8 ms·

What's the current outlook of Servo following recent events at Mozilla? Did any significant contributions previously come from the OSS community or was it more

What's the current outlook of Servo following recent events at Mozilla? Did any significant contributions previously come from the OSS community or was it more or less just Mozillians?

tarkin2 6y ago
I thought it was only the dev tools and mdn people? Although looking at twitter it appears it may be more?
- zucker42 6y ago
  The U.S. based Servo team got laid off. There's another team I think, and they were unsure last I heard.
  - est31 6y ago
    IIRC nox was in the paris office, and jdm in the Torronto office.
    - fabrice_d 6y ago
      Simon is also in Paris. He an nox both worked on the "layout 2020" project (with pcwalton).
      - est31 6y ago
        Yes but Simon apparently wasn't laid off while jdm and nox were. It's not just the US servo folks affected.
        fabrice_d 6y ago
        France has reasonable labor laws with respect to firing people, so the list of people fired there is not known yet.
        mst 6y ago
        That would come as news to nox. Not that I expect him to have any actual motivation at this point given Servo is basically toast either way.
        est31 6y ago
        I have it from their tweets: https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1293198502642749440 https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1293198502642749440 https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1293999583903780864 https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1293999583903780864
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        mst 6y ago
        Neither of those mean he's been laid off.
aquova 6y ago
To jump on this, what is the scope of Servo anymore? It was originally supposed to eventually replace Gecko, but last I heard they had shifted to simply moving the more stable parts into Firefox with Quantum. What is the end goal of the project now, even before the recent layoffs?
- dathinab 6y ago
  I think it kinda didn't had an end goal anymore. They had detected the most profitable improvements and moved them over to Firefox. So I'm not really surprised about them not continuing servo, even though it had been grate. I'm more worried about some of the other layoff. Further it feels a bit like they got in a place where they financially couldn't go on like before and fanned out to get more revenue streams but if that fails we might be down to chrome + safari, which would be horrible, tbh. If it really comes to that we might even want to try to push the EU to get financially involved or something.
  - dthul 6y ago
    Someone on Twitter mentioned Servo's "Layout 2020" project which would have ensured that Firefox's layout engine stays competitive: https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020 https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020
    - Brakenshire 6y ago
      A parallel layout engine would be a hugely important change for the web. Would mean the possibility of changing or animating layout relevant properties (which is almost all of them) without recalculating the entire page. This is the most important limitation for web UIs.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    This is the problem with the low hanging fruit strategy. Everyone gets behind the 20% improvement. Almost nobody gets behind the 1% improvement. Those only happen by force of will (some developer doing it despite being told not to). In the end you are 80% of the way to the goal and the last 20% is politically insurmountable. This is, IME, a primary driver for the Lava Flow Antipattern.

What's the current outlook of Servo following recent events at Mozilla? Did any significant contributions previously come from the OSS community or was it more or less just Mozillians?

tarkin2 6y ago

I thought it was only the dev tools and mdn people? Although looking at twitter it appears it may be more?

zucker42 6y ago
The U.S. based Servo team got laid off. There's another team I think, and they were unsure last I heard.
- est31 6y ago
  IIRC nox was in the paris office, and jdm in the Torronto office.
  - fabrice_d 6y ago
    Simon is also in Paris. He an nox both worked on the "layout 2020" project (with pcwalton).
    - est31 6y ago
      Yes but Simon apparently wasn't laid off while jdm and nox were. It's not just the US servo folks affected.
      - fabrice_d 6y ago
        France has reasonable labor laws with respect to firing people, so the list of people fired there is not known yet.
      - mst 6y ago
        That would come as news to nox. Not that I expect him to have any actual motivation at this point given Servo is basically toast either way.
        est31 6y ago
        I have it from their tweets: https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1293198502642749440 https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1293198502642749440 https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1293999583903780864 https://twitter.com/nokusu/status/1293999583903780864
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        mst 6y ago
        Neither of those mean he's been laid off.

aquova 6y ago

To jump on this, what is the scope of Servo anymore? It was originally supposed to eventually replace Gecko, but last I heard they had shifted to simply moving the more stable parts into Firefox with Quantum. What is the end goal of the project now, even before the recent layoffs?

dathinab 6y ago
I think it kinda didn't had an end goal anymore. They had detected the most profitable improvements and moved them over to Firefox. So I'm not really surprised about them not continuing servo, even though it had been grate. I'm more worried about some of the other layoff. Further it feels a bit like they got in a place where they financially couldn't go on like before and fanned out to get more revenue streams but if that fails we might be down to chrome + safari, which would be horrible, tbh. If it really comes to that we might even want to try to push the EU to get financially involved or something.
- dthul 6y ago
  Someone on Twitter mentioned Servo's "Layout 2020" project which would have ensured that Firefox's layout engine stays competitive: https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020 https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Layout-2020
  - Brakenshire 6y ago
    A parallel layout engine would be a hugely important change for the web. Would mean the possibility of changing or animating layout relevant properties (which is almost all of them) without recalculating the entire page. This is the most important limitation for web UIs.
- hinkley 6y ago
  This is the problem with the low hanging fruit strategy. Everyone gets behind the 20% improvement. Almost nobody gets behind the 1% improvement. Those only happen by force of will (some developer doing it despite being told not to). In the end you are 80% of the way to the goal and the last 20% is politically insurmountable. This is, IME, a primary driver for the Lava Flow Antipattern.