Hacker News Reader

Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

From reddit to answer the question some might pose ("who?"):

> One of Mozilla's most senior engineers who has worked on Mozilla projects as a contributor and employee for well over a decade particularly working in the graphics code and helping make native audio and video in the browser a reality.

http://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/48ix55/robert_ocall...

View on HN

Great! Now how about the next question:

"Why?"

I suppose it's nice to know that he is a big deal but as someone who doesn't follow mozilla religiously a little more background is always appreciated.

Why is he leaving? That's covered in the OP: he wants to devote his full-time attention to working on rr, a reversible debugger for native code that imposes impressively low overhead, and possibly spin it into a startup.

I think roc would give me a sly smile for pointing out that this doesn't really answer the "why". It's what he's going to do after he leaves. Doesn't quite answer why he's leaving.

Because... he wants to do those things? I'm really unsure what you're trying to say.

He just wants to build a startup out of some cool tech and get rich. There's no conspiracy or dirty laundry here.

My, cynical much? Seems to me that 10+ years at a non-profit, and choosing to live in a place outside the traditional startup locations (New Zealand) with fewer networking opportunities, might indicate fairly little interest in that exact trajectory, for those exact reasons.

But what do I know, I'm just another ten-year Mozillian myself. And if or when I leave, it'll also surely be to get filthy rich at a startup, right?

Well, it'd be foolish to assume that someone doesn't have multiple reasons for making a dramatic change in their life.

It'd also be foolish to assume that most of those reasons are any of our business.

Robert is an amazing guy, and we're all lucky to have benefited from his work over the years. Now, he's set off on a new adventure, for reasons of his own... And has hinted that he'll continue sharing some of the fruits of his labor.

That's more than enough ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com