Yes, you can stop testing with the current build. We are, however, asking community members who received a Z3C to hang on to it. We hope to be able to reuse them for testing other Connected Devices products. We don’t know yet what form that software will take - that will depend on the outcome of the product innovation process.
We’re not sure at this point. That is something we need to consider and work through.
Hi Marcus,
There will be many more projects coming, and some could work with Firefox OS, maybe collecting info from its sensors…
Content for TV will continue to be available in marketplace.
Totally understand that it’s strange we didn’t talk about these openly in a note of this sort.
The other 2 are in their very early stages, just past Gate 0, and only a few weeks old.
One specific point:
Those who pitched these projects really don’t have many resources/people right now and have a lot of time pressure to show progress before a Gate 1 evaluation that will come within months.
In some ways, that’s ripe for participation/contribution, but there’s a tension on having time to set it up well. Our participation/ collaboration team hasn’t had the chance to reach out to them yet to help understand how contributors can help and how to design that. That’s an important to-do in the weeks ahead.
2 big questions for me (we don’t have answers!):
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Would there be situations when we need to keep new ideas quiet/closed for competitive reasons? On what criteria should we evaluate this? Should we be conservative with this (e.g. default = closed) or be willing to take more risks with being open generally?
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In an innovation process like this, typically the early stages are short and not that many projects progress. Also, things are shut down quickly (if you’re doing it right). This can be hard on the people involved (especially founders) – their egos almost by definition take a hit. What are the implications of this happening in public? For those people? For Mozilla’s reputation in the open source community? What about the implications on the volunteers who got involved, but then the project doesn’t get resources moving forward? How do we design this well?
True. Thanks for bringing that up.
We’ll pay attention to comments/questions like this in the next couple of days and then get a communication out to existing foxfooders about their phones and the contracts they signed with Mozilla.
Thunderbird, Persona, FirefoxOS…
Mozilla is dying…
It’s true that I’m disabling and removing the desktop and Android web runtimes, but note that the decision to do so was my own, not Ari’s, and I made it as the module owner for the Desktop Runtime module (and a peer for the Fennec module). It is unrelated to this decision about Firefox OS.
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@agarzia Can you help me understand your perspective behind this statement better because it’s pretty foundational to the rest of your comments?
Right, thanks!
What’s the use of the whole foxfooding program at all? Why work hard, invest our free time for an ending project??
Foxfooding program will evolve, but in the meantime, there will be a new Firefox OS version and we want it to be the best one, so still we need to continue filling bugs on that. If Firefox OS 2.6 is great, they will more chances to continue working on that, outside or inside Mozilla 
Thanks for jumping in here @mykmelez. Is there a place you can point people from here to learn more about this decision?
I thought Mozilla was here to offer an alternative and defends the users. Looks like I was wrong and we don’t have the same definition of “win”. One user protected from Google, Apple or Microsoft is already a victory. Back to the fight, everyone.
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Well, I am sure you had good reasons which I would really like to hear more since that was an important technology that properly marketed could become extremely popular with devs. Just cue how much work is going on Electron and similar tools. Without XULRunner and WebRT we have nothing on that front. Can you elaborate on why you decided for the removal?
Thanks George,
Myk, I read the thread. Completely understand your pain there. WebRT could be soooo great. Isn’t it the case of fighting internally for more resources?
Can contributors that received Z3C phones flash custom Firefox OS builds and hack on Gaia now? It will be necessary anyways in order to transition to this connected devices future, so can we start with it right away?
I proposed to disable the runtimes, and then decided to do so, in this firefox-dev thread. And there was a bit more discussion about the decision afterward in this Mozillians thread.