8 ms·

Update on Mozilla WebThings

132 points by benfrancis 6y ago

josteink 6y ago
In other words: It's dead. And to be clear, IMO that is absolutely fair. At this stage WebThings seemed more like a conceptual thought, rather than actual marketable products, protocols or even code. If Mozilla need to cut for real, they should definitely get rid of stuff like this which lacked a complete and convincing story.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  I strongly disagree. They have a W3C spec for the WebThings API[1]. Not a protocol as such but its a big step in the right direction. And the existing product is great. I have been using it for months to control my TV, stereo, lights, etc with no issue. I have even added custom adapters for my own little projects. It's a great product to work with and use. I agree that this project was unlikely to make Mozilla any money, but this is much more than a "conceptual thought". [1]https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/ https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/
  - dominicl 6y ago
    Indeed they did do quite something in standardization of thing controls for which it so sad to see it going unmaintained. On the tunnel side though which they are also shutting down there are plenty alternatives e.g.[1] [1] https://diode.io/download/ https://diode.io/download/
- benfrancis 6y ago
  I'm pleased to report that WebThings isn't dead, it is alive and kicking with a new commercial sponsor. The Thing Description specification at the core of WebThings is now a W3C Recommendation (https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-thing-description/ https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-thing-description/) and there is a new W3C Web Thing Protocol community group working on standardising the concrete HTTP & WebSockets based protocol WebThings uses to monitor and control devices. The WebThings platform includes over a hundred GitHub repositories worth of code (https://github.com/WebThingsIO/ https://github.com/WebThingsIO/) but I'm sorry to hear you feel it lacks a convincing story. That's something I hope to improve in WebThings' new life beyond Mozilla's R&D department.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tssva 6y ago
    I know this may be painful to hear since the new commercial sponsor is you but having an early stage startup which is entering the fairly crowded digital signage space be the commercial sponsor is not something which is going to raise anyone's confidence level that WebThings has a long term future.
  - dolmen 6y ago
    What interested me in WebThings was: * independance of any device vendor * independance of operating system vendor * independance of cloud vendor (local data) * true openess that would allow some hope of device vendors contributing integrations As a former developer of a proprietary home gateway who has studied and implemented many home automation protocols I know too much the mess of the home automation ecosystem. Just walled gardens. And gateway APIs are one way to lock-in users and software developers. I wonder if that "new commercial sponsor" will not change the balance of independancy.
dahfizz 6y ago
I hope this goes well, but I am worried. This is a project that I really care about. Mozilla seemed like our only hope for a smart home that doesn't spy on you between WebThings and all the speech processing tech they had. It's important that we have open source alternatives. I will be contributing to this project and I encourage others to do so as well.
- atonse 6y ago
  Apple’s HomeKit Is another ecosystem that doesn’t spy on you. It’s the main reason I picked it even though there are fewer, more expensive devices to choose from.
  - hellcow 6y ago
    Helpful reminder that Apple still cooperates with the FBI [0]. They famously participated in PRISM and only pivoted to privacy-based marketing after this bad PR. It's also closed-source, so you have absolutely no idea that what you've said is true; they've certainly lied about it before. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive-idUSKBN1ZK1CT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - syshum 6y ago
    Given that is closed source you only have Apple's word on that, and I personally do not Trust Apple at all. Further their hostility to open protocols, and open systems means I could never adopt them to run my home or IoT system I have an extreme aversion to vendor lockin when it comes to IoT and I have no desire to tie myself of Apple
  - dolmen 6y ago
    From HomeKit Accessory Protocol specification (https://developer.apple.com/fr/support/homekit-accessory-protocol/ https://developer.apple.com/fr/support/homekit-accessory-pro...): "a HomeKit accessory that will be distributed or sold must incorporate the Apple Authentication Coprocessor" Do you know what the Authentication Coprocessor do? At least those proprietary processor and proprietary protocol are the opposite of the WebThings approach to home automation.
lloydatkinson 6y ago
I have since removed my plan of using WebThings in my house, right after Mozilla started it's self imposed suicide starting with firing Firefox devs.
- benfrancis 6y ago
  Sorry to hear that and I'm very sad about the recent layoffs at Mozilla too, which included lots of people I know. What would convince you to give WebThings a second chance under its new management?
  - aesh2Xa1 6y ago
    For me, what would do it is a complete product that is not niche. A Chromecast competitor that supports the big platforms and content providers out of the box (Android/iOS, Spotify/Netflix, Alexa/Google/Siri) would be ideal. This already exists in the Chromecast, except it's not open. Ideally, it'd just be software on a Raspberry Pi or any hardware.
    - benfrancis 6y ago
