Mitchell- Thank you for bringing up these issues in a public forum and encouraging people to be vocal.
The Mozilla mission page says, at the top, "We're building a better Internet", but then says lower down, "Our mission is to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web." That mission page is surprising when you think about it, given that Mozilla seems to be confused about the difference between a whole (the internet) and a part (the web). On the the Mozilla Manifesto that situation is reversed -- "the web" is mentioned in the title up top and then not mentioned directly in any of the next ten points which almost all mention "the internet". That confusion may in turn lead to some conflicts and related strong feelings based on related misunderstandings or widely differing priorities. If Mozilla's mission in really to build a "better internet", then abandoning email and instant messaging and other forms of peer-to-peer communication is a clear dereliction of duty, because those are important internet applications (even if sometimes limited resources do force difficult choices). If Mozilla's mission is just to improve "the web" somehow, then it is easier to say email and IM do not matter to that narrower mission -- except incidentally, given the web would likely quickly collapse without email and IM to connect the maintainers of the web closely together in near real-time, and also that email and IM can be done via webapps communicating with web servers that act as gateways to non-HTTP internet services. Below are observations, opinions, questions, and suggestions that elaborate on that theme to try to help move past that fundamentally confusing mission statement as it relates to Thunderbird. The deep question is, should such peer-to-peer internet tools that use local file storage like Thunderbird be something Mozilla cares deeply enough about to put a lot of money behind them? I hope Mozilla will consider the below before making a final decision on the issues you raised in your original email. --Paul Fernhout ([email protected]) On Tuesday, December 1, 2015 at 12:29:47 PM UTC-5, Mitchell Baker wrote: > Communications tools remain key, that's clear. Today the big tools are > WhatsApp, Viber, Line, etc. These are the communications tools that > hundreds of millions of people use as their home, and which are pushing > us away from the Web and into individual proprietary product offerings. Proprietary internet-connected applications like WhatsApp (instant messaging client for smartphones), Viber (text, picture and video messaging, voice calling), and Line (exchange texts, images, video and audio, and conduct free VoIP conversations and video conferences on a range of platforms) will come and go "today" based on paid promotion to drive up user numbers linked with fads about "the next great thing". I've only heard of one of those three before. I have not used any of them and nor do I want to (especially because they are proprietary). Granted, I'm not a teenager, and I am also not a big mobile phone user. In round numbers, investors have poured about twenty billion dollars into those three proprietary ventures taken together (just basing that mostly on Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp) -- but all three of these specific services can be replaced by similar alternatives as far as basic functionality. Each may not even exist as viable businesses in five years -- altho ugh no doubt then people will still be exchanging and pictures and chatting with each other in some way or another, like via improved email tools. :-) None of those three apps are essential to maintaining a secure identity on the web in the way that reliable email is. Twenty billion dollars could have funded more than 200,000 FOSS full-time developer-years of work on better email tools (perhaps a million developer-years total if in China or Eastern Europe or Russia). Socially, it is hard to argue those proprietary products were good social investments, even if they turn a profit someday. One may argue some of that money went to physical infrastructure for servers, but that infrastructure would not have been needed with a more distributed data and networking model. Also, the money to fund those proprietary products ultimately still comes from the pockets of the users, even if in indirect ways related to eventual product purchasing decisions shaped by advertising rather than, say, a direct tax. So, those three apps potentially cost society million person-years of FOSS development that did not happen. :-( Do you think even Facebook itself would still be interesting to anyone after a million person-years of coordinated development went into an improved Thunderbird that ran everywhere and did everything one might want to do related to real-time collaborative communications over the internet? What could our networked lives and the web be like right now if those (potential) million developer years would have been spent differently? By the way, from Wikipedia on Viber: "On November 4, 2014, Viber scored 1 out of 7 points on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's secure messaging scorecard. Viber received a point for encryption during transit but lost points because communications are not encrypted with a key the provider doesn't have access to (i.e. the communications are not end-to-end encrypted), users can't verify contacts' identities, past messages are not secure if the encryption keys are stolen (i.e. the service does not provide forward secrecy), the code is not open to independent review (i.e. the code is not open-source), the security design is