Mozilla Pulls Its Direct Investment From WebThings, Spins Its IoT Effort Out as a Community Project
Shift away from the Web of Things comes following a series of layoffs at the company and its refocusing on the Firefox browser.
Mozilla, which recently underwent a series of layoffs, has announced it is spinning its Internet of Things division, WebThings, out as a community-driven project — and is cutting its funding as a result.
Launched in 2017 as Project Things, Mozilla's Internet of Things push left beta and launched as WebThings in April 2019. "Mozilla’s mission is to 'ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent,'" wrote Mozilla's Ben Francis at the time. "The Mozilla IoT team’s mission is to create a Web of Things implementation which embodies those values and helps drive IoT standards for security, privacy and interoperability."
Just over a year later, though, and Mozilla is cutting its involvement in the Web of Things in general and WebThings specifically — though the platform won't be going away entirely. "Mozilla is winding down its direct investment in WebThings and is transitioning control and responsibility to the community," Mozilla's David Bryant explains. "It is important this happens in a way that allows easy continued contribution to the project as an open source effort, and so all the WebThings Gateways running around the world continue to function properly."
"To enable that independence from Mozilla some changes will be needed in how the project is named as well as how project infrastructure operates. Governance of the project will be passed to the community using a module ownership system independent of the Mozilla Corporation’s organizational structure, like the one used by the core Mozilla project."
For those who have a WebThings gateway, it should be business as normal — except that any future software updates will be delivered by the WebThings community, and not Mozilla. For anyone who opted to make their gateway remotely accessible through Mozilla's mozilla-iot.org domain, they will be able to continue to do so until the end of the year - before which, Bryant promises, a replacement service on the webthings.io domain will be made available.
More details on the shift can be found on the Mozilla Discourse forum.