Betterbird: a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird
betterbird.eu
betterbird.eu
It looks like revenge-driven development. I don't want to take sides. I just want to read my emails.
Went to the site, and it's very apparent that it's a "Revenge Inside (TM)" project. Left in 30 seconds. Will probably forget the existence of the project sometime today.
First, the maintainers' attitude directly affects the community around the software being developed. I tend to involve in the community of the tools I use (bug reports, patches if I have time, feedback, etc.).
If the maintainers or the BDFL is angry, this anger or harshness tend to spread, and both makes the project unpleasant to communicate with, and tend to drive wannabe contributors away. This generally happens silently, so it's hard to detect.
This brings me to the second point. Motivation is the primary fuel of open source & free software projects. What happens when the angry people calms down? What happens differentiating features are merged to main? What happens the locomotives of the community have no more time to pursue their projects?
If the community is not nice (or not have a healthy number of newcomers) and the steam runs out, the project just dies.
As an example, I'm currently trying to help a tool I use, but its developer just lost interest to maintain. However, there's a small number of kind people who stepped up, and we try to get things rolling again. Many people won't have the motivation if the community is not nice to begin with.
Lastly, while tangential, like the GP, I don't want to take sides, just want to read my emails.
The tone of this project is extremely off-putting and not something I'd feel very comfortable supporting given my current ignorance of what happened here, but on the other hand Thunderbird has been infuriating every time I've tried it for exactly the reasons he states, it's been like that for what seems an eternity, and the Betterbird featuretable is impressive...
https://www.betterbird.eu/faq/moz-governance.pdf
https://www.betterbird.eu/faq/permanent-ban.pdf
https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.governance/c/RQHR3eFAYZ8
While i dont really care so much about the mail client in itself, I would gladly use something else besides outlook, if it would integrate itself into the exchange protocol so well.
It feels like E-Mail is a solved problem, but its really not we all have just more or less agreed that its good enough. I Remember when i started using ot years ago (i even have private exchange since more than 10 years), i thought -this - this is how email is going to become everywhere. But it never really cought on, except of course if you now also book office 365.
Comming back to the main topic though: i dont think that extended hubris and sarcasm is a sign of a healthy project, but more that of a hurt child. If your fixes would have been according to the guidlines of mozilla to begin with, im sure your patches would have been merged.
The issues laid out in this[0] email thread are pretty concerning, as is the fact that the response seemed to be trying get out of the first temporary ban on technicalities, rather than addressing the behaviors that caused the ban to begin with. Even worse is that he violated the temporary ban. Then I saw this[1] recent email response which left yet another bad taste in my mouth.
To the dev's credit, everything is very transparent, but if I learned anything about FOSS drama (see Netgate v. Wireguard, 2021) it's that the loudest side is probably not the one I want to follow.
[0] https://www.betterbird.eu/faq/moz-governance.pdf [1] https://www.betterbird.eu/answer.html
I was worried this project is just repacked Thunderbird, with malware. This makes it more legit.
Also some people do not like politics in Mozilla Corp. Firefox is supposed to be privacy focused, yet it uses Google for search, CEO salaries, scraping promising tech etc...
I use Brave browser, created by a guy who was also banned from Mozilla, it works great.
Any links?
Brave was founded by Brendan Eich, long-time Mozilla developer, long-time Mozilla CTO, briefly Mozilla CEO.
Brendan Eich also happened to be an anti-gay-marriage activist and donator (afaik, only his spare time, not at work) and California law says that if you donate more than [some sum of money], you must specify your employer. So, suddenly, a few days after Brendan Eich was nominated CEO, someone on Twitter published the records of Brendan Eich's donation, phrasing it as "Mozilla is donating against gay rights", or something like that. A shitstorm started, including death threats against Mozilla employees, a highly hypocritical PR campaign by OKCupid (whose CEO was member of the same political circles as Brendan Eich) to boycott Mozilla, etc. Brendan Eich was convinced to resign from Mozilla after about two weeks of this.
That's probably what GP calls "banned from Mozilla".
Of course, after this, US Conservatives rephrased this into "Mozilla is persecuting Christians", so the death threats continued, just from the other side.
Source: I was there.
Presumably the donations were of money that he made at work.
And? It's his money at that point, is it not? Isn't "work" trading labour for money? While working you abide by the rules and principles of your employer and outside of that, you operate by your own principles.
AFAIK he only donated some money in 2008; I can't find anything on him being an "activist"?
And 2008 was the same year Obama said "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage." Although Obama did support it a few years later (2012). And the prop 8 he donated to was actually passed, so a majority of CA residents at the time agreed with him. My point is, it was a mainstream view (and to some degree, still is, although less so).
For what it's worth, I strongly support same-sex marriage, but I feel this ostracisation of anyone who disagreed is not doing the cause any good... Oh well, old drama...
I may be misremembering that part.
Brendan "quit" Mozilla, but many people consider that he was kinda forced to quit.
More precisely, that's 52% of less than 80% of registered voters.
He was appointed Mozilla's CEO. There was then some public discussion about his political donations (Brendan donated money to a campaign trying to prevent gay people from marrying because of their gender) and whether they were relevant to this position. After a couple of weeks he stepped down as Mozilla's CEO.
His Wikipedia article has more details — if you just can't get enough real-time “people shouting at each other” and you want to add some historical “people shouting at each other” to bulk it out a bit.
As for Thunderbird: I use it, but it seems like its dev decisions are often wedged in rather basic ways. I have no idea how the decisions were made, but if you look at the support forum, there is a big disconnect between what the devs keep adding, and the existing pain points that users keep running into. I'd rather have a less featureful program where the dev effort went into eliminating user pain instead of adding more.
