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Internet company Mozilla is divesting its IoT platform WebThings and allowing developers to work with it freely. Active servers will be closed at the end of this year.
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Via a blog post Directly addressed to the WebThings community, Mozilla has announced that the IoT platform will no longer be part of the company’s portfolio. The platform was founded only a good year ago. Mozilla will phase out its investments in the platform, and it will no longer bear the Mozilla WebThings name. Control and responsibility are transferred to the community. WebThings will now be an open source platform that users and developers can use freely.
WebThings is an online platform where users can connect IoT devices and control them through the platform. It was compatible with many smart home applications such as locks and thermostats, but also with, for example, the Raspberry Pi. In the blog post, Mozilla assures that the phase-out will happen gradually, so that users experience as little disruption as possible. Thus, the platform will still be intended to operate locally.
Until December 31, Mozilla will remain the active domains with mozilla-iot.org support that allows you to control your devices remotely. By then Mozilla would roll out a replacement platform for it. From then on it is entirely up to the users themselves to develop software updates. Mozilla will still communicate how you can sign up for it.
Paying services
Why Mozilla is now making the decision to divest WebThings, that cannot be read in the blog post. But it is presumably a result of the financial difficulties plaguing the company. The internet company has been hit hard by the economic crisis. CEO Mitchell Baker announced this in August a quarter of the workforce will have to be made redundant.
To get out of the crisis, Mozilla will focus a bit against its philosophy on paid services. WebThings was not one of them. The VPN service Mozilla VPN is that. This is currently only available in a limited number of countries; not yet in Belgium.
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