Hi everyone,
At the end of last year Michael Stegeman, David Bryant and I spun WebThings out of Mozilla as an independent open source project. We wanted to make sure that the project could continue despite a major round of layoffs at Mozilla which meant the company could no longer support it.
Due to the limited time we had available to transition the project before Mozilla shut down the WebThings Cloud infrastructure, we agreed to use my existing UK limited company (Krellian Ltd.) as its new legal home. This meant Krellian taking on legal and financial responsibility for WebThings through a written legal agreement with Mozilla Corporation.
We put in place an open governance system to distribute decision making amongst the WebThings community, through a hierarchical module ownership system inspired by the one used by the Mozilla project, with Michael and me as the initial top level module owners. At the time we discussed the possibility of setting up a separate non-profit legal entity for WebThings at a later stage, once the project grew beyond a certain size or if the needs of Krellian the company and WebThings the community should start to diverge.
Over the last seven months the tree of modules and module owners has steadily grown, whilst Michael Stegeman sadly had to stop contributing leaving me as the sole top level module owner. Following discussions about project governance in the last Monthly Public Meeting in April, it became clear that some members of the community felt ready to transition the project to a long term non-profit home, with a Project Board to steer its direction.
I therefore wrote to the current set of module owners to propose the creation of a new non-profit legal entity to oversee the WebThings project, with the current module owners as the initial members of a Project Board. After discussing this over the last couple of months, they have instead decided to apply for WebThings to be adopted by an existing non-profit umbrella organisation, and have started the process to apply to both the Software Freedom Conservancy and the Eclipse Foundation as potential homes.
I do not intend to be part of a new Project Board myself, because as the founder and original Product Owner of WebThings at Mozilla I don’t want my original vision and goals for the project to get in the way of where the community wants to take it next. As part of this change I therefore also plan to step down as the top level module owner of the project under the current module ownership system, to make way for new leadership. I do however intend to remain a peer of the existing WebThings Gateway module in order to continue to contribute and help with the ongoing W3C compliance work.
It will take time to fully transition the WebThings project and all of its assets to a new non-profit legal home and I will support the Project Board in doing that.
I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to WebThings since the project was spun out of Mozilla, which has enabled it to continue. I hope the project will continue to thrive and grow under its new home and leadership.
If you have any questions, please feel free to raise them here, in the #WebThings Matrix channel, or privately with members of the interim Project Board:
Happy hacking.
Ben