Never. FFmpeg was actively rebase-merging Libav changes, but not vice-versa. Libav devs wanted to focus on API clean-up and harmonization, FFmpeg usually prioritized new features. Major Libav dev activity more or less died by 2017.
No, that’s not what happened with ffmpeg.
Multiple developers forked ffmpeg in a somewhat abrasive way because they disagreed with the rest of the team. They wanted to focus on cleaning the code and changing the api while others wanted to keep working on adding features.
Debian switched because the ffmpeg maintainer was part of the group. Sadly for the fork the mainline was very much more reactive and pragmatic than them. Ffmpeg kept merging all the good changes they made while they mostly refused to use ffmpeg code. Then a security auditor found that ffmpeg was good at fixing bugs while the fork did a poor job and that was the end of it. The fork was abandoned.
Michael Niedermayer was the maintainer and a guy who did crazy amounts of work on ffmpeg. But he was also what seemed to be the BDFL. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but it seems like there was sort of a coup that took over development. Then the Michael Niedermayer side took back control and the group that took over ffmpeg abdicated power over ffmpeg and its brand and moved to a fork.
It's actually interesting how hard it is to get a simple timeline of events. But some information is in the following thread:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120511022506/http://lists.mpla...
Once again, no, it’s not what happened. A team forked but failed to gain significant traction and the original project is now the only one remaining.
The email you quote comes from just before the fork. Niedermayer was the main maintainer of ffmpeg and as stated there was disagreement between him and what became the libav developers about the possibility of adding new features while improving the code.
The libav team wanted to fully focus on code improvement and left in a very vocal and really obnoxious way. As anyone could have predicted history showed the they were wrong. It was completely possible to do both new features and code improvement at the same time.
Niedermayer resigned in 2015 because the way the fork was handled had made things painful for him which I fully respect.
I'm not sure which part you disagree with, since you clearly seem to be saying the same thing with respect to who forked what.
And one of the big fundamental differences between ffmpeg/libav and thunderbird/betterbird is that the Niedermayer side still merged in a lot of changes from libav, leading to an overall better product than libav, whereas thunderbird does not at all follow the same behaviour WRT betterbird. They have ridiculous bugs that had for decades and as much as I try to like it I can't for the life of me for example understand how they have an open request for a search that doesn't end up in that stupid filter view instead of just showing all results.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161107163133/http://article.gm...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120510045810/http://lists.mpla...
Reading carefully I know realise it’s not what you wrote. We are indeed in agreement.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220817182407/https://www.bette...
Guy seems like a bit of a dick but I suppose after quite a few years trying to effect change in an org most people get that way.
I read this as a thoughtful, passionate, plea for project (governance) improvements. You can certainly disagree with him (I don't enough much about the project to judge either way, although his arguments ring true to my general software development instincts), but he was not attacking anyone or being a jerk.
On the other hand, the exact terminology used in the details of the ban here[0] do lean toward the less severe side of CoC violations. It seems likely that it was death-by-a-thousand-papercuts (frequent & persistent small violations coupled with an evident unwillingness to accept feedback), rather than one big blowout incident as is more often seen with such bans.
Can you describe what is concerning? I'm not going to look into email threads just because someone says there is something concerning there.
What are your concerns? I'm not here to defend them, but I am lazy. If there are concerns, what are they? I figure if they're concerning enough, they can be described in a few sentences.
The existence of a competing fork might be healthy, though. Having competition can make your priorities a lot clearer.
This is the lie people like you keep purporting in those VC money firehoses that have no grounds in the real world.
But note that your parent comment said "almost always", not "always". The Linux project isn't exactly typical.
He really did not.
He simply aged and had kids.
With age everything looks "not important enough to be upset by"
Believe me.
I'm giving him a lot of credit for doing it, that proves he wasn't an abusive person, he just was himself.
It's the World around him that changed and he adapted.
A lot of people do not adapt and think that their sensibilities are other people's problems.
Why would I believe your guess instead of his actual statement?
i.e. until he was ~50 years old, when he stepped aside
his words (Sun, 16 Sep 2018):
This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good. [...] I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately.
Which is the same things Stallman said after they tried to push him out.
Linus is just smarter than Stallman, was preoccupied at the time that Linux development was being taken over, and released a public statement that made people happy, bu also he haven't changed much [1], because, in the end, he is who he is and we should appreciate him for what he's achieved.
[1] a year later he released this statement
people take me seriously in a way they didn't do back in 1994.
And that's absolutely not some kind of complaint about how I wasn't taken seriously back then – quite the reverse. It's more me grumbling that people take me much too seriously now, and I can't say silly stupid crap anymore.
So I'll still call out people (and particularly companies) for doing dumb things, but now I have to do it knowing that it's news, and me giving some company the finger will be remembered for a decade afterwards.
Whether deserved or not, it might not be worth it.
He realized that people were trojan horsing his words against Linux.
But he's Linus Torvalds, he's in the unfortunate position of being the face and image of the most successful OSS project ever, not some guy on a mailing list about Thunderbird, that nobody cares of.
Sure, but as another counterpoint to OP, that was after two decades of producing value (not just Linux but also Git).
I've seen the effect of a brilliant jerk first hand. People leave. I'm sure it's often a net negative.
Btw, calling this discussion a "lie" comes across as overly aggressive.
I don't know how to solve that, if it's real.
