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0 pointsjacquesm5y ago0 comments

Yes, it commonly helps if you use the same definitions to have a productive discussion.

Rust is not a product, never was meant to be one either, if you can point to $0.01 of income brought to Mozilla because of someone paying for Rust then I will be happy to concede that it is in fact a product.

Failing to me means that your product can not stand in the marketplace on merit. Underhanded - criminal at that - tactics by a competitor does not change that in principle. See also: Stacker, Netscape (hm, haven't we seen this before: browser company wants to be platform company, does a rewrite), and many other products that ultimately did not make it but had a very good run while they were alive.

Mozilla is confusing their own importance to staying alive as 'Mozilla the profit seeking company' vs 'FireFox, the last stand'.

And the latter to me is much closer to the stated mission of Mozilla than the former, no matter how much corpspeak they throw at it.

0 pointsjacquesm5y ago0 comments

Yes, it commonly helps if you use the same definitions to have a productive discussion.

Mozilla is confusing their own importance to staying alive as 'Mozilla the profit seeking company' vs 'FireFox, the last stand'.

And the latter to me is much closer to the stated mission of Mozilla than the former, no matter how much corpspeak they throw at it.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

AsyncAwait5y ago· 2 in thread

> Rust is not a product, never was meant to be one either, if you can point to $0.01 of income brought to Mozilla because of someone paying for Rust

That's not the only way to measure it. Rust paid for itself by making Firefox more competitive. Also, I like how the focus is on one of the most useful things Mozilla does outside of Firefox and not the gazillion things that had much, much less use than Rust.

jacquesmOP5y ago

But Mozilla is not a 'programming languages' company in the mold of Microsoft or former Borland. Programming languages are worth $0 to the market place at the moment. So if Rust gave some unique advantages, great. Use those. And maintain focus. Because if they don't do that then we may end up with Rust and no FireFox and to me that would be net loss.

AsyncAwait5y ago

> But Mozilla is not a 'programming languages' company in the mold of Microsoft or former Borland.

What? Microsoft is nothing like Borland. Sure they make some money from Visual Studio Enterprise or whatever, but their languages are mostly there to attract devs to Windows/Azure and are making $0 directly.

You missed my point, Rust does not need to directly make $$ "on the market place", ever. All it needs to do is enable Mozilla developers to make Firefox more competitive, easier and faster than other solutions. It is doing that, see "Firefox Quantum", WebRender, Servo etc.

And BTW, the Rust staff paid by Mozilla is relatively tiny, (dozen people?). The fact that this is a major focus is pathetic.

EDIT: Not a dozen, more like 3-4 people.

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