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Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot

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1222 points phantomathkg | 7 comments | 22 May 25 16:30 UTC | HN request time: 1.377s | source | bottom
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Vinnl ◴[22 May 25 18:41 UTC] No.44065279[source]▶
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.)

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1. mort96 ◴[22 May 25 19:42 UTC] No.44065982[source]▶
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.
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2. Vinnl ◴[22 May 25 20:08 UTC] No.44066308[source]▶
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.)
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3. mort96 ◴[22 May 25 20:15 UTC] No.44066377[source]▶
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.
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4. cosmojg ◴[22 May 25 22:22 UTC] No.44067792{3}[source]▶
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.
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5. EMIRELADERO ◴[22 May 25 23:38 UTC] No.44068320{4}[source]▶
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.
6. mort96 ◴[23 May 25 04:19 UTC] No.44069822{4}[source]▶
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!).
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7. illiac786 ◴[24 May 25 08:51 UTC] No.44079762{5}[source]▶
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.