It could be a legitimate problem with the underperforming person (that may or may not be fixable), an overreaction to a perceived problem, an interpersonal conflict between two people, a toxic employee, or some combination of the the above.
If you have a toxic person and an underperformer dragging the team morale down, you have two problems that need to be fixed.
A good leader will dig deeper to try to understand what's really going on and act accordingly. In the scenario you've described, digging deeper would mean having the person making the claim present concrete examples and soliciting outside opinions if folks on the team are unwilling to give theirs.
In my experience, things usually fall apart due to a failure to act rather than acting on false positives.
In the end, details like this matter a great deal.
Vim is a highly successful project for decades. And one could correctly attribute much of that success to Bram Moolenaar's driving it.
And yet, once Neovim was created with a much "nicer" and broader leadership team, innovation has absolutely skyrocketed, where it's highly likely that Neovim has almost completely replaced Vim as the preferred editor for most Vim users who take the time to think about their editors, customize them, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised if neovim starts replacing vim in distributions within a couple of years.
> I wouldn't be surprised if neovim starts replacing vim in distributions within a couple of years.
That would be highly disruptive as Neovim isn't compatible with Vim. Plus Vim is still actively developed with no signs of slowing down.
I use regular vim because I don't want to think about my editor, I just want it to work.
> The following paragraph shows how so-called cancel culture was used weaponising the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines to expel someone striving for excellence, user satisfaction and accountability within the project.
> In early 2020, Thunderbird's financial and administrative home became MZLA, no longer a non-profit organisation. Hence pEp didn't want to pump money into a for-profit organisation and asked the Thunderbird project to refund Jörg's work at Thunderbird. At the beginning of 2020 the project let Jörg go, and in August 2020 he was ousted from the Thunderbird Council(), of which he had been a member since 2016, and the Thunderbird community. He was subsequently banned for life() from the entire Mozilla Community based on alleged infringements of the unacceptable conditions set out in a preliminary ban.
There's an approach I've seen some people take where they ask "how are we supposed to win without playing underhanded?" Well, maybe you aren't.
That's why the right to fork is sacred. Nobody can ever stop you from doing your own thing. It provides an escape hatch; no project disagreement is ever truly urgent, because the worst thing that can happen is that other people don't go along with what you want.
Exactly this.
This is the key point of every community, you can't have them without conflict.
If you ban conflict, you ban the social, collective, aspect and it becomes a corporate project with bosses and employees.
Very confusing goal to me here.
> * No interaction with any of the people involved. This includes
> o No interactions with Thunderbird community members, paid contributors, and Thunderbird Council members.
> o No interactions in any official Thunderbird channels, as well as external or unofficial channels like social media (Twitter, Facebook, Telegram).
You know what that is? That's fucking weaponized shunning. You know, like cults do. If this tells me one thing, it's that if I ever run an opensource project, I need to push back aggressively against any attempts to impose a code of conduct or found a council; such organizations seem to routinely attract terrible people.
Reasonable people don’t need to have such harsh actions applied of course. But reasonable people don’t end up getting to this point!
I am a bit partial to messaging when someone is banned like this, but there are definitely cases where people will just keep on arguing about something forever and ever unless they are explicitly told to stop. And this is what that looks like, and I think is present in more or less every official OSS community
Maybe this should just look like “lose access to mailing list for a bit” stuff though
What would be the optimal Code of Conduct? From looking at this and reading the FFmpeg mail thread, I'm currently leaning towards "Avoid talking about people." Just, try to avoid talking about people, period. If a technical forum comment contains no discussion of code, at least in theory, it's probably harmful to the project. As far as I can see, this also in the same stroke removes all potential for harassment.
Private interactions with members of the community, as well as interactions in other contexts (eg working on a different project), I would assume to be fine. They don't want the problematic member to be harassing other members through unofficial channels, and the only consequence would be not being re-integrated in the community.
Anyway, I understand why Mozilla would want to make a declaration like this. I just think the fact that they believed that this was a declaration that they could make, and have be obeyed, reveals an uncomfortable sentiment of social ownership.
I prefer for society to be sliced "horizontally", rather than "vertically". I am not aware of good terms for that. I want the arrangement to be that people can spend some of their time contributing to some group effort, with no impact on other efforts; rather than that people belong to groups, totally: "I contribute to Thunderbird" vs. "I am a Thunderbird developer."
The resigning of Brendan Eich violated that same rule as well. You work for Mozilla, then you go home and Mozilla drops out of your life. You are not a Mozilla employee unless you're on the clock. Only, what happened was that it turns out you can't be a Mozilla employee and a certain kind of Republican in the same person; the vertical isolation was violated. I think this is because people saw Brendan as "he is a Mozilla employee" rather than "he works at Mozilla." I am against that way of looking at people. I think it is important for the functioning of society that people can horizontally intermix rather than segregate.
A core part of the horizontal arrangement of society is that when you leave the boundary of a project, you leave its mores behind you; you are allowed to codeswitch as you context switch. Any rule that penalizes you for behavior elsewhere that violates the local rules directly threatens this.
This is why I don't care what they do on project media like ML. That's a social space that's reserved for the project itself, so fair's fair. It's part of their slice, but "Twitter, Facebook and Telegram" is not. It's like a school deciding that a child is a bad influence and isn't allowed to have a sleepover with another child in the same class. You have authority over them as long as they're in your care, and not one second longer.
That's what being banned by an organization is.
If it feels similar to a cult, it's because cults are organizations too (I say this as a former cult member from birth who was shunned for leaving).
