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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

An engineer on the Firefox OS project tells the story of the operating system's development:

I’d like to tell you my version of the story of Firefox OS, from the birth of the Boot to Gecko open source software project as a mailing list post and an empty GitHub repository in 2011, through its commercial launch as the Firefox OS mobile operating system, right up until the “transition” of millions of lines of code to the community in 2016.

During this five year journey hundreds of members of the wider Mozilla community came together with a shared vision to disrupt the app ecosystem with the power of the open web. I’d like to reflect on our successes, our failures and the lessons we can learn from the experience of taking an open source browser based mobile operating system to market.
...
Biggest Achievements

        --Design — Designed a simple and fresh looking mobile OS with some innovative features like edge gestures for switching windows. Came up with some great designs for how a browser based OS could work, even if the vision was never fully realised.

        --Engineering — Built a mobile operating system from scratch, entirely in the open, and got it to market in less than two years. As far as I know no other team has ever done this. Got web content rendering very close to bare metal on mobile devices with a very lean technology stack, in many cases beating the performance of native code on equivalent hardware. Pushed the envelope of the web with 30 experimental new web APIs and helped create new web app trends.

        --Product — Successfully launched 20 devices in over 30 countries, mobilised the Mozilla community to help run launch parties and created slick branding and marketing campaigns. Sold the message that “the web is the platform”, even if we failed to live up to it.

        --Partnerships — Won unprecedented support from the mobile industry. Repeatedly stole the show at MWC, the world’s biggest mobile event, and got big telecommunications corporations on board with Mozilla’s mission, with competing companies working together towards common goals.

Read on [medium.com] for the biggest mistakes, and what he'd do differently.

Original Submission