Steve Klabnik:
Open Source advocates prefer permissive licenses, and Free Software advocates prefer viral/copyleft licenses. What’s the difference? Well, that’s the topic for a different essay. Because here’s the thing: the jig is up. We’ve already hit the root problem. And you probably didn’t even notice. It took me a long, long time to notice.
In a post with a title borrowed from Ariana Grande, Steve Klabnik is announcing his departure from Mozilla and what he hopes could be his next moves.
Mozilla is not interested in hearing what I have to say. And that’s fine, but when I take a step back and think about things, that means it’s time to go, for both my sake and Mozilla’s. So I’ve just put in my two weeks’ notice.
The interesting thing isn’t exactly that he’s moving on from Mozilla, it’s that he’s betting big on WebAssembly.
I’ve also been enamored with another technology recently: WebAssembly. 2019 is going to be a huge year for WebAssembly, even if many people don’t know it yet, and may not see the effects until 2020.
So what’s his next move? Something different…
In terms of the actual work I would like to do, I don’t think a traditional engineering role really suits me. Don’t get me wrong, I love to write some code, but I don’t think that those kinds of roles really play to my unique strengths. What I really love to do is teaching, evangelizing, and growing something.
A lot of people wanted Steve Klabnik to elaborate on this from a recent post on WebAssembly…
Some have compared WebAssembly to Java applets; in some ways, they’re very right, but in some ways, they’re very wrong. Eventually I’ll write a post about the wrong, but for now, the right: in some sense, WebAssembly is a different way of accomplishing what the JVM set out to do: it’s a common virtual machine that can be used to build very cross-platform software.
Here’s a great take away if all you want is a tldr…
Java Applets and Flash were security nightmares. WebAssembly, on the other hand, piggybacks on the JavaScript VM. All of the effort going into creating its sandbox also applies to Wasm.
