B2G OS and Gecko Annoucement from Ari Jaaksi & David Bryant

[tas_pats]

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

<https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/09/firefox-os-pivot-to-connected-devices/>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

<https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21msg/mozilla.dev.platform/gF-kiJV21ro/qJRk1B-KAAAJ>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

<https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/02/04/firefox-os-smartphones-and-2-6/>.

*

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

<https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/update-on-b2g-os-for-smartphones-transition/7364>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