not properly documented, and there has not been a recent independent security audit. AIM, BlackBerry Messenger, Ebuddy XMS, Hushmail, Kik Messenger, Skype, and Yahoo Messenger also scored 1 out of 7 points. In contrast, OpenWhisper Systems' free, open source TextSecure and Signal scored perfect 7 out of 7 on the EFF Secure Messaging Scorecard, as did the fre e ChatSecure, Cryptocat, Pidgin with Off-the-Record Messaging, and the commercial Silent Circle suite. Also Telegram scored a perfect score for its "secret chats."" Those highly ranked systems mostly seem to follow the general open-source distributed Thunderbird model more? And presumably none of them had the same amount of money put into them as Viber? Email has been with us for decades and shows little sign of going away. Mozilla had neglected this need for reliable email by reducing funding to Thunderbird and email-related research over recent years. Now Mozilla seems about to disregard entirely a fundamental need of literally billions of internet users by spinning off Thunderbird rather than investing in it to grow it into something even greater than it is now. A decision to spin off Thunderbird may be justifiable on short-term business grounds, but it is still sad. Consider this report that predicts the continued growth of email in parallel with social networks: http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Email-Statistics-Report-2013-2017-Executive-Summary.pdf "The total number of worldwide email accounts is expected to increase from nearly 3.9 billion accounts in 2013 to over 4.9 billion accounts by the end of 2017. This represents an average annual growth rate of about 6% over the next four years. ... Email is remains the go-to form of communication in the Business world. In 2013, Business email accounts total 929 million mailboxes. This figure is expected grow at an average annual growth rate of about 5% over the next four years, and reach over 1.1 billion by the end of 2017. ... In 2013, the majority of email traffic comes from business email, which accounts for over 100 billion emails sent and received per day. Email remains the predominant form of communication in the business space. This trend is expected to continue, and business email will account for over 132 billion emails sent and received per day by the end of 2017. ... Instant Messaging (IM) is also showing slower growth due to increased usage of social networking, te xt messaging, Mobile IM, and other forms of communication by both Business and Consumer users. In 2013, the number of worldwide IM accounts totals over 2.9 billion. ... Social Networking will grow from about 3.2 billion accounts in 2013 to over 4.8 billion accounts by the end of 2017." Key point: "100 billion emails sent and received per day". Email is how the web was built. Email is still what is used to keep the web running. Maybe that was and is a dumb idea given what a mess email is in practice (including from spam), but that's the way it is, and it does not seem about to change anytime soon. I don't want to call those three proprietary services you mentioned fluff because I'm sure people like them and find value in them. Maybe I'll even feel forced someday by peer pressure to use one to communicate with someone I care about. But if those three services did not exist, people would easily get by through picking alternatives, including even better open source alternatives (or by just using email), and the web would hardly notice it. By contrast, shut down all email communications, and how long would the web as we know it exist practically speaking, with no new validated website signups, no notifications, and no address books? How would most technologists do their jobs without email archives or newsgroup archives to consult? How would Mozilla itself function? Sure, Automattic uses blogs internally to great effect and reduced email traffic; however, it is not clear that scales to the public web though as at they very least you still need a notification system for new messages and some common reliable authentication system (which email generally is still used for). That is one reason why, as above, there are about a billion business-related email accounts in the world. A downside of working in the middle of a jumping tech scene is it is all too easy to get caught up in hype cycles. Anyone around the Silicon Valley area is surrounded by technophiles rushing after the latest fad or the latest huge venture investment to be the next well-funded pets.com (as well as being a target of the paid hype machines that support them). By contrast, I'm a trustee of my local rural historical society, and the whole board agrees computers are a real pain -- although since my career has involved programming computers starting with a KIM-1, my reasons for agreeing with that sentiment are mostly somewhat different than most of the other trustees' reasons. :-) From a historical perspective, it's not even clear any of these applications you list or many others have made our lives much better compared to face-to-face interactions (including eating meals together) than they have often displaced. They are for the most part all optional and can be done in multiple ways. Email is not optional today for almost any involved citizen. Every board member, even one who is over 90 years old, has at least one email account (even if they may not check them very often). I predict that in ten years, all my local historical society's board members will still have an email account (or equivalent, if peer-to-peer email etc. improves fundamentally), and each of those three services you