Famo.us lays off some of its staff after raising $31M and failing to create a business model around its open source Javascript rendering engine
Josh Constine / TechCrunch : Tweets: @pinboard , @mrdoob and @mitsuhiko . Thanks: @joshconstine Tweets: @pinboard : This article describes such a masterpiece of douchebaggery that I can't even find a pull quote. Trust uncle Pinboard http://techcrunch.com/... Ricardo Cabello / @mrdoob : Oh no! Who is going to save HTML5 from itself now? http://techcrunch.com/... Armin Ronacher / @mitsuhiko : You did not fail because of open source, you failed because you did not have a business model. http://techcrunch.com/... Thanks: @joshconstine
Context & Ripple Effects
The layoffs land two years after Famo.us raised $31M on its open source JavaScript rendering engine, and the developer reaction captured in the coverage is blunt: as Armin Ronacher put it, the failure wasn't open source itself but the absence of a business model, while Ricardo Cabello mocked the project's promise of saving HTML5 from itself.
The arc fits a recurring pattern in this coverage: Mode Media's collapse a year later traced to investors losing faith in a free-spending operation, and Mattermark's eventual shutdown saw common stockholders walk away with nothing — all cases where funding arrived faster than a way to charge for the product.
First-order effects
- Laid-off Famo.us staff exit a company whose core asset — an open source rendering engine — generates no revenue to sustain them, leaving the project's maintenance dependent on whoever remains or the community.
Second-order effects
- Developers who built on the engine face an abandonment-risk calculation, pushing attention back toward native browser capabilities — exactly the HTML5 baseline Cabello's tweet needles the company for claiming to transcend.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across this corpus — Mode Media, then Mattermark — investors get stricter about separating technical achievement from monetization, and open source infrastructure teams are forced to attach a paid product before the next raise rather than after.
The trend: Venture-funded technical projects keep failing on business models rather than engineering, forcing open source infrastructure companies to find revenue before their backers lose faith.