

Andreas Gal is leaving Mozilla - hepha1979
http://andreasgal.com/2015/06/05/new-adventure/

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mooreds
The real question is, who is stepping in? Mozilla is very important to keep
the major browser vendors honest (beyond being a great piece of software).
Seems to me it needs deep technical leadership.

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kibwen
I don't know about the CTO role, but since Dave Herman has been leading
Mozilla Research for a while now I wouldn't be surprised to see him take over.

~~~
Manishearth
That was my first thought too after wondering who would be the new CTO :)

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ptx
Hm, this seems discouraging. Brendan Eich, Andreas Gal and Graydon Hoare are
all gone and Mozilla's leadership and public messaging seems to be getting
more and more marketing-dominated.

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navyrain
Despite some well-publicized departures, I'm still bullish on Mozilla. As
javascript becomes more capable, Mozilla's open-web mission becomes more
attainable. Public awareness of widespread government surveillance increases
the demand for trustworthy communication tools. Concretely, FirefoxOS is
quietly reaching maturity, and Servo has a great deal of promise.

I think that Mozilla's strange position, being a non-profit that is at various
times either in competition or in cooperation with the world's largest tech
companies, makes employee departures all that more press-worthy that the
typical corporate churn. I wouldn't read too much into it.

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hobarrera
> Mozilla's open-web mission becomes more attainable

That's their mission (allegedly), but things like Pocket integrations, or the
Telefonica chat thing (Hello?) really make me think it's not where the
manpower is going.

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Manishearth
Most of the effort behind Hello was independent of Hello. Hello is based on
WebRTC, which is something Firefox needed to support anyway. Hello is just a
neat way to use it, and I doubt that it required a lot of effort. ICBW,
though.

Same goes for Pocket.

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hobarrera
Little effort, but we (eg: the community) don't get anything that's reusable.
We just got a bunch of code that interacts with some proprietary system.

Meanwhile, we still don't have any FLOSS implementation for WebRTC-based
voice+video.

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metajack
I can't figure out what you mean here. WebRTC's implementation is totally open
source. The only thing aside from accounts in Hello is the STUN/TURN servers,
and I think OSS projects exist for running those.

In other words, everything is reusable and is being used by tons of new
startups and projects doing video conferencing.

The whole thing will even use free codecs if both sides support it.

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sylvinus
I really hope Servo & other real innovations (i.e. not Firefox OS) can turn
Mozilla around. The open web needs them to matter!

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skrowl
Yep. If firefox and IE together dip below 20% or so, we'll see more and more
of the horrible "This site only works in Chrome".

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walterbell
_> we'll see more and more of the horrible "This site only works in Chrome"_

There is still Safari/WebKit to provide some balance.

Sites could move to a native app with bundled WebKit. If you're going to
support only one client, make it your own client.

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bevacqua
He was the CTO for less than 1.5 years, I guess he didn't like having that
position at Mozilla if he left so quickly?

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navyrain
7 years at any organization is a long time, and with so few rungs above him on
the ladder, it is only reasonable that he'd move on to something else.

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GuiA
Nah, that's a sign of an organization going in the wrong direction to me. When
you reach the C*O level, you should pretty much be there for life unless you
have serious doubts about the sustainability of the place/get kicked out/have
a major life event that takes precedence (eg sick spouse).

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toomuchtodo
You should only be in a position long enough to a) learn enough to move up to
the next position or b) effect the change you want to if you're C-Level.

If you're not learning anymore, it's not fun anymore, or you're not having the
effect you want to (or any combination of those), its time to leave.

~~~
Manishearth
This. I think most Mozilla employees approach stuff this way. I've seen folks
leave to form a startup other times too, and that's not because Mozilla is bad
at keeping them.

I (non employee; student+volunteer) certainly do this. I've drifted between
open source projects and communities, reducing participation drastically when
I find something I learn from more. Im pretty involved in a couple projects
and I really want to stay because they're awesome, but it's quite possible
that in a few years I'll be somewhere completely different. At the moment, I
hope not. But only time will tell.

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anon3_
Mozilla lets cabals on Twitter call the shots over tech brains.

Mozilla doesn't need to survive as a corporation after that blunder. They
should downsize and just provide the browser and thunderbird as open source
projects.

Rescind what you did to Eich, Mozilla. Stand up for your employees rights and
the ethics and people who got you where you are now.

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zatkin
>Related: Technical Leadership at Mozilla - Today, I am starting my role as
Mozilla’s new Chief Technology Officer.

This is amusing.