Regardless of the merits of the organization, there aren't other effective ways to guide acceptable behavior by its acolytes -- even criminal punishment by governments (organizations) is a related act.
attention acquired. please proceed
Pragmatically speaking, you shouldn't expect that the only exceptions to these general rules of civilized interaction are ones you like or agree with.
> People have a right to not want to interact with others who make them uncomfortable. Imagine being forced to work...
a) No one is being forced to work with anyone else. b) If a specific someone might not want to interact with someone else, don't make that decision for them.
Yes. That is what I endorse.
Modulo "being forced to work"; I don't think anyone should be forced to work anyway, but that's not what this is about, it's about what's reasonable to expect. I think this is a reasonable thing to expect.
Nobody was going to chain people to the keyboard while Brendan Eich was loitering in the room, aggressively existing at them while they worked. The question is, if one person cannot work with another, who is being unreasonable? Who should be forced to yield? In other words, is there a right to not be made uncomfortable by somebody's mere belief, no matter how vile, that supersedes the expectation of workplace civility? I do not believe in such a right - conversely, I believe that there is a duty of tolerance in the workplace; tolerance as a behavior, not as a state of mind.
(Though, that said, I think Mozilla is far more symptom than cause.)
This type of hyperbole is just as bad as calling him a Nazi.
It was worse than that. Folks called for his blood over a past endorsement of / financial support for California's Prop 8 and a Republican congressman (one who, at the time, was one of the few congresspersons at all - let alone among the Republicans - who even so much as paid lip service to the idea of electronic freedom and privacy). It didn't seem like any attempt was made to even so much as ask if he still supported that Proposition and that congressman - and that's a pretty reasonable question to ask when a large number of Democrat (and more modest number of Republican) voters and politicians alike have indeed shifted from opposing to supporting gay marriage and broader GSRM rights. Maybe he does indeed still oppose gay marriage, and that's why he decided to step down instead of trying to defend himself. Who knows?
On the other hand, there's a pretty stark difference between "Mozilla employee" v. "CEO of Mozilla". It wasn't until he was appointed as CEO that his political leanings attracted criticism - and it's pretty reasonable to be critical of whether someone can objectively and fairly manage an entire organization and its employees while having contributed money toward the passage of a law that actively discriminated against at least some subset of said employees. Eich's situation seems much more understandable than attempting to excommunicate an ordinary contributor.
In terms of "this sort of power", you are of course welcome to ignore them asking you to not tweet at them -- just don't expect to be allowed back into the community. It seams reasonable to me to say while you are in "time out" to not keep pestering the council, or Thunderbird community in general, during those 3 months.
> I've seen plenty of harassment which in principle insults code. It easy to say things like "Part X of the code base is a piece of * and should be deleted", or "Recent PR 1234 is awful" -- no-one's name is mentioned, but everyone knows who is in charge of X, or who wrote PR 1234.
I think that's specifically the sort of feedback I want to embrace. Everybody writes awful code, it's normal. Not calling it awful doesn't make it better, and the goal of the project is good code over happy contributors - happy contributors only matter insofar as they lead to good code, and I think contributors who are made unhappy by people calling their code bad, probably don't write good code as a rule. (How do you get better if you shield yourself from negative feedback?)
As a concrete example, I consider myself a reasonable coder -- I've contributed to a bunch of projects, including gcc. I've stopped contributing to projects (including gcc) because I got feedback which wasn't helpful, but was either hostile or at minimum extremely unhelpful. Did they want rid of me? Maybe so, but they certainly kept all the code I'd submitted, much of it to the current day.
They threw it back in my face, demanding that I find the actual place in the code where the bug was happening, and that it wasn’t a proper “bug report” without that information. Sorry, but I just don’t have time for that level of arrogance. I provided exactly what the software industry demands for a bug report (workflow + reproducibility), it’s the support team’s job to use that spoon-fed info to dig into the code itself.
I mean, it’s different if I was making or requesting a specific code change, but I wasn’t. While I am a programmer myself, I wasn’t going to swan-dive into a completely unfamiliar codebase written in an unfamiliar language and built using unfamiliar tooling and spend weeks (if not months) of my own time learning it, just to reach a conclusion that they could probably reach in an hour or three with their own experience and familiarity with the product.
From the email we are discussing:
> Using facts to excuse disrespectful language.In a number of conversations where you have been called out for communicating disrespectfully, you counter by stating what you said is a fact. While in many cases it is truly a fact, the way in which you convey these facts has not been appropriate. The CPG requires that if someone says they have been harmed through your words or actions, listen carefully, apologize sincerely, and correct the behavior going forward.
This is very much open to abuse
I think this is more a matter of tone being hard to convey over text than such statements actually being harassment. Technical debt is more often than not nobody's fault in particular, yet often elicits similar commentary - and at least in in-person conversations, it's almost always clear that the commentary is directed at the code itself, not at the author - and hell, quite a few programmers will readily say such things about their own code (myself included).
Or, perhaps worse, if a major contributor fall on illness or other hard time, it would forbid the community from using official channels to rally to their support, because they can't talk about people, only code.
I like the spirit behind it, but maybe it could be improved. Maybe "avoid" is a really important keyword, meaning it isn't banned, but generally should be avoided. Perhaps that could be better stated?
I feel the same way in this instance, why should a FOSS project in an official capacity rally around maintainers, why can't the people who are part of the project do it individually? In fact the more I think about it the more I like this idea, if an organization can be used to help an individual (or to hurt an individual which is the necessary corollary to that) there will be those that seek to use the organization for personal ends, whereas if the organization is solely focused on it's mission and only that, there will be fewer people seeking to weaponize the organization for their own ends, and the organization will be better of.
