Flying the Nest: An important update on Mozilla WebThings
Dear WebThings Community,
We are writing to inform you that the WebThings project is being spun out of Mozilla as an independent open source project.
The project will be renamed from “Mozilla WebThings” to “WebThings” and will move to a new home at webthings.io.
Why is this happening?
Mozilla is winding down its direct investment in WebThings and is transitioning control and responsibility to the community. It is important this happens in a way that allows easy continued contribution to the project as an open source effort, and so all the WebThings Gateways running around the world continue to function properly. To enable that independence from Mozilla some changes will be needed in how the project is named as well as how project infrastructure operates.
What does this mean for my WebThings Gateway?
Because your smart home gateway is designed to operate locally inside your home without the need for a centralised cloud service, it will continue to work just as before. You’ll still be able to monitor, control and automate your home via the gateway’s web interface inside your home network.
Future software updates will be provided by the WebThings community rather than the Mozilla Corporation and we will let you know how to opt-in to those updates.
What does this mean for my *.mozilla-iot.org domain?
If you access your gateway remotely using Mozilla’s secure tunnelling service at a *.mozilla-iot.org domain then this service will continue to operate until 31st December 2020.
Before that date, we plan for a replacement service to be made available at webthings.io and you will have the option of transferring to that service before Mozilla’s servers are shut down. Your existing registration will not automatically be transferred outside Mozilla servers so you will be required to opt-in to this new service if you would like to use it.
What will Mozilla’s involvement in WebThings be going forward and how will it be governed?
Governance of the project will be passed to the community using a module ownership system independent of the Mozilla Corporation’s organisational structure, like the one used by the core Mozilla project. For continuity the initial module owners of the top level WebThings module will be Ben Francis and Michael Stegeman from the original Mozilla IoT team. These module owners will then be able to create sub-modules and assign new module owners and peers to help govern the project going forward.
The WebThings project will no longer be directly affiliated with the Mozilla Corporation so will stop using Mozilla trademarks and will instead operate under its own WebThings brand.
How will the community communicate?
For the time being the WebThings project will continue to use the Mozilla IoT forum on Mozilla Discourse, and the #IoT channel on Mozilla’s Matrix chat server.
If you would like to be kept informed with updates regarding WebThings then you can sign up to the new WebThings newsletter at webthings.io and you can follow @WebThingsIO on Twitter.
We encourage you to continue to file issues and submit pull requests on GitHub at the new location github.com/WebThingsIO.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your contributions and support for the project so far. The team is looking forward to this new chapter in the WebThings story, as the project flies the nest from Mozilla to make its own way in the world! We hope to take you all along for the ride, so remember to sign up to the newsletter at webthings.io if you would like to be kept updated.
The WebThings team
