Mozilla is one of my favorite tech companies. Servo is a great example: Mozilla is willing to engage in fundamental CS research. Not only are they trying to put together a parallel, secure browser engine from the ground up, but they even created Rust to do so. This is truly long-term work, which seems rare in an increasingly short-term world.

And Rust isn't just another C clone with OOP or CSP bolted on: it's principled, relatively elegant and takes full advantage of the last few decades of PL research. All while being practical—it has to be, since it's evolved with a Servo as a concomitant project. A non-trivial companion project like that seems great for naturally guiding a language! Not many other languages can say any of this, much less ones actually poised to replace C++ or at least do actual systems programming.

And Mozilla is doing all this in a completely open and transparent way. I think this is incredibly important: anybody can get a glimpse into active development or even contribute. Just go to the relevant GitHub repo[1][2] and you're set. This is the way open source is supposed to work, rather than having companies develop behind close doors and dump source code occasionally (although that's also better than nothing).

I really wish more companies would take this sort of approach with their open source or basic research work. This gives me more confidence in Servo, Rust and Mozilla as a whole, especially compared to many of Mozilla's competitors (both in the browser space and in programming languages).

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/servo/ [2]: https://github.com/mozilla/rust

Some individuals in the Linux community regularly criticize Canonical for "not playing along well with others" and taking Ubuntu in directions that go against "the community's wishes." I think those individuals are misguided. Canonical does try to collaborate with other projects and distributions. It's just that such collaboration is not the company's priority.

Canonical's priority, as best as I can judge, is to make Ubuntu the world's leading Linux distribution for desktops and other platforms -- cloud, tablet, phone, etc. So they will use whatever F/LOSS code works best to achieve this goal, regardless of whether it's internally or externally developed. They are not letting 'ego' and 'pride' get in the way of achieving their goal.

If using systemd will help them achieve their goal more than using upstart, they will use systemd. Ditto for Unity versus Gnome, and for Mir versus Wayland. For them, it's not about "winning the argument," but about "winning the #1 spot."

Hi everyone, Chris here, I've been working with Max on Keybase. I can't help but feel this ended up scooped a bit early. (Crap!) Not a surprise, because HN is quick.

The alpha site's changing every day, and we're working on the documentation now. I don't use the term "alpha" loosely. There will be extensive security details published, explaining every aspect of the identity proof system, client sessions, etc. They will be on the site before we open general access or turn beta. Right now only a few friends are on there. All that said, Max and I can answer questions here.

My profile on the site is https://keybase.io/chris if anyone wants to look. My profile demonstrates early examples of how identity proofs will work, including both twitter and github. We'll of course be adding other public identities in the future.

The site design is also very iffy at the moment; I was about to move into firefox bugs tomorrow.