Help Keep Thunderbird Alive

Those two examples map to the first and second parts of my claim.

Though I'm making a general reflection rather than trying to antagonize any individual here. I was already thinking about this when clicking into TFA to see that yes, it's another donation beg.

The answer to the person I replied to is basically: yes.

There's a nit in human psychology between mutual transactions (even lopsided against our favor) and voluntary unilateral ones (like donations) where the latter results in disproportionate scrutiny and entitlement compared to the former.

I once started accepting donations on my forum. I noticed people acted like they were about to make the grandest gesture in the world, would I be so lucky to deserve it after answering their questions despite having built a forum they spend four hours a day on. (They gave me $5)

And once they donated, they saw themselves as a boardmember-like persona with veto power and a disproportionate say on what I do, often pointing out that they're a donor. (They gave me $5)

I'm exaggerating a bit to paint a picture of what I mean. I think it's all unintentional, and they might be embarrassed if I'd told them this.

But I ended up refunding everyone after a while.

Yet when I charged $5 to let users expand their PM inbox size or max avatar resolution, nobody ever brought it up. They understood the transaction ended there. What is the $5 used for? -- What do you mean? It doubled my PM inbox size.

It's a funny quirk of our brain. I think a license purchase aligns expectations much more than groveling for donations, and it creates a natural freemium model for open source (or source-available rather?) projects.

For that matter, Mozilla pretty much left Thunderbird to die off for over a decade... it was a group of committed contributors that kept it alive... Moz now wants to try to monetize the software in a way to support the larger org. Moz.org has been problematic and antithetical to just making great software and you can agree or disagree with their stated goals and where/how they spend their money, but most people would also agree that they're probably spending too much outside the core competency, which should be building great software.

Firefox should have a war chest worth of cash at hand, if it hadn't been spent on massive layers of managers and marketers. They've tried repeatedly to spin off monetization in order to increase the overall charity, and I can understand that desire... but they've done so to levels that absolutely compromise the core of what the org is known for... the software.

They effectively HAD electron decades before electron.. they left it unsupported and let it die... they HAD a great mail/nntp platform, they left it to die and only recently realized it was a thing and tried to resurrect it only as a potential for more monetization. They HAD an engineering staff that was reshaping the direction of low-level development (Rust and related) and they let them all go so they could keep paying middle-managers and marketeers for a charity that was never self-sufficient and only served to drain or monetize their core products to detrimental effect.

I would like Mozilla to have great products and succeed... but frankly, I don't like the parent org, charity structure or their direction at all. They're the worst examples of "woke HR" you can find online and I emphatically won't be giving them cash... I truly hope that at some point the developers can just spin off the open-source itself into a new org similar to Libre Office, and break away. If all they did was the software and their existing monetization, they'd have all of their developer staff and a long headroom of funding in the bank.

Expanding the acronym really works well here. Gmail is no good if you have a legitimate need for pretty good privacy.

I would argue everyone does, most people just don't really think about what they are giving away. And how many emails a day are you receiving that a daily or hourly incremental offside backup wouldn't give you almost all of the benefits of "multi region replication"?

I used to be a pretty heavy NNTP user... at some point, while it was largely left to rot, NNTP features themselves became much harder to use... the fact that the leading button on posts now "reply" is an email to the author of a post, instead of a response post is beyond me, and changing the behavior got worse release after release.

The fact that they haven't invested in anything resembling a companion set of services for shared calendar/contacts is also a heavy pain point in contrast to the use of GMail or Outlook/M365/Exchange. If they had offered hosted email/calendar/contacts alone as a monetization option, they could have done so well ahead of GMail or M365 options and could still do so and under-cut them... having an open-core suite just for communications.

They've left a lot of options out there to die... they effectively had Electron a few decades before Electron was a thing. XulRunner was pretty nice to use, and they just left it to die... it got worse over time and just stopped seeing updates. All the while, the charity org and business org just kept spinning their wheels and basically throwing money away... for decades now.

I sadly have to agree. The damned thing struggles with a handful of basic stuff, it still has a config UI of which you can't tell head from tail, complete with teeth and whiskers and even a full "about:config" panel à la Firefox hidden underneath. Spell checker. Calendar. Chat client. Complete web-browser internals, with grindy disk-caching. To add insult to injury, the macOS bundle is half a fxxxing GiB in size (universal flavor, but still).