Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

One thing that unfortunately never got properly announced, is that over time Pocket was slowly open sourced piece-by-piece, mostly as it got rewritten/modernised, as I understand it: https://github.com/Pocket/

I guess the fact that it wasn't a big bang source code dump made it hard to make a moment of it.

(Note: open-source does not necessarily mean that it was optimised for self-hosting, which would've been a lot more work, of course.)

Kind of a bit "too little too late" when they're still open-sourcing it but by bit in 2025 after promising to open-source it during the acquisition in 2017. I'm not very impressed.

It wasn't started in 2025, it's a process that's been going on for years. (Presumably, but I don't actually have more information here, the pre-acquisition codebase couldn't easily be open sourced without rewriting for legal reasons, e.g. copyright residing with someone else.)

Nothing about the communication at the time indicated that publishing the source code would happen gradually over a decade. For all intents and purposes, what was promised was that it would be open source within some reasonably short time frame.

Having worked on a similar endeavor, I doubt they intentionally dragged their feet on it. They likely had a smorgasbord of legal bullshit and technical challenges resulting from code omissions mandated by said legal bullshit that they had to muddle through.

How common is it for a SaaS company that isn't an old-enterprisey type to use third-party proprietary code in their business logic? I associated that phenomenon much more with standard installable PC software, especially the type to use specialized workflows for non-standard stuff, not a web service, much less something like this.

I don't care. Don't promise to do something like that if you can't follow through. Nobody forced them to promise to open source Pocket (although that promise certainly helped the bad PR of integrating a closed source service into Firefox!).

You should care. Not holding a promise because you cannot or because you don’t want to is not the same thing. Both aren’t great but there’s a very significant ethical difference between the two in my opinion.

Totally! I loved using Pocket when I wasn't that crazy for FOSS advocacy. I've been checking their repos and forums here and there over the years to check if they open sourced everything, since that's been a promise since 2017. Last time I checked they still just had their mobile apps open sourced. Glad to see that they've finally released the back end source code! Excited to see community progress on making it self-hostable or forking it altogether!

Surprisingly, the Pocket's recommendations were their feature I liked the most that I never saw any other open source alternatives out there. Would love to use it again if it means that I keep my own recommendation data.