Mozilla is laying off roughly 250 employees (I believe that's about a quarter of their staff).
Their stated reason for laying off 250 employees is... to develop more Mozilla products. Which. Typically you don't need to have less employees to build more products... but the announcement was so light on actual information, that it's hard to make heads or tails of it.
One example from the announcement:
"That means diverse, representative, focused on people outside of our walls, solving problems, building new products, engaging with users and doing the magic of mixing tech with our values. To start, that means products that mitigate harms or address the kinds of the problems that people face today. Over the longer run, our goal is to build new experiences that people love and want, that have better values and better characteristics inside those products."
What does that mean, exactly? Who knows! Lots of "values" and "diverse", "representative", "magic". Shrug.
Then there's this bit:
"Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges."
I'm assuming they're talking about issues with marketing driven revenue (where the user of a service is, in fact, the product being sold). If that's what they're talking about... then I agree with that. Heck, that's at least one of the reasons why I like sites like Locals -- no advertising, no need to do mass data collection and sales (like Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc.).
This would be a massive change for Mozilla. They have, until now, relied heavily on advertising sales (including deals with Google) and marketing / data collection schemes. That's how they earned money. Are they going to stop doing that now?
Their statements were not only light on specifics... but almost completely devoid of them. It reads like they filled an A.I. bot up with business lingo... and let it spit out an announcement.
One thing worth noting, is that Mozilla is committing to provide severance pay equivalent to full time salary through the end of 2020. Which means those 250 people should (if Mozilla is being straight about this) receive close to 5 months worth of pay as they leave the company.
What happens with Mozilla Corporation from there... I couldn't even begin to tell you based on what they've said so far.
The public announcement:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-changing-mozilla/
The internal email:
https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Message-to-Employees-Change-in-Difficult-Times.pdf
And that's not all! Figma - who makes design and prototyping software - also trademarked the word "Config" and attempted to trademark "Schema".
Remember that "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" ad campaign from back in the early 2000s? The one that told you pirating DVDs was a crime? It used unlicensed music and a pirated font. Seriously.
Ads are filling the entirety of the Web -- websites, podcasts, YouTube videos, etc. -- at an increasing rate. Prices for those ad placements are plummeting. Consumers are desperate to use ad-blockers to make the web palatable. Google (and others) are desperate to break and block ad-blockers. All of which results in... more ads and lower pay for creators.
It's a fascinatingly annoying cycle. And there's only one viable way out of it.
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Those in power with openSUSE make it clear they will not allow me anywhere near anything related to the openSUSE project. Ever. For any reason.
Well, that settles that, then! Guess I won't be contributing to openSUSE! 🤣
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An advantage of writing a dependency free game engine is that it's easy to set up anywhere. My flight was delayed, so I bought a cheap Bluetooth keyboard and added features to my game via Termux on my phone. In a million years you couldn't do that with something like Unity.
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