web platform
> engine, as part of the ongoing development of Firefox. In order to
> evolve quickly and enable substantial new architectural changes in
> Gecko, Mozilla’s Platform Engineering organization needs to remove all
> B2G-related code from mozilla-central.

Interestingly there has been no discussion on this topic on the
dev-platform mailing list. Was this discussed publicly at all before
this announcement?

Gabriele

[kskarthik]

It happened on platform-dev a month ago. I created a topic on discourse too. But, i didn't expect to end like this https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/should-we-worry-about-this/10407

[Gabriele Svelto]

On 27/09/2016 15:51, kskarthik wrote:
> It happened on platform-dev a month ago. I created a topic on discourse too. But, i didn't expect to end like this https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/should-we-worry-about-this/10407

It's not the same thing. Removing the non-standard DOM APIs was already
decided and agreed upon. In fact I've been participating in the work
involved removing three APIs myself and I've also started tackling the
complete removal of mozApps.

Here it seems like we're talking about removing any part specific to B2G
which would include things like the widget and build system bits. That
wasn't discussed publicly anywhere AFAIK.

Gabriele

[andrew....@gmail.com]

Speaking for developers outside of Mozilla who that were watching B2G and writing apps for Firefox OS - We no longer care what you do with the code.