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Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

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Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#71

Post by mixmastamyk »

bad_user wrote: post #60
martinald wrote: post #26

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's…

Your comment is incredibly mean. Mozilla isn't competing with other "charities", they are competing with Google, Apple and Microsoft, the world's largest corporations. The Mozilla Foundation might be a not-for-profit corporation, but they have the same constraints as normal businesses ... they have to secure reliable sources of funding, they have to preserve their resources, they have to be smart about investments, t…

Either TB has been critically underfunded or it hasn’t.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#72

Post by maxaf »

martinald wrote: post #26

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's…

When I saw the headline on HN, my first thought was: "Just the one?!"

A typical startup might deploy anywhere from 3 to 15 engineers on a product such as Thunderbird. Considering the amount of legacy it's saddled with, let alone the competing interests around e-mail in general, hiring a single engineer to work on this thing sounds like a token move at best, and likely a terrible waste of that person's time.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#73

Post by tialaramex »

jordigh wrote: post #32
martinald wrote: post #26

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's…

Is it a charity? It's the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation. Despite some explanations I've received, I've never quite understood how the money flows there. I suppose I could look up their financial statements, but my understanding is that if you donate money to Mozilla, it won't be directly used for developing software.

A charity can't function like a normal business. Income to the charity must be donations, and it's OK to give something of low value back but you can't just "sell" stuff and make money. Hence, "Donate $250 and get this T-shirt".

But what you can do is have a _for profit_ company that makes T-shirts and sells them for $10, and then a charity which _owns_ the for-profit company and receives all of the profits as a donation from the for-profit. That's legal.

So, Mozilla has a corporation to do all the stuff a charity isn't allowed to do, and then a foundation which owns the for-profit corporation. Getting paid a pile of money by a Search Engine to make their engine your default is not a charitable donation, because there's a quid pro quo, so the Mozilla Corporation takes all the Google money, for example.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#74

Post by ronnier »

pmontra wrote: post #66
ronnier wrote: post #12

This is good news to hear. I use Thunderbird daily and it's not a pleasant experience.

What makes your experience unpleasant? My pain point is that dragging attachments to folders doesn't work in Linux. It's been an open bug since 2007 and I've lost hope on that. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mozilla-thunderbir... Everything else works as it should. I'm not using calendars or syncing address books which probably places me in the long tail of the user distribution.

It breaks the model that nearly every other email client uses where you can enter email1@example.com, email2@example.com, ...

and instead it provides an input box, one per line, per email address. When you have a large to list, this gets painful.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#76

Post by stefantalpalaru »

> The successful applicant will be hired as freelancer (independent contractor) through the Mozilla Foundation’s third-party service Upwork (www.upwork.com).

Terrible idea, for a corporation with a revenue of $520,000,000 in 2016[1]. Upwork is extremely humiliating for programmers.

For hourly contracts they take random snapshots of your desktop in 10 minutes intervals and they measure your mouse movements and key presses to show your activity, because design doesn't matter, only implementation. Then they take a 2.75% cut from the client, a 20% cut from the freelancer plus extra wire transfer fees when your hard earned funds are available, some 4 weeks later, after they earned interest for Upwork.

Then they decided to punish those freelancers who did not upload silly promotional videos on their profiles by forcing them to have video calls for "verification" or get suspended from the platform.

Fuck Upwork and fuck Mozilla.

---

[1]: https://www.ghacks.net/2017/12/02/mozillas-revenue-increased...

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#77

Post by confounded »

bhauer wrote: post #36
martinald wrote: post #26

I have to say I think Mozilla is a complete shambles of an organisation. It must be one of the richest charities in the world with the billions of dollars of commission it earns from search from Google et al. I can't actually believe this is something they're excited to post a blog about. Charity with 9 figures revenue is hiring a developer (finally) to work on a product which has 25 million users. I think Mozilla's…

I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high esteem I have for Mozilla generally, it is disconcerting how little attention Thunderbird sees despite its regular use by so many people. I've never agreed with the neglect it has received from Mozilla and, in fact, feel that Mozilla is missing an opportunity to help re…

Desktop native clients will be in declining use, and Mozilla will know this.

I handle most personal email on my phone, and corporate email increasingly requires MFA via a web-client, for which there is no standard for native clients.

I have native desktop clients for email installed, and prefer them, but in reality I hardly ever use them.

Thunderbird is a great project, but relative to other things Mozilla have their sights on, I can certainly see why it's lower priority.

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#78

Post by raverbashing »

tonyarkles wrote: post #67
raverbashing wrote: post #17

As much as I think the action is commendable I have my questions about the role of an email client in today's market Maybe they should think about how to make a mobile version of it. Still a mail client is a "solved problem". Most of email's problems are behind the client, not on it (like spam control)

I'm asking this as a legitimate question. If it's a "solved problem", what's the solution? I'm personally a reluctant Thunderbird user. I use it, I don't mind it all that much, but I can't say it's a delightful experience to use. But it does give me access to my email when I'm offline, and it lets me do GPG for sensitive email.

If Thunderbird solved your problem there's your solution

And I agree, it's not very nice to use

But at some point, there isn't much a mail client can do as it's limited by the tech and the stack

A solved problem is not a sports car, it's the 10year old car that costs 1k. Very few people want to pay for a mail client

Re: Mozilla Is Hiring a Developer to Work on Thunderbird Full-Time

#79

Post by wutbrodo »

tajen wrote: post #69
bhauer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was apprehensive of your comment at first since you start with fierce criticism of Mozilla. But on reflection, I concur that regardless of the high esteem I have for Mozilla generally, it is disconcerting how little attention Thunderbird sees despite its regular use by so many people. I've never agreed with the neglect it has received from Mozilla and, in fact, feel that Mozilla is missing an opportunity to help re…

Especially since most emails worldwide aren’t decentralized since they rely on centralized webmails. As in, Google and fastmail could decide to swipe you and all proofs you’ve ever saved in your emails from the history. Thunderbird is the last way to download emails (...at least in an open format).

> Thunderbird is the last way to download emails

Google Takeout supports one-click exporting of emails to an open format; you just need to make sure to actually do it if you're interested.

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