For example if Mozilla focused on their freaking web browser I would be happy to donate to them but those at the helm felt that Mozilla need to go outside of their mission to support other causes that I may not be in alignment with, and so I don't donate.
This constant need for everyone to foist responsibility onto organizations needs to end, organizations exist for the purpose the organization exists for, if you want an organization that makes the world a better place in a specific way you think it should be better go and start a non-profit to do it, stop trying to co-opt other avenues to do so. At the end of the day if someone feels that organization X should do something about Y, all they are doing is trying to shirk their personal responsibility while still feeling morally superior.
Unless the members agreed to give them that authority.
Let me ask you this: are you a member of that community, or merely an outsider imposing your opinions on others that did not consent?
If the former, that's fine. If not, why do you feel it's fair to do to others what you think is wrong for them to do?
If this is truly happening with informed consent, I'll say that it's morally acceptable to me - but still creepy, to a similar degree as, say, Scientology. In that case my question becomes, "what possessed you to give them that sort of power?"
The one that doesn't exist.
ignore them on the client side. it's easy. there's a field called FROM.
Someone else might be interested in reading what these people have to say.
Who knows.
> Reasonable people don’t need to have such harsh actions applied of course
Define reasonable in a global way.
I think maybe you were looking for "people who do not engage in heated discussions"
Right or wrong, it's unreasonable to think that everyone will always be in absolute control.
It's simply words, there's nothing slightly alarming in what I've read.
For example:
where you have been called out for communicating disrespectfully, you counter by stating what you said is a fact. While in many cases it is truly a fact, the way in which you convey these facts has not been appropriate
Maybe if you don't acknowledge facts and focus on wording, people will get upset.
You can't actually know if you're talking to a Tourette Syndrome patient, but you can totally know if what they are saying makes some sense or not.
Besides, are we kids in church that should be schooled?
But the most alarming bits are
No interactions in any official Thunderbird channels, as well as external or unofficial channels like social media (Twitter, Facebook, Telegram).
No attendance at Thunderbird events during this period (virtual or physical)
WHAT?
Are they kidding?
Do you realize that your discourse politically implies a very individualistic views of how such problems should be dealt with?
I don't know the situation here, but let's take it aside and consider another example: some one in an organization is constantly harassing other members (e.g., a guy being heavy with women). If the organization follows what you suggest, it means it doesn't deal with the problem has a collective, and rather let everyone deal with it on their own. You're telling the victims of the bully that they're all alone, you don't consider them. This is probably the best way to have them leave and be left with the bullies only in the end.
I truly believe this cannot be the right approach to such behavioral issues. Rather, the collective approach at the organization level is the good one: it sends the right message to everyone, both the bully (now you stop), the potential bullies (we don't tolerate such behaviors here), the victims (we heard you, we're stand together, our organization culture is based on respect and you count as much as everyone else), and the potential victims (we do out best to make our organization a safe place).
You have nothing to fear in this if you don't want to be on the bully side.
I ain't ever seen a vote to ban on a ML.
The way you see the collective approach has nothing collective if it is the doing of a few individuals. When I say "collective" I mean that word, not "the unaccountable head of the organization" as you seem to think.
Indeed.
I don't know thunderbird's internals but I've certainly been institutionally bullied and stood up for others that were.
There's a lot of petty tyrants in all kinds of organizations who respond to their insecurities through administrative pedantry as a substitute for being an adult.
It's best to choose to use your time elsewhere so you don't suffer through them scapegoating you in a futile attempt to ameliorate their personal problems.
A mailing list ban. "no contact" in a general is a modification of freedom of expression and/or association, and way beyond the authority of a dev community.
> But reasonable people don’t end up getting to this point!
Sigh.
My face now has a permanent dent where my forehead was. Grievous bodily harm caused by facepalm.
As far as I am aware there are two models for community moderation: 1. The strict democratic process with councils, elections, laws and what not; 2. bdfl.
Problems arise when attempts are made to reconcile both models. In the former case you make sure that the community itself self-governs. In the latter case you have bdfl who tells someone to just fuck off out of the community. What happens when certain people with actual power (like ability to disable accounts) try to impose their own view and speak for the community? You get a shit show. There are "laws" one has to abide with and then there are certain high-ranking members who can ban users on a bad day - laws and unwritten by-laws. This leads directly to echo chambers.
So, you either strictly follow the process you yourslef instantiated, be dictatorship or become a hegemony. And don't forget we are talking about some random individual spamming mailing lists. As far as I understand this was already high-ranking, possibly valued member of the community.
What authority?
They can’t force him to not talk to anyone or not Tweet at anyone. He can do whatever he wants.
They’re just saying he’s not welcome in their community if he does. It’s their club so their rules.
There's a widespread forum rule: "don't import drama." The idea behind it is when you enter a certain forum, you may know people from elsewhere but you leave that context at the door and enter a new context with different rules. I think that ability to codeswitch into and out of social contexts is an important part of common civility, and overbroad declarations like this undermine it.
That's literally what they are saying: don't import this drama to twitter.
If that's what they meant, their word choices were very poor, because that is emphatically not what they said. What they said was "don't interact with anyone involved on any platform in any way."
Because it's the only thing you can control.
If you start canceling, you will be cancelled.
Look where this brought Mozilla...
Do you still trust them?
Do people still trust them?
They are on the verge of oblivion, I only use Firefox because I do not want to live in a browser mono culture.
But I've stopped my donations to Mozilla years ago.
