Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
> Will Penelope be the death of Thunderbird?
I haven't been following the politics at Mozilla /Corporation/, beyond
the Registered Trademark fiasco, so this new (lack of) development has
taken me by surprise, I must admit. As for MozCorp's excuses about Web
based mail services making traditional Email obsolete, if that is true
then it's a very sad day indeed. I despise Web Email and forums with a
passion, in preference to /real/ message systems like SMTP and NNTP.
Indeed, I have such a distaste for these toy communication methods; an
intolerable affront to my senses, filled with useless distractions and
advertising spam; that I refuse to even accept messages containing any
elements other than just text - everything else is discarded.
I have no problem with Blogs, as a means of personal expression, and a
way of voicing concern or spreading information, but as an interactive
tool for communication - it's an unstructured and unwieldy mess.
By comparison with traditional methods, these new methods are slow and
clunky, and do not facilitate local storage, archiving, and search. It
is a very poor substitute, and despite the security failings of things
like SMTP, I feel the way forward is to improve them, rather than just
discard them, especially when the /supposed/ replacements are so crap.
This is what happens, when we allow the future direction of technology
and communications to be dictated by those who's only concern is greed
and how to protect those greedy interests. So "Email doesn't pay" then
according to MozCorp, and they wish to abandon an essential technology
purely because it doesn't turn a big enough profit. Is /this/ the next
phase of "Open Source" ideology? Is this what the Free Software ideals
are about; develop technology so long as it is profitable to do so? If
that is so, then I think something's been lost in the translation, and
people like those at MozCorp have lost their way.
AFAICT the primary reason for people's lack of participation in things
like Usenet, and their predilection for Web based mail services, isn't
because they find those services so appealing, but rather it's because
they're largely ignorant of these traditional systems. Very few novice
PC users that I talk to have ever even /heard/ of Usenet, for example,
and apart from office workers, few even know what an Email client is.
So is it the case, that the increasing popularity of Web based service
caused companies to support these services to the exclusion of methods
like SMTP and NNTP, or is it the other way round - the likes of Google
arbitrarily discarded traditional methods in favour of their own, as a
means of attempting to monopolise those services? And now Google, plus
the the hoards of Dotcom-like bandwagon jumpers, are caught up in some
kind of Web 2.0 "arms race", which has little time or patience for any
of the /proper/ communications protocols. So the public perception now
is that Web mail and forums is "the way forward", and that the old way
is somehow "inferior", but the great majority of these noobs base this
opinion on ignorance and marketing gobbledegook.
It looks like the Eternal September is finally coming to an end ... an
inevitability of course, but unfortunately it seems that the noobs won
(thanks in no small part to the likes of Microsoft and Google, and now
Mozilla too, apparently).
--
K.
http://slated.org
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| "Proprietary licenses, the crack cocaine of software finance."
| - Matt Asay, CNET
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Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) on sky, running kernel 2.6.22.1-41.fc7
16:01:47 up 33 days, 14:56, 3 users, load average: 0.28, 0.21, 0.18
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