Mozilla Will Stop Developing And Selling Firefox OS Smartphones

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For those who missed it: http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/mozilla-will-stop-developing-and-selling-firefox-os-smartphones/

–jeremy

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I’m surprised it took this long to be honest. The race to the bottom is never fun.

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Really doesn’t surprise me, especially given the recent announcement about ditching Thunderbird. They’re focussing all their effort on the browser and Firefox OS just detracts from that. Also, no-one bought them.

One wonders how long it will be until the Ubuntu phone stops being a Thing. I don’t know who has deeper pockets - Canonical or Mozilla…

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A most interesting question. Does anybody think the answer is “it will not get killed”? I do… On optimistic days.

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I sometimes think that. But more often than not I see the desktop side of Canonical being narrowed down to being just enough people to keep things packaged, whilst the majority of the company’s focus is on cloud, which is where the money’s being made (or at least it was in my day).

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Mozilla are at war. even with themselves, from the days of Netscape.

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Hey, they just (10th Dec.) announced where half of their open source support funding is going - discourse, buildbot, readthedocs, django and mercurial benefit, among others. Thats good news at least - discourse aims to make email a first-class citizen as a means for updates/notifications etc.!
( https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/12/10/mozilla-open-source-support-first-awards-made/ )

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Yeps, and there’s still bugs on @discourse , even including mine.

I liked this from Mozilla, thou

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This is heartbreaking :frowning: I remember going to the shop to buy the official Firefox phone in Japan this Summer. The age of Open Source was here, and I wanted in. Now I have a two year contract for a phone that is no longer supported.

Now I have to question, was it worth the risk? Should we take risks on Open Source, if they can stop support at anytime? I still want to believe :blush:

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It’s just as much worth-the-risk as any proprietary system (anyone remember the Palm Pre? Brilliant phone, but Palm folded up like wet carboard). More so, in fact, because it’s something you care about.

OTOH I’m hideously pragmatic about these things and use an iPhone… make of that what you will :slight_smile:

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@gmb Graham, Palm Computing never dies - they were just bought a year, ago by Wide Progress Global Limited.

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Indeed, Palm is the Beric Dondarrion of the software world.