mentioned will be long forgotten and replaced by some new similar service (or via an improved email or IRC system). Of course, as Alan Kay says, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. On and off, something better is what I and many others been working towards for many years with hopes for creating something like a "social semantic desktop". I'd suggest Mozilla consider innovating in that area as well, such as by bringing web technologies to the local desktop (as with creating a new Thunderbird server version to replace a hard-to-maintain Thunderbird desktop version). > As advocates of open source or public benefit, and / or standards-based > interoperability we have a lot of work to do here. I do not believe an > email centric client like Thunderbird is going to win these people back > to the old model. Mozilla needs to lead in the new model. Thunderbird's current implementation is hard to maintain. Why is that? Looking at the codebase for the first time yesterday, about 95% of the Mozilla communications codebase (literally more than a gigabyte of source) has nothing to do with the communications task as it is a copy of Firefox (yet, that copy must be kept in sync with a mainline Firefox that essentially does not care about downstream breakage for security reasons). C++ is a terrible choice today for an application where speed or low-level control is not a significant issue (and they are not for Thunderbird). XUL is on its way out. You made these points more indirectly in your original post to this thread. So, yes, the bathwater (the Thunderbird implementation) needs to be thrown out sooner or later. But the baby, email (or more generally, peer-to-peer data exchange of locally stored data), as well as the existing Thunderbird developers and users, should not be thrown out with the bathwater. Yes, Mozilla should lead in the "new model". But what is the new model? And what should it be? And is the new model "the internet" or is it just "the web"? For a while, Firefox OS was the shiny new model (even with a huge chorus of people pointing out a landscape littered with mobile phone failures). But now Mozilla is starting to back away from that Firefox OS model after watching Firefox desktop get starved for resources and seeing Firefox OS get little traction in the cell phone market (as many predicted). Especially, should the new model be more centralized and client-to-server and proprietary or more decentralized and peer-to-peer and FOSS? I'd argue decentralized and peer-to-peer and FOSS is more democratic and more resilient. Firefox could still perhaps win big in the mobile space by making peer-to-peer FOSS apps for all mobile platforms that interoperate with the desktop and relay servers. Such mobile apps, built for Android and iOS with web technologies, but operating via "the internet" than "the web", could still produce a huge positive benefit for connecting people and supporting small groups in our society. As Margaret Mead said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Such apps to support such small ad-hoc groups could even be called "Thunderbird" apps. > Mozilla has both the opportunity and the challenge to have impact at a > large scale. I'm serious about the challenge part. It's hard to do of > course. But the challenge I mean here is that there are plenty of good > open source projects that one wants to see succeed that don't make sense > to integrate into mozilla build or technology infrastructure. I > recognize this is painful for Thunderbird, which is partially integrated > now. The above statistics say there are about four billion email accounts, three billion instant messaging (IM) accounts, and three billion social media accounts globally -- or about ten billion accounts in total in the world. So, from one point of view, maybe this suggests Mozilla should be spending about 70% of its budget on supporting better email and instant messaging to have a proportional impact at a large scale on the internet (as opposed to just "the web")? :-) What percentage of Mozilla's budget does it actually spend on supporting those two types of accounts (email and IM)? Maybe one percent if that? How is that justified? As above, yes, please throw away the Thunderbird implementation as soon as is reasonably possible. :-) Even the remaining maintainers will probably cheer! :-) Who wants to spend all their time mostly just dealing with breaking changes from an underlying HTML rendering engine not designed to have stable APIs instead of improving an important application? But don't throw away the developers or the user community. Let's just take the essence of Thunderbird and put it on modern web technologies (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and DOM). And let's have a clear path forward for existing Thunderbird users. A way forward, suggested in September by Kent James (and later reprised by me, not knowing then of his earlier suggestion) is for Mozilla to create a locally installable Thunderbird Server that provides peer-to-peer communications services accessible through a webapp or possibly other clients as well. These services could include email, IRC, news group reading, RSS feed reading, notifications, and also a variety of other services via plugins (audio, video, whiteboarding, note taking, web page archiving, structured arguments, IBIS diagramming, file sharing, and more). Initially that server could be on Node.js, with the hope that Firefox itself could host that as a plugin at some point. Such an approach could also be adapted to create Android and iOS Thunderbird mobile apps as well, although ideally