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Compared to what other companies are doing, Persona's source-code is open source [1] and you or others are free to continue that project if you think it makes a difference. As it happens Mozilla isn't under any obligation to you or anybody else to continue a project that is draining resources and given its open-source nature, if nobody picks it up, then I doubt its viability.

Firefox OS from an "open web" perspective, was primarily a vehicle to push for the standardization of web APIs needed for mobile devices. It has succeeded in doing that and many Firefox OS improvements are now incorporated into Firefox for Android. But given the complete dominance of Android on the low end, it would have been extremely foolish to continue it, as that would have been literally burning through cash. Consider that even Microsoft has failed spectacularly, given all their resources and experience in building operating systems.

> Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.

Wait, people are allowed to speak their own mind? Oh, the horror.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/persona




Thank you for keeping the Persona dream alive. It turns out that being open source wasn't sufficient for Persona to be able to be continued by a third party: we accidentally baked in some intractable centralization, and the code was too much of a mess. Moreover, I'm not sure that Persona's proposed architecture makes sense outside of a browser vendor.

I just gave a keynote on this exact subject at linux.conf.au; video should be online in a few hours somewhere under https://www.youtube.com/user/linuxconfau2017/videos?shelf_id.... The title is "Designing for Failure."


Mark Mayo on Persona: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364465

"Let's get something straight first. I'm not a fan of excuses. Persona failed to achieve its goals, and I'd rather we own up to what it was good at, and what it failed at, learn from it, and keep fighting for better authentication on the internet because that's what matters."




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