I was executive sponsor of Rust, which Graydon Hoare was doing as a personal project while working with me on ES4. Rob Sayre, JS team manager, agreed Rust should be an official project, so Graydon went full time on Rust at Mozilla. This was in 2008.
Later, others notably Niko Matsakis and Patrick Walton (apologies for leaving yet other folks’ names out) took Rust to 1.0.
Mitchell didn’t know what Rust was until I explained it, wasn’t CEO when we made it an official project, but was CEO for this:
Holy shit, this is actually Eich. Comment deserves more attention
Huge fan, you were pushed out unfairly - it's wild that you were fired for donating money to a vote that passed. It was a normal and popular opinion at the time.
Brendan, I'm a big fan of a lot of your work, but I really think it's a poor look commenting in this thread at all. Most folks on HN are well aware of Mitchell's record, and those that aren't...well it's willful ignorance on their part.
I think it comes off as petty to punch down, and wanted to let Mr. Eich know (out of respect) in case he didn't realize it. But if he realizes it and doesn't care, or just disagrees, that's his decision.
Punching down implies I’m up. How do you figure that? I’m not at Mozilla, not paying myself a seven figure salary, not ever engaging with the Davos set.
In any event, my comment laid out salient bits Rust history, which however much you might not like them, do not “punch” anyone.
You're a chief executive of a successful web technology and browser organization, while it looks as though Baker is being removed from the one you previously left.
I have no issue with the Rust facts, just that the context makes it look like you're being petty by further highlighting Baker's failure in a thread about what is effectively her removal, and I thought maybe you didn't realize that and would like to know. If you know and don't care, or disagree, then just disregard me.
>I’m not at Mozilla, not paying myself a seven figure salary, not ever engaging with the Davos set.
Mozilla's a dying organization kept on life support by Google and playing make-believe hero of the free web these days. Certainly tough to get much lower than that.
You are only getting Brendan's story, and why is Brendan going out of his way to attack Mitchell Baker? It strongly implies some powerful drive besides sharing information.
Whatever white knighting is, I'm interested in the truth, in the dangers of Internet mobs, and in fairness to anyone (including you). All are essential. Look at what our world has become as people disparage all that.
> the person who has destroyed firefox’s marketshare?
One aspect of that mob mentality: You skipped past having evidence and reasoning for that assertion; it's just assumed. And then you act out in anger that anyone would question the mob's assumptions.
Netscape, on its deathbed (and I think due to Baker's efforts, in part), open-sourced the Netscape code. Mozilla was created by ex-Netscapers, developed that code, and released a few versions of a Mozilla browser, which followed Netscape's idea of integrating browser, mail client, webpage editor, other stuff (maybe IRC client?).
Sometime later, a few Mozillians decided the web and Mozilla needed a simple, sleek, fast browser, and built Firefox.
Mozilla was created by Netscape itself, before its "deathbed". They were possibly the first "open-core" project of significant scale: they wanted to do a Big Rewrite (Netscape 4 code was unmanageable and crusty), and hoped that doing it as opensource would speed things up. The original Mozilla suite was supposed to be the experimental/rough version, which Netscape would then polish and sell as its own. Unfortunately, by the time this happened (and it did happen - Netscape released a few Mozilla-based versions), the browser market was entirely commoditized and there was no path to profitability for Netscape (which had been absorbed by AOL by then). The Big Rewrite took way longer than expected, and the open setup introduced even more development friction.
The Mozilla suite never got anything else beyond browser/mail/editor. I think the AOL version shipped a bunch of extra bookmarks and that's it. They had already built some infrastructure for extensions and themes though, and that's effectively what Firefox took to extreme consequences: a skunkwork group of Mozilla devs stripped the suite down to the lone browser, and forced everything else to be an extension. That was Phoenix (rebirth and all that), which became Firebird (because people can't spell Phoenix, and the other surviving products could be aligned as Thunderbird and Sunbird), which became Firefox (because oops in IT there's a Firebird already, a database with angry lawyers).
Later, others notably Niko Matsakis and Patrick Walton (apologies for leaving yet other folks’ names out) took Rust to 1.0.
Mitchell didn’t know what Rust was until I explained it, wasn’t CEO when we made it an official project, but was CEO for this:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/programming-language-rust-mozi...