the Thunderbird Server webapp would run well in Firefox mobile (or Firefox should be improved until that was the case). The direct cost of such an effort initially would probably be (guesstimating) about a million US dollars, as it would probably take about a year for seven developers building on existing JavaScript libraries for email handling and other peer-to-peer communications and custom service interactions. Or about 1/20000 of what went into those three apps you mentioned. The results would be Mozilla empowering users to store data locally and share it peer-to-peer across the internet -- as well as a whole new industry of web hosts supporting this same email system for users who want someone else to do backups and keep up with patches and security issue. That is clearly within the mandate of making the web a better place. And it clearly just a tiny fraction (less than one percent) of Mozilla's annual budget. Such an effort would provide a huge incentive to improve Firefox to support use in new ways (including easily displaying untrusted content securely in webapps, and supporting custom desktop apps in the same way Chromium does without requiring people write them using XUL). Firefox has emulated Chromium recently in all kinds of ways that many people have complained endlessly about, yet in this essential way of supporting easy embedding into desktop apps that any Firefox aficionado would approve of, Mozilla has lagged behind. Beyond the value of such a communications platform itself, if Mozilla had prioritized this need to improve Thunderbird four years ago, Mozilla might have improved the Firefox platform in ways that helped keep up its market share up because Thunderbird was showing a need that became Electron and Phonegap and other similar software. Then open-source-friendly companies like Automattic might not be turning to Electron/Chromium for creating a desktop WordPress/Calypso app instead of using the Firefox platform. In fact, if Mozilla has done such a thing, is it possible that much of the time and money and attention that has gone into WhatsApp, Viber, Line, etc. might have gone into an enhanced Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox instead? Maybe then Firefox market's share and Mozilla's revenues might have even expanded rather than contracted? Instead, by ignoring the needs of Thunderbird and the internet users it serves, by not trying to grow in that area, Mozilla missed a huge business o pportunity. It's too late to change the past, but we can think about improving the future. One issue may just be that Mozilla has a fundamental conflict of interest between supporting access to proprietary mostly-advertising-supported web sites (Firefox) and making them less necessary (Thunderbird)? That's a difficult issue to think through. Within a capitalist society, there is a lot of money to be made by privatizing gains (usually by centralizing systems), socializing costs and risks (including the social cost of harming face-to-face community), and creating barriers to entry (including by disempowering users and reducing their options for switching services when possible). Many web services fit that model (although rare exceptions like Craigslist buck that model with their focus on helping users get together locally). By contrast, socializing gains, privatizing costs and risks, and empowering users is traditionally what charities or governments do. So, there is lots of money available to tell people how important centralized proprietary systems are (even when they really are not). There is little money to tell people how important decentralized open systems are (even when they really are). I'm writing this email staying up to 5:30am local time when I should be sleeping, and I'm sure those three companies you mentioned could instead put 100 people working 9-5 for months to convince you the ideas in here are stupid. :-) Even if they probably won't, on the assumption this will just be mostly ignored. Perhaps the same thing might happen with different groups if I was vocal enough about broccoli being generally healthier than candy? :-) Thunderbird is something really different from a typical web startup by empowering users to manage their own data. The problem is, for Thunderbird, as with other FOSS applications, it is hard to find a big source of revenue empowering users with free software. And it is very hard for people to maintain complex software and support a large user community when they have a separate day job (it can even hard when it is your day job). Selling access to eyeballs is just more profitable -- but that does not make that more important in a democracy. Ideally, governments and foundations interested in promoting democracy would be pouring billions of dollars year into peer-to-peer research and an even better Thunderbird, but instead we get more draconian copyright laws where people (in theory) face more jail time for sharing music than for committing murder and also lots of funny commercials on how wonderful it is to use proprietary services and related potential spyware. Mozilla is caug ht in the middle of that socioeconomic situation. There are around half a billion Firefox users globally, but only about ten million Thunderbird users (so the Thunderbird user base is about 2% of FireFox's user base). Mozilla makes most of its revenue from partnerships with big companies related to advertising (especially for a default search engine); so there is indeed no large short-term business reason for Mozilla to spend any significant part of that revenue on something like Thunderbird in itself. But even 2% of