      Interesting. That's very different to what WebThings provides today but that's something I'd like to see too and have toyed with building in the past. Chromecast was once very close to being an open platform by implementing the DIAL protocol (although DIAL also had some centralisation issues), but is now a proprietary platform built on the Google Cast protocol, and is creeping towards morphing back into Android TV. There was once a project to build a Firefox OS based TV stick called Matchstick which could have been great (B2G is still used on current Panasonic smart TVs believe it or not), which unfortunately got embroiled in a debate regarding DRM and never made it to market. The digital signage platform I'm currently building at Krellian (https://krellian.com https://krellian.com) could be adapted to consumer use cases like Chromecast and I'd be interested in building that in a standards-based way (e.g. using the W3C Second Screen Protocol), but the challenge would always be getting support from the big content providers, and of course the issue of DRM.
- gostsamo 6y ago
stefan_ 6y ago
Wow, this must be a new record for an IoT platform from conception to death. Thank god they didn't actually dare to sell any devices with this.
- benfrancis 6y ago
  The WebThings platform was a four year project at Mozilla which sadly ended when their Emerging Technologies department was wound down, as part of a recent round of layoffs affecting a quarter of Mozilla's workforce. The closest that WebThings got to a commercial product was this developer kit available on OKdo https://www.okdo.com/p/mozilla-webthings-gateway-kit/ https://www.okdo.com/p/mozilla-webthings-gateway-kit/ As the Founder of the new commercial sponsor for WebThings, that's something I'd like to change.
detaro 6y ago
Maybe just a marketing failure, but WebThings to me always seemed like a project with no clear purpose in the ecosystem. Not enough mindshare and nothing unique to attract that mindshare. Open-source home automation projects is not a field lacking options. While the idea of standardization for protocols has some merit, a W3C group working silently and then tying it to another new standalone "gateway" project is not the way to get the standard attention (sadly an anti-pattern many of the more niche W3C groups fall into, made worse by time limits imposed on WGs). Projects with more impulse behind them create defacto-standards instead, and unless the focus shifts to integrating with other software more I don't see them coming out of that ditch. (+ for my taste the standards involve to much JSON-LD complications, but I'll accept that that's taste) EDIT: I guess part of the question is, what exactly is the goal? Bringing forward the WebThings "standard", or building yet another IoT/home automation controller? To me it has seemed like the "mission" is the former, while the thing actually done is the latter.
- silon42 6y ago
  Haven't used it (or any IOT), but they are doing something right: (quote) Because your smart home gateway is designed to operate locally inside your home without the need for a centralised cloud service, it will continue to work just as before. You’ll still be able to monitor, control and automate your home via the gateway’s web interface inside your home network.
  - detaro 6y ago
    Sure, but that's true of pretty much all the open-source options in the field. (To be clear, I don't want to say it's bad, just not sure about the place and why)
- vongomben 6y ago
  I totally see your points. The interoperability of a standard and a common voice on the home protocols could be relevant move. The gateway is not need or at least is in a very competitive market (with open source solutions)
- rvz 6y ago
ekianjo 6y ago
At this rate Mozilla is killing projects faster than Google. That's quite an achievement.
tyingq 6y ago
I think Mozilla should publish a list of what things they are going to fund and support.
- dolmen 6y ago
  Yes, that would be a shorter list than the things they abandon.
pornel 6y ago
> Because your smart home gateway is designed to operate locally inside your home without the need for a centralised cloud service, it will continue to work just as before. Kudos for that. Too many "smart" things are tied to online accounts for no good reason.
- the__alchemist 6y ago
  The reasons are good for the business; not good for the customer.
bachmeier 6y ago
Is Mozilla trying to monetize anything? I can understand that they need to cut costs, but the other side of the coin is bringing in revenue.
CryoLogic 6y ago
Mozilla seems to be really underperforming in upper management - all of these initiatives that have failed have resulted in engineering layoffs. When will the business unit leaders responsible for repeated failure be let go and replaced?
hadjian 6y ago
Disclosure: I work at Siemens on an implementation of the Web of Things not related to the Mozilla Project. What is mostly misunderstood about the Web of Things, is that it does not define a network protocol but a document format to describe devices in terms of properties, actions and events. Interactions are then further described by „forms“ that contain Hrefs with the protocol scheme supported by the device (e.g. coap://, opc.tcp://). The idea is not to introduce the next unifying protocol, but to unify the description of devices that support arbitrary protocols. Think of OpenAPI for IoT. It serves us well in industrial settings where protocols like opc-ua, bacnet, coap, modbus and the like will stay the leading protocol in their respective domain for the foreseeable future. Such a descriptive approach to me seems the only option to at least write applications in a uniform manner. Looking at efforts like MS Device Description Language (DTDL) or AWS Things Graph Data Model (TDM), it makes sense to have at least one openly standardized description language to prevent fragmentation at that level. The war on fragmentation at the protocol level is already lost IMHO (and everybody lost).
rzr 6y ago
Something that worth to be mentioned too, is that the gateway project has been designed to be extensible with addons. The community took off with more than hundred of adapters to support new devices or protocols and even online services. Myself I wrote a couple of them and use them to push further than the regular smarthome use cases. For the curious ones watch demos: https://purl.org/rzr/weboftwins https://purl.org/rzr/weboftwins https://purl.org/rzr/social https://purl.org/rzr/social