Some people seem to just inherently be a bit nasty, even if it’s the very first time you interact with them and so nothing you’ve done at all.
Those people could think the same thing about you.
"amount of nastyness" it's not an internationally recognized standard unit of measure and it depends a lot on culture, status, social class, and a lot of other more subtle things.
You can't even imagine how many stereotypes on Italians I have to endure in a normal, professional, conversation with North Americans, who don't even notice that they are doing it.
And yet I don't get defensive all the times.
> If 90% of the community think you’re a jerk then it’s probably you that’s the jerk.
Or it's a community of Jerks.
Proud boys think I am a jerk, for sure.
If you think they’re jerks then don’t join in.
If they think you’re a jerk they won’t want you to join in.
It’s not the mystery you’re making it out to be. If many people tell you that by their norms you’re rude then by definition you’re rude as that’s the definition of rude - not meeting social norms for interaction in a given situation which is causing people to be upset.
If you don’t understand their norms or why they’re upset, that’s your issue to work on not theirs.
> Proud boys think I am a jerk, for sure.
Yeah so you probably wouldn’t be welcome at a Proud Boys meeting. That’s fine. Did you think this was a ‘gotcha’? You’re arguing against your own position!
You don't know until you don't know.
> If they think you’re a jerk they won’t want you to join in.
Which is why Mozilla as a brand is as toxic as the inside of Chernobyl reactor core.
> You’re arguing against your own position!
Not really.
I'm arguing against the hypocrisy of "openess".
Proud boys say they are for free speech, but then, as you correctly state, they wouldn't let me speak at one of their rallies.
Mozilla says they are open, but then their bans are written by someone who's in love with medieval torture.
The only missing bit of fun in their e-mail is being forced to sleep in an iron maiden.
Open to people who aren’t jerks. Again I don’t think that’s a mystery - it’s implicit in any community and is even made explicit through their CoC if you can’t judge social norms yourself.
true
but they say that he was mostly right.
There's a line between just being a jerk and being right but expressing it in the wrong way according to the mainstream audience (meaning the admins).
What I am trying to say is 90% white people and them thinking that black people are drug dealers isn't exactly unheard of.
And you can basically go back decade by decade over history with such situations. What makes you think that minority is more right now about someone being just bad/a jerk?
Are you perfectly sure that people always start from "neutral" or "positive" attitude, even when contacted for the first time?
I have been rudely dismissed more than once from some members of some communities over the years, even with very neutral mails.
I'm personally very against loaded (in tone) emails, and can be considered even a pacifist, but being polite, kind and open never guarantees people won't yell at you at first contact.
Are you sure they don't?
And how do you know?
You can only know if you do it.
That's the point.
> but being polite, kind and open never guarantees people won't yell at you at first contact.
Because that's not enough.
You have to be understanding too and know when you are wrong too and when other people are right.
Their behaviour is a completely different matter, until it is not borderline criminal, it should be considered as an expression of their feelings.
People have them, not all of us are soulless robots like me.
My doctor shouting to my face to take the f*king medicine, is probably trying to help me.
Me doctor telling me kind words, knowing very well my lazy ass, is probably not giving a flying f*ck about me.
I've seen conversations with or without me on either side of the spectrum, so it's not a given.
> And how do you know?
By writing neutral, simple, kind e-mails and messages to people.
> You have to be understanding too and know when you are wrong too and when other people are right.
Asking something you don't know to someone you never contacted before cannot contain the points you mentioned. If the conversations are ongoing, then things are different. It's important to be able to accept you're wrong and do it humbly. That's also very correct, but sending an email in the tone of "Hello, I'm wondering about this, can anybody point to me to the right direction, because I've failed to achieve it myself." Has neither right, nor wrong in it. Also, it can't contain anything more than appreciation of others time (and you show it by not spamming the person or the list).
> Their behaviour is a completely different matter, until it is not borderline criminal, it should be considered as an expression of their feelings.
Borderline criminality is not a defined international standard and can‘t be put on a scale homogenized throughout all cultures and conversation styles. It's also important to note that while the sending party is not entitled to replying party's kindness, replying party is not entitled to be tolerated for its tone of choice. This is why we have politeness and kindness as an international standard and aspired underpinning of conversations throughout this planet.
One can show their emotions perfectly well without yelling or being rude, too, if wishes to chose that way.
> My doctor shouting to my face to take the f*king medicine, is probably trying to help me.
Then you should first ask yourself what you have done to your doctor to deserve this reaction, maybe?
> Me doctor telling me kind words, knowing very well my lazy ass, is probably not giving a flying f*ck about me.
No. Some people say strong words kindly. They can only tell "You'll just die if you continue doing this." with a calm tone, and you may lose sleep over it for a month. The choice is, of course, yours.
So, as a result, we come to the conclusion of "If both parties act reasonably, then kindness and politeness is a natural outcome".
Then as a corollary, we can ask that "If everyone behaving reasonably, why at least one of the parties is not polite?"
The result was that they followed me on to Twitter and other social medias and started calling me names like Nazi and so on. I blocked them there but it was frustrating - we were just trying to run a small help forum for an open source library and I spent way too much time in good faith trying to help this person and still got publicly name called from it.
I ended up feeling totally burned out by this and stopped moderating the forum soon after.
Because of following me and other mods onto Twitter we made the temp ban permanent. I have no idea if the person is still banned.
If I had to deal with this kind of situation a lot I can totally see adding a rule that the banned person can't follow you onto social media and complain as a requirement for the ban remaining temporary.
Contrary to this being weaponized shunning, I see it as "we need space from you for a while and if you don't give it to us and come back with a better attitude we're gonna permanently remove you from the community".
