🦊 Not a hot fox anymore?
Mozilla - the organization behind the Firefox browser and one of the strongest voices for open-source and free software - laid off 250 employees or 25% of its staff. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker, cited the need to focus on new revenue streams: “products such as Pocket, its VPN service, its VR chatroom Hubs, and new “security and privacy” tools. The company started launching paid consumer services over the past year, offering a news subscription and access to a VPN from directly within Firefox”.
Cynics noted that “within hours of the browser maker laying off a quarter of its staff [Mozilla] had signed a three-year agreement with Google” potentially worth from “$400m to $450m a year between now and 2023”.
Currently, Mozilla makes more than 90% of its revenue from web search engines that pay to be the default search engine in Firefox (such as Baidu, Yandex, and Google).
While this is bad news for the employees who were laid off it is also a pretty bleak signal for the open-source and free software community. But let’s bet that Mozilla hasn’t been outfoxed yet and that it will “be like the fox” and “practice resurrection” - to paraphrase Wendell Berry.
🤖 A-levels and GCSEeeeks
In the UK, public outrage spread as people learned that the “algorithm and data used by the exam regulator Ofqual to distribute grades after the cancellation of exams amid the coronavirus pandemic found that a net 39% of assessments of A-level grades by teachers are likely to be adjusted down before students receive their results”.
Not only that, but it is estimated that the downgrades were more likely to impact children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In Scotland, it was found that the poorest pupils were twice as likely to have their exam results downgraded compared to rich students.
Under pressure, the government and Ofqual made a spectacular U-turn and announced: “we have decided that the best way to do this is to award grades on the basis of what teachers submitted.”
Happy ending? Not sure. Although grades predicted by teachers are more generous, a report from the Sutton Trust already warned in 2017 that “almost 3,000 disadvantaged, high-achieving students – or 1,000 per year – have their grades under-predicted.”
🤓 No sh*t Sherlock
Open-source software: It not only means access to the source code, but it must also follow a list of 10 criteria ranging from free redistribution to being “technology neutral”. Read more here.
Free software: “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Read more here. To understand the difference between open-source and free, read this.
A-levels: In the UK, A-levels are exams taken by students around the age of 18. They have a huge impact on which university students attend.
FAANG: An acronym for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet).
Ofqual: The Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation regulates qualifications, examinations and assessments in England.
📢 The rest is familiar noise
App Store drama: Epic Games the publisher and developer behind Fornite, has picked up a fight with Apple and Google over the App Store infamous 30% cut. This is only the beginning as other heavyweights such as Spotify or Facebook have already joined the melee.
“Green tech”: Before Casper, Leesa, Allswell et al. people slept on comfy grass beds 200,000 years ago. The rest is, well, history.
