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Freezing Mozilla WebThings

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Mozilla freezes the design of its gateway for the smart home WebThings Gateway . Such a letter was sent by David Bryant to the participants of the WebThings Gateway project.

From translator
Gateway , , Gateway — 0.11. , : , .

Greetings.

Two months have passed in 2020, and I would like to talk about our plans for the development of Mozilla WebThings in the near future. In the last two years, we can talk about two main areas of our efforts - the development of technologies that make the Internet of things an industry platform, and the possible products that Mozilla could bring to the market.

The experience of the past year showed that Mozilla should change the general approach to development in 2020. The first, and perhaps most important, is the cessation of efforts to market Mozilla-branded products using the WebThings code base. In 2019, we made some efforts to find ways to implement WebThings Gateway in commercial routers through cooperation with the OpenWRT system, including distributions for installation on existing routers. This experiment allowed us to evaluate the market and understand the ecosystem of routers. We realized that WebThings Gateway with this approach can offer something interesting to end users, but is not able to be commercially competitive. As a result, we finished this development branch, and also removed all links to Gateway for routers from the official site.

In addition, since we have no plans for the commercial development of WebThings for the year 2020, we do not plan to develop WebThings Gateway as a whole and introduce new features for end users. We will continue to oversee Gateway's open source code base, and we will support the community that has grown around it. In particular:

  • The infrastructure that supports the deployment of WebThings Gateway will continue to work unchanged. Tunneling, renewal, certificate management and other services for the daily use of Gateway will be available. Now in the world more than 1200 units of WebThings Gateway are launched and work, and they will continue to work as before.
  • We will expand the options for Gateway packaging to make it more convenient for developers to implement it in their projects.
  • WebThings.
  • W3C (WoT), Mozilla UX . WoT - (, CHIP).
  • -, , .
  • , Gateway , .
  • Gateway, , . , . , Gateway.
  • WebThings Gateway, . Discourse IRC/Matrix.
  • Mozilla WebThings Gateway , .

Although we do not plan to work on commercial products based on WebThings in 2020, we have an understanding of the key role of the Internet in everyday life, full of interconnected things. We want the first enthusiasts to respond to our initiative with WebThings to continue working in this direction at the community level.

Some of the changes described above are already included in the WebThings Gateway 0.11 release, while others will appear in the next release 0.12, which is scheduled for March.

Soon I will publish this message in clear text.

Thanks,
David.

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