That all said, it probably could be worded less severely.
You are free to believe that. Just as an organization is free to believe differently, and to set their rules accordingly.
Anyone may believe what they want; that's not a shield from criticism.
Having such rules is essentially pointless. The people you want to shun won't listen to your silly rules, and everyone else will just be weirded out by your authoritarian community.
There were a lot of well-meaning people on the other side of that discussion, but lets be clear that this is what they WANTED.
I don't see arrogance in the name, it's just bit cheesy and unappealing. But I guess it's hard to come with something both catchy and at the same telling it's Thunderbird beneath but with enhancements.
Postbox which is also based on Thunderbird and comes with additional features, started as freeware in beta. After the stable release a 30-day trial was introduced and those who originally pick the beta could get full version with a discount. At this moment it's a paid software that asks for email (sic) for which you'll receive the download link.
Well, now I can say: So slow. It made me think it might be electron, but apparently it’s based on thunderbird, so I guess TB is also slow, or they are doing something wrong.
I'm a long-term TB user. I have noticed fairly severe UI lag in recent releases - say, the last couple of years. E.g. I click on a folder in the left pane, and it takes up to a second for the contents to appear and the folder be highlighted. Not every time, but often enough to cause input mistakes. Other applications running at the same time do not exhibit this lag.
I haven't reported a bug; it's so noticeable, I assume someone else already has.
Still on spinning rust? Defrag.
I never asked for those sqlites, I'm sure they were introduced long after I became dependent on Thunderbird. Nobody ever warned me that I was now a janitor! - I don't think I should need to know about sqlite admin conventions to install and use TBird, and the TBird website doesn't make much noise about it.
TBird seems to propose to compact this folder or that from time to time; so I assume it's looking after that, and my folders are in the sort of compaction ranges I've set.
Dammmit, I had no idea that sqlites were supposed to be vacuumed. I need a robot sqlite vacuuming machine, I'm too old for hard work.
This is a starting point to learn about this particular drama:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/m7vi3b/wireguard_r...
In the past, I also created userscripts for various websites. I eventually created collections called Better$Sitename, e.g. BetterHackerNews. Because, why not? The userscript (or in this case, Thunderbird fork) is certainly supposed to be an improvement. As such, BetterSomething is a very appropriate, if lazy, name. You wouldn’t create Worsebird on purpose, right? ;-)
Since there are no examples of the accused behaviors it is impossible to determine whether the issues raised are actually accurate.
I also would consider the issues of whether a governance board is legitimately serving and whether its own processes were followed much more than technicalities.
To me, being German, these e-mails from Jörg Knobloch rather look like the directness that is often more common in Germany and German discussions. Keep in mind that Jörg Knobloch comes from this country (see http://jorgk.com/).
In this sense I consider this accusation rather to be a cultural misunderstanding if you are not used to this style of discussion.
> Betterbird: Yes!
> Thunderbird: No, requested since 2003
Wonderful! Back in the mid-2000s, this annoyed me enough to switch from Thunderbird to Outlook for work mail. Great to hear they had to fork the project to match the delicious UI of Lotus Notes.
Honestly since then I haven't thought much about local PC mail clients to even consider any alternatives. Apple Mail and web mail work fine.
What kind of obligation do opensource projects have when someone makes a feature request? Honest question, because i see this mentioned as an argument. I presume no one is stopping anyone from developing it and proposing a PR, if the "main dev team" or whoever is running the project is not seeing that feature request as a priority.
Has something been happening at Mozilla for the past few years or am I paranoid?
Also, the failure of Firefox OS and Mozilla Connected Devices didn't help, nor did a few rounds of layoffs,
This seems more like the actual problem.
If you're working in Mozilla your main client is Google, not your users (who left 10 years ago).
What happens when X actually improves? Then the whole reason for your existence evapourates.
Sounds like the developers would consider it a win-win situation.
Taken from the FAQ site
(This happened to me and I hope it's better now)
I wish it had built-in support for an editable message Priority column (with icons like Eudora used to have), but I've managed to add that in myself with a version of H.Ogi's Priority Switcher extension that I edited myself to work with Postbox 7.
I understand some won't like Postbox because it is a proprietary/commercial fork and doesn't have a Linux version. But I wish Thunderbird was up to the quality standard of Postbox.
(In my opinion, this is not a feature but a bug. HTML-only emails are evil.)
So I can let Dropbox/something sync or symlink and hop between computers.
How would you setup that? Is that even supported by Thunderbird?
There is a half workaround where you can sort of use the system keychain for atleast pulic keys, but you still need to import your private keys.
Anyone know how to use Thunderbird with Google Mail in a way that doesn’t do this?
However, I had a lot of difficulties to obtain a unified inbox/sent for each of my mail account. I succeeded by creating saved search under local folders for each mail account that unifies inbox and sent. Unfortunately I got some issues (sometimes empty title for mail, and a delay upon reception of new mails).
I previously tried to obtain the same thing with unified view.
The old adage 'try to please all and you'll please none' is true—well, it's essentially thus—so one would expect Thunderbird's developers to have to make some hard decisions about what aspects of the program should be developed in the absence of unlimited funds.
That said, we need to stand back for a moment and look at the history of email clients over the past 20—30 years or so to examine what's gone right and wrong with their development (and especially so with Thunderbird).
Early on in the 1980s we had enthusiasts who wrote email clients and then have users pay for them (for example, Steve Dorner who developed Eudora Mail which was a well respected email client). At the time this situation was fine as both developers' enthusiasm and the fact that they were profiting from their programs meant that they would continue to support them, and competition from rivals ensured that these products would receive ongoing development.