132 points by benfrancis 6y ago

In other words: It's dead. And to be clear, IMO that is absolutely fair. At this stage WebThings seemed more like a conceptual thought, rather than actual marketable products, protocols or even code. If Mozilla need to cut for real, they should definitely get rid of stuff like this which lacked a complete and convincing story.

dahfizz 6y ago
I strongly disagree. They have a W3C spec for the WebThings API[1]. Not a protocol as such but its a big step in the right direction. And the existing product is great. I have been using it for months to control my TV, stereo, lights, etc with no issue. I have even added custom adapters for my own little projects. It's a great product to work with and use. I agree that this project was unlikely to make Mozilla any money, but this is much more than a "conceptual thought". [1]https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/ https://iot.mozilla.org/wot/
- dominicl 6y ago
  Indeed they did do quite something in standardization of thing controls for which it so sad to see it going unmaintained. On the tunnel side though which they are also shutting down there are plenty alternatives e.g.[1] [1] https://diode.io/download/ https://diode.io/download/
benfrancis 6y ago
I'm pleased to report that WebThings isn't dead, it is alive and kicking with a new commercial sponsor. The Thing Description specification at the core of WebThings is now a W3C Recommendation (https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-thing-description/ https://www.w3.org/TR/wot-thing-description/) and there is a new W3C Web Thing Protocol community group working on standardising the concrete HTTP & WebSockets based protocol WebThings uses to monitor and control devices. The WebThings platform includes over a hundred GitHub repositories worth of code (https://github.com/WebThingsIO/ https://github.com/WebThingsIO/) but I'm sorry to hear you feel it lacks a convincing story. That's something I hope to improve in WebThings' new life beyond Mozilla's R&D department.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tssva 6y ago
  I know this may be painful to hear since the new commercial sponsor is you but having an early stage startup which is entering the fairly crowded digital signage space be the commercial sponsor is not something which is going to raise anyone's confidence level that WebThings has a long term future.
- dolmen 6y ago
  What interested me in WebThings was: * independance of any device vendor * independance of operating system vendor * independance of cloud vendor (local data) * true openess that would allow some hope of device vendors contributing integrations As a former developer of a proprietary home gateway who has studied and implemented many home automation protocols I know too much the mess of the home automation ecosystem. Just walled gardens. And gateway APIs are one way to lock-in users and software developers. I wonder if that "new commercial sponsor" will not change the balance of independancy.