the Yahoo US$300 million a year would be US$6 million a year, which is a lot more than I suggest a project to create a Thunderbird Server would cost if run well. It's also not clear how Thunderbird, even a server version, would ever bring in significant revenue (beyond a search engine partnership or other advertising). Thunderbird is a bit like Craigslist in that sense -- it can help millions live better lives in a clutter-free way if it stays modest, but most of those users won't ever appreciate the technical effort and personal generosity that went into all that. Ideally some foundation would pour millions (or even billions) of US dollars into a new Thunderbird just because it is the right thing to do (while also funding other great FOSS webmail systems out there like Roundcube or mailpile to provide a diversity of implementations). I feel, historically, that foundation should be Mozilla as far as Thunderbird goes, and Firefox would also indirectly benefit from it. Still, maybe politically from a short-term business perspective, Thunderbird should better find a new home -- maybe it should just go somewhere it is really wanted even j ust for community morale reasons? Frankly, as I see it, if you look at the adoption trends, and consider the rapid rise of Slack, between Firefox and Thunderbird, an expanded Thunderbird is actually the more viable product concept long-term. :-) But I am sorry to have to say that as a long-time Firefox user. :-( As a supporting example, after a couple of failed tries with Firefox, I had to use Chrome just to send in a job application via Jobvite as the submit button did not work correctly with Firefox and selectively-enabled NoScript options (it just ate the entire application as it reset the form). So, I eventually had to use Chrome to apply to Mozilla earlier this week for a Growth Engineer job. :-( And I'm finding I need to use Chrome to upload things to GitHub and Workable as well. Meanwhile, applying for jobs via Thunderbird still works as well as always. :-) Those are just a couple anecdotal data points; I can hope they do not really reflect a permanent trend. The key reason for Mozilla not wanting Thunderbird and seeing it as a "tax" is not, as above, that email and IM and other peer-to-peer and local file storage are not essential to the internet and even the web. They are essential. The key reason is not that Thunderbird is drowning in technical debt and needs a complete refresh. Lots of apps need complete overhauls from bitrot now and then. Like G. K. Chesterton said: "All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post." As above, companies are willing to spend *billions* of dollars to get software that works. For many, a million dollars would be next-to-nothing. Even for Mozilla, it's not much. The real key reason and deeper issue is just that empowering internet users is not a very profitable part of "the web". It is hard to swim agains a tide of social recession that (web) capitalism can create. In a different sort of world, there would be a bunch of well-funded people eager and able to take on the challenge that Joshua Cranmer laid out a dozen hours ago on the tb-planning email list (Fri Dec 11 16:08:08 UTC 2015, Why we need Gecko updates) of finding commonalties across email application libraries -- with so far no replies. He wrote: "Having talked with both the Gaia email and the emailjs.org people, I've more or less gotten people to agree on some of the changes to be made, but I've lacked any time to actually develop those changes. If people can spare some time, fleshing out the email-socket library and hooking up smtpclient and email-sasl to that would open the doors to being able to share some more code between various email projects." That is amazing progress -- if there were more cycles to help him. But those cycles mostly go to Slack, WhatsApp, Viber, Line, etc.. And also, Mozilla has just not in the past culturally emphasized supporting those seven billion accounts (email and IM, 70% of the total) by writing breakthrough new software to support those activities well. That cultural bias to ignore the less visible part of the internet is perhaps one reason proprietary solutions like those three examples you provided and even now Slack have proliferated in that instant messaging void. That is why the funds for up to a million FOSS developer years have instead gone to forge shackles instead of keys. If Mozilla had poured a tiny fraction of the money that went into Firefox OS into re-envisioning Thunderbird, maybe FOSS developer Automattic would not have recently embraced a proprietary Slack as the way to store a lot of potentially sensitive information (including job interviews) at a potential major competitor in the internet communications space. And maybe Mozilla Governance might not be hosting its email list on Google Groups (where, t o begin with, there is no easy way to get all the archives in mbox format). So, given the confused Mozilla mission statement, and given current web economic realities, it's hard to disagree that it makes short-term business sense for Mozilla-as-it-is to continue to defund Thunderbird and throw it away (maybe hoping someone else funds it, which indeed might happen). It is mainly just bad for democracy not to have tools like Thunderbird and to have no one who seriously promotes them. And in the long term, it might be bad for Firefox to not be co-evolving with tools for email and IM and other more peer-to-peer real-time activities (like white-boarding) that an enhanced Thunderbird Server could provide. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
