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Comment by asadotzler | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla has been a force for good here, working closely with the game engine teams for a couple of years on Emscripten porting to ASM.js, and sharing our open source experience.

Mozilla is bringing AAA gaming to the most widely deployed, free and open platform the world has ever known, the Internet. If you're looking for leverage and opportunity for further opening up the gaming industry, Mozilla should be on your short list of partners/friends/projects.

And no other project out there has more experience doing open source. (Mozilla was much of the inspiration for the creation of open source model as an alternative to the commercially-challenging free software model that came before.) http://opensource.org/history

So yes, "Get cozy with Xiph.org/Mozilla."

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It's the web, not the internet. And the web is not the most free and open platform the world has ever known, it is a comittee-designed disaster whose goals are regularly overruled by the interests of big companies.

I get it, Mozilla is doing this game native stuff now. Why not keep it at that? Baby steps.

Name a more free and open platform than the web. You can choose from any point in history.

Well, the internet. That was easy :)

And, how would the average person make use of the Internet? Shall they setup a gopher server? SMTP...that's a good one for the average person, right? I mean, who doesn't understand how DKIM works and have the tools needed to use it?

The web is pervasive, secure-able by average users (and becoming moreso with Let's Encrypt), accessible in ways that no other Internet protocol is or ever has been, allows creation and participation by anyone of almost any technical ability or resources, it can be used anonymously, and, it has very low barriers to entry even if you do want to run your own site/server...much lower than any other Internet protocol.

I cannot think of a single piece of the Internet that is more open and free, for more people, than the web.

GNU/Linux. A ton of platforms are more open than the web more that EME is part of the spec. It means that a full implementation of the web has to contain non-free components.

On the EME front we are agreed.

Native mobile: it is so open it lets me a real choice of a programming language I like. Unlike "open" web that forces me to script or transpile.

Yep. Mozilla is even bringing the fight to C++ with its new Rust language. It's been very exciting to follow the journey of a brand new language backed by a company who really knows how to do community-powered development.

It might even end up fulfilling some of the goals from Tim Sweeney's "The Next Mainstream Programming Language" talk from way back.

That's solving a different problem. Mozilla is building a runtime, which is great... but what Unity and Unreal bring to the table isn't the runtime, it's the productivity tools and framework.

Mozilla has been working on Emscripten (the compiler that helps port native games to the web), which is bundled with Unity and Unreal now. That is, it's part of their tools and not part of the browser runtime.

Can you give some examples of libre or open games from teams Mozilla has worked with?

Large parts Sauerbraten (http://sauerbraten.org/) were ported to Firefox using Emscripten under the name BananaBread (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/demos/detail/bananabread).

Looks almost awful, sadly. Where is our link to a playable http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV32Cs_CMqo ? :)

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