dahfizz 6y ago

I hope this goes well, but I am worried. This is a project that I really care about. Mozilla seemed like our only hope for a smart home that doesn't spy on you between WebThings and all the speech processing tech they had. It's important that we have open source alternatives. I will be contributing to this project and I encourage others to do so as well.

atonse 6y ago
Apple’s HomeKit Is another ecosystem that doesn’t spy on you. It’s the main reason I picked it even though there are fewer, more expensive devices to choose from.
- hellcow 6y ago
  Helpful reminder that Apple still cooperates with the FBI [0]. They famously participated in PRISM and only pivoted to privacy-based marketing after this bad PR. It's also closed-source, so you have absolutely no idea that what you've said is true; they've certainly lied about it before. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive-idUSKBN1ZK1CT https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- syshum 6y ago
  Given that is closed source you only have Apple's word on that, and I personally do not Trust Apple at all. Further their hostility to open protocols, and open systems means I could never adopt them to run my home or IoT system I have an extreme aversion to vendor lockin when it comes to IoT and I have no desire to tie myself of Apple
- dolmen 6y ago
  From HomeKit Accessory Protocol specification (https://developer.apple.com/fr/support/homekit-accessory-protocol/ https://developer.apple.com/fr/support/homekit-accessory-pro...): "a HomeKit accessory that will be distributed or sold must incorporate the Apple Authentication Coprocessor" Do you know what the Authentication Coprocessor do? At least those proprietary processor and proprietary protocol are the opposite of the WebThings approach to home automation.

lloydatkinson 6y ago

I have since removed my plan of using WebThings in my house, right after Mozilla started it's self imposed suicide starting with firing Firefox devs.

benfrancis 6y ago
Sorry to hear that and I'm very sad about the recent layoffs at Mozilla too, which included lots of people I know. What would convince you to give WebThings a second chance under its new management?
- aesh2Xa1 6y ago
  For me, what would do it is a complete product that is not niche. A Chromecast competitor that supports the big platforms and content providers out of the box (Android/iOS, Spotify/Netflix, Alexa/Google/Siri) would be ideal. This already exists in the Chromecast, except it's not open. Ideally, it'd just be software on a Raspberry Pi or any hardware.
  - benfrancis 6y ago
    Interesting. That's very different to what WebThings provides today but that's something I'd like to see too and have toyed with building in the past. Chromecast was once very close to being an open platform by implementing the DIAL protocol (although DIAL also had some centralisation issues), but is now a proprietary platform built on the Google Cast protocol, and is creeping towards morphing back into Android TV. There was once a project to build a Firefox OS based TV stick called Matchstick which could have been great (B2G is still used on current Panasonic smart TVs believe it or not), which unfortunately got embroiled in a debate regarding DRM and never made it to market. The digital signage platform I'm currently building at Krellian (https://krellian.com https://krellian.com) could be adapted to consumer use cases like Chromecast and I'd be interested in building that in a standards-based way (e.g. using the W3C Second Screen Protocol), but the challenge would always be getting support from the big content providers, and of course the issue of DRM.
gostsamo 6y ago

stefan_ 6y ago

Wow, this must be a new record for an IoT platform from conception to death. Thank god they didn't actually dare to sell any devices with this.

benfrancis 6y ago
The WebThings platform was a four year project at Mozilla which sadly ended when their Emerging Technologies department was wound down, as part of a recent round of layoffs affecting a quarter of Mozilla's workforce. The closest that WebThings got to a commercial product was this developer kit available on OKdo https://www.okdo.com/p/mozilla-webthings-gateway-kit/ https://www.okdo.com/p/mozilla-webthings-gateway-kit/ As the Founder of the new commercial sponsor for WebThings, that's something I'd like to change.

