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> Open Source ≠ Business

> Newcomb himself admits it was a “divergent brainstorming process,” saying “We tried everything…we tried everything so we could create a business model around open source. And at the end of the day, we just couldn’t do it.”

What a load of shit. This has nothing to do with open source.

It's more like people don't want to pay for another JavaScript framework that claims to be better than the current web stack which at the end of the day, ends up reimplementing most features a web browser already has, but in WebGL. In the article, Steve even admits "We built a shitty game engine".

Recently, there were a few other attempts at reimplementing most of the web in WebGL, I think Flipboard had an article.

Let me point out, this is hard. You wind up with some of the features HTML/CSS already has that's faster, but a ton of missing stuff you end up needing at some point.

For example in WebGL, layout is non trivial, rendering text correctly is non trivial, events are non trivial. These things are an afterthought when working with HTML/CSS.

People love to shit on HTML/CSS and blame it for their problems, but at the end of the day, the grass really isn't greener on the other side.

Don't blame open source because it can't rescue your product. Great products and care for the community foster great open source communities, not the other way around.




Also trying to be faster than HTML/CSS is a hard game, the developers of Chrome and Firefox, etc are constantly optimizing.


Just wait until you see what Servo can do. Parallel layout is sick. https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Design#strategies-for-pa...


Sorry but I try out servo EVERY day and it will take a long time until this will be stable.

It's not ACID1, ACID2, ACID3 compliant. It misses a lot of CSS2.1, CSS3 and JavaScript feature's. Static sites working better and better (and are way way faster than firefox).

However I think that servo is the right step, however I just think that it should have more people so that the Innovation could be faster.


> I try out servo EVERY day

Cool, thanks for helping out! I hope you're helping them by reporting bugs when you find them.

> it will take a long time until this will be stable

Sure, it's a WIP. That's to be expected. Expecting otherwise is unrealistic.

> It's not ACID1, ACID2, ACID3 compliant

https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/04/17/another-big-mil...

> and JavaScript feature's

Maybe DOM bindings, but Servo ships with bindings to SpiderMonkey, the JS VM used in Gecko, so all of the Language JavaScript should be there.

> I just think that it should have more people so that the Innovation could be faster

Check out the top story on proggit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3rqqvu/mozilla...


Currently we are not testing against our application always, but I sometime try it out and its working aweful.

also on acid2 i get different results every day/week. sometimes i'm good somtimes not.

Yeah servo gets more support, i still think it takes at least another year (or more) to ship it.


> It's not ACID1, ACID2, ACID3 compliant

Huh? Servo has passed Acid1 and Acid2 for, like, a year now. Servo doesn't pass Acid3, of course (although neither does Firefox anymore!).

I mean, I'm not going to claim that Servo is by any means Web compatible yet, primarily due to a long list of bugs and incompletely-implemented features. In terms of feature checklists, though, there's a lot done.


It's not, passing most of the times.

It's unstable. That doesn't mean thats bad.

And Firefox is passing Acid3. And always did.

I mean ACID1 and ACID2 failures are mostly regression that getting fixed a day after but still its not roughly stable.


> It's not, passing most of the times.

Acid1 and Acid2 are reftests. The CI system ensures they continue to pass on every commit. Commits are not merged if they break the Acid tests.

> And Firefox is passing Acid3. And always did.

No, it didn't always pass it. Acid3 didn't even exist when Firefox first came on the scene.

Firefox scores 99/100 for me.


This is a great point. The model probably could have worked, it's just that the framework isn't very desirable. A really easy to point at example of why this is so hard to do: they implemented their own formula for inertial scrolling, since mobile browsers don't really (or didn't at the time) let you interact with scrolling behavior at all in javascript. So simply scrolling through a site written in famo.us felt _off_. It's a small thing, but emblematic of the problems with their approach, in my mind.


Yep. Web tech needs all sorts of layers for all kinds of demanding software, so as long as you build something useful/adoptable, there should be ways to commercialize.

I'm more bullish on WebGL. To meet the desire to do VR, gaming, and data visualization on the web, a lot to be done. We went all in for the data side, and surprise, people with data problems are happy to pay for you to help them finally see it ;-)




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