"Ryan Sipes told the audience during his keynote ... that the Thunderbird mail client 'probably shouldn't still be alive'. Thunderbird, however, is not only alive—it is arguably in better shape than ever before. According to Sipes, the project's turnaround is a result of governance, storytelling, and learning to be comfortable asking users for money."
#JoeBrockmeier, 2024
https://lwn.net/Articles/982610/
(1/?)
"[Ryan Sipes] would also like it quite a bit if Linux distributions stopped turning off telemetry."
#JoeBrockmeier, 2024
https://lwn.net/Articles/982610/
That so Ryan? What privacy-aware people would like is for you to stop trying to ship software with built-in spyware, that monitors how we use the software, and beams it back to HQ. Please and thank you.
Good on the teams running GNU/Linux distros for responding to our expectation that "telemetry" is opt-in, not turned on by default (opt-out).
(2/?)
I can anticipate Ryan's counterargument, that most opt-in things are never turned on. Two things on that.
Firstly and most importantly, so what? Convenient access to huge swathes of use data for commercial developers is *not* more important than privacy or consent.
Two, how much data do you need? It's widely reported that around 20 million people use Thunderbird. So even if only 0.1% of us turn on opt-in telemetry, that's around 20,000 people's worth of data. That's not enough?
(3/?)
Turns out the counterargument is even more naive and unprincipled than that;
"Guys we do not collect any PII [personally identifiable information], we need to know how many Linux users there are so we can make decisions about whether or not to solve problems for Linux users over existing problems on other platforms where we do collect telemetry."
#RyanSipes, 2024
https://lwn.net/Articles/982610/
Does anyone still believe the DataFarmer's fairy tale of data that can't be deanonymised?
(4/?)
But more importantly, Thunderbird needs to prioritise development of versions for GNU/Linux - including mobile ones like Mobian - *regardless* of how many people they think are using them. Because that's the *principled* thing to do.
In 2025, it's questionable whether it's even possible to offer versions for the spyware OS controlled BorgSoft, grApple and Goggle without compromising the people using them. Prioritising them over GNU/Linux 'cos metrics' is mindbogglingly shortsighted.
(5/5)
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