detaro 6y ago

Maybe just a marketing failure, but WebThings to me always seemed like a project with no clear purpose in the ecosystem. Not enough mindshare and nothing unique to attract that mindshare. Open-source home automation projects is not a field lacking options. While the idea of standardization for protocols has some merit, a W3C group working silently and then tying it to another new standalone "gateway" project is not the way to get the standard attention (sadly an anti-pattern many of the more niche W3C groups fall into, made worse by time limits imposed on WGs). Projects with more impulse behind them create defacto-standards instead, and unless the focus shifts to integrating with other software more I don't see them coming out of that ditch. (+ for my taste the standards involve to much JSON-LD complications, but I'll accept that that's taste) EDIT: I guess part of the question is, what exactly is the goal? Bringing forward the WebThings "standard", or building yet another IoT/home automation controller? To me it has seemed like the "mission" is the former, while the thing actually done is the latter.

silon42 6y ago
Haven't used it (or any IOT), but they are doing something right: (quote) Because your smart home gateway is designed to operate locally inside your home without the need for a centralised cloud service, it will continue to work just as before. You’ll still be able to monitor, control and automate your home via the gateway’s web interface inside your home network.
- detaro 6y ago
  Sure, but that's true of pretty much all the open-source options in the field. (To be clear, I don't want to say it's bad, just not sure about the place and why)
vongomben 6y ago
I totally see your points. The interoperability of a standard and a common voice on the home protocols could be relevant move. The gateway is not need or at least is in a very competitive market (with open source solutions)
rvz 6y ago

ekianjo 6y ago

At this rate Mozilla is killing projects faster than Google. That's quite an achievement.

tyingq 6y ago

I think Mozilla should publish a list of what things they are going to fund and support.

dolmen 6y ago
Yes, that would be a shorter list than the things they abandon.

pornel 6y ago

> Because your smart home gateway is designed to operate locally inside your home without the need for a centralised cloud service, it will continue to work just as before. Kudos for that. Too many "smart" things are tied to online accounts for no good reason.

the__alchemist 6y ago
The reasons are good for the business; not good for the customer.

bachmeier 6y ago

Is Mozilla trying to monetize anything? I can understand that they need to cut costs, but the other side of the coin is bringing in revenue.

CryoLogic 6y ago

Mozilla seems to be really underperforming in upper management - all of these initiatives that have failed have resulted in engineering layoffs. When will the business unit leaders responsible for repeated failure be let go and replaced?

hadjian 6y ago

Disclosure: I work at Siemens on an implementation of the Web of Things not related to the Mozilla Project. What is mostly misunderstood about the Web of Things, is that it does not define a network protocol but a document format to describe devices in terms of properties, actions and events. Interactions are then further described by „forms“ that contain Hrefs with the protocol scheme supported by the device (e.g. coap://, opc.tcp://). The idea is not to introduce the next unifying protocol, but to unify the description of devices that support arbitrary protocols. Think of OpenAPI for IoT. It serves us well in industrial settings where protocols like opc-ua, bacnet, coap, modbus and the like will stay the leading protocol in their respective domain for the foreseeable future. Such a descriptive approach to me seems the only option to at least write applications in a uniform manner. Looking at efforts like MS Device Description Language (DTDL) or AWS Things Graph Data Model (TDM), it makes sense to have at least one openly standardized description language to prevent fragmentation at that level. The war on fragmentation at the protocol level is already lost IMHO (and everybody lost).

rzr 6y ago

Something that worth to be mentioned too, is that the gateway project has been designed to be extensible with addons. The community took off with more than hundred of adapters to support new devices or protocols and even online services. Myself I wrote a couple of them and use them to push further than the regular smarthome use cases. For the curious ones watch demos: https://purl.org/rzr/weboftwins https://purl.org/rzr/weboftwins https://purl.org/rzr/social https://purl.org/rzr/social