Unfortunately, this situation didn't last, when Microsoft launched Windows 95 it bundled with it an email client for 'free' and that changed everything. Being seemingly free and conveniently bundled with the O/S—which was quickly becoming ubiquitous—meant, like the O/S, it too became the dominant email client. The fact that it was a poor client when compared with others didn't matter as much as being 'free' and convenient to use (it being always immediately to hand). And if more demanding users found its limitations were an issue then they could benefit from the bigger and better Outlook bundled within MS Office.
What was left of the earlier client market struggled on with little further development or was bought up by large companies as afterthought products to bolster their product lines only for these companies to later discard them altogether (after they'd realized there was little profit in them—as much of the sales had to be plowed back into product development). Simply, Microsoft's business practices put the kibosh on most email client development, essentially, the email client ecosystem fell apart.
(A classic instance of this was Eudora Mail which was bought by Qualcomm which it soon discarded. Eudora was an excellent client that I used for years right up to the point where its age and lack of necessary updates meant that it became untenable to continue using it.)
Many mail users were concerned about Microsoft's sudden monopoly over the email client market and that's how Thunderbird was born (how that happened is overly involved to discuss here).
What happened next was the proliferation of web mail and the likes of Google's Gmail. Now with both web mail and Microsoft's email clients being widely available the standalone POP/IMAP client market was further squeezed and marginalized, essentially this left Thunderbird and a few stragglers to eke out an existence in what was left of their sector of the market. There being now essentially no money for development, clients such as Thunderbird stagnated for years. And this is why many (including me) stuck with better albeit then-dated clients such as Eudora and we did so until the very last moment.
Eventually, with no effective competition we were forced into using Thunderbird and we didn't do so willingly. The reason why many of us found that using Thunderbird was such a problem was that things (often of a rather basic nature) that were simple to do in our old clients were either much more awkward to accomplish in Thunderbird or were not possible to do at all - except with perhaps the assistance of plugins/addons—and then there was never any guarantee that suitable ones would be available. (I can still give instances of features in Eudora that have no equivalents in Thunderbird and where there are still no plugins/addons to fill in these missing gaps.)
Nevertheless, I've installed plugins/addons into TBird to ease the pain as much as was (is) possible. What is important to stress here is that my use of plugins/addons was essentially to add necessary/utilitarian features that should have been in Thunderbird from the outset—moreover, most are simple and would have required little coding to incorporate them into the base code.
Now, to make matters even worse, Thunderbird's developers repeatedly broke plugins/addons with almost every major upgrade—and they did so with such frequency—and such predictability and alacrity—that it seemed almost a mantra for them to do so on every occasion.
(When a feature worked perfectly well until an upgrade and then afterwards ceased to do so, one's anger became very palpable. Unfortunately, this has been an all-too-frequent occurrence.)
Thunderbird's developers always had some excuse for breaking plugins/addons. Usually it was that hoary old chesnut 'security'—that forever bastion of an excuse that developers inevitably wheel out whenever they do not want to do something that users need or require. In such battles poor hapless users always come off second best.
Unfortunately, as most open source programs are free to end users, there is little incentive (and certainly no monetary incentive) for developers to do what users require. It's not only Thunderbird's development that has suffered as a consequence, there are many others; for instance, GIMP being awkwardly different to Photoshop and similarly LibreOffice from MS Office/Word. (In these cases, developers have made little attempt to ease users' transition from widely used commercial software programs to their open source counterparts. The same can also be said of Linux's developers.)
In my opinion, the issue of developers failing to fix bad or limited code because it's boring less interesting work than it is to work on fashionable and exciting aspects of programs such as new (pet) features is likely the single biggest problem with open/free software. Unlike those who pay for software in a marketplace of similar competing products and who can go elsewhere when developers fail to respond to their needs, users of free software have essentially no leverage over developers, they just have to take and accept what they're given. Moreover, I cannot foresee how this problem can be easily resolved.
I've railed for years over Thunderbird's many issues and limitations here on HN and elsewhere, as well as having provided considered feedback directly to its developers and in each instance their response has been essentially nought!
Right, they have no obligation to respond (other than perhaps the fact that they've persuaded users to use their product which takes time and effort). However, I would suggest that in a more competitive environment they would at least be compelled to provide reasons for why they can't provide a requested feature or why it was undesirable for them to do so.
Unfortunately, from my dealings with Thunderbird's and Firefox's developers, Mozilla, as an organization, has been and still is notoriously bad at explaining itself, that is why it does certain things and not others that many users would deem appropriate for action. And, in my opinion, this is very bad for the free software movement in general (Mozilla being such a big and influential player).
Clearly, I am not fully cognizant of the facts surrounding the blowup between Mozilla and Betterbird's developer but as mentioned at the outset I'm not surprised that these matters have flared into a major issue (it had to happen eventually given the litany of issues).
If my point isn't yet fully clear then I'll summarize by saying that almost every software user faces difficulties with bad, ergonomically-unsound software on a daily basis but it often becomes an intolerable problem when there is no effective competing product to which they can turn for a solution. And not having any effective competition to Thunderbird is the situation many of us users continue to face. Thus it's little wonder some of its users' tempers will flare out of sheer frustration.
Thunderbird's developers are either too self-absorbed to realize this fact or they simply do not care. Why should they when they've no effective competition?
If nothing else, Betterbird's existence may bring wider attention to Thunderbird's problems—and that's a good thing to happen.