June 27, 2025
Keeping tech free
The results of our latest poll have been tallied and FOSS Force readers evidently think that Mozilla should keep Thunderbird instead of helping the project find a new home. Mozilla executive chairperson, Mitchell Baker, announced on November 30 that the foundation intended to eventually separate itself from the popular desktop email client it first released in 2004.
I stared at a blinking cursor when confronted with the question, “Your profession and position?”
It can be difficult to define the entire spectrum of my role at Reglue. Yeah, I am founder and executive director, but outside of that, in the real world where people are identified by their professional roles, how do I answer such a question?
A head scratching session ensued. The longer I looked at the blinking cursor, the more frustrated I became.
Mozilla has announced that it’s dropping a program everyone but Mozilla seemed to realize was a bad idea from the start. In a blog posting on Friday, the organization’s vice president of content services, Darren Herman, wrote that Mozilla has “made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery.” The much disliked sponsored tiles won’t immediately disappear from users’ browsers, however. “Naturally, we will fulfill our current commitments as we wind down this experiment over the next few months.”
Google is getting ready to migrate all Gmail users to Inbox, which should be something of a concern for those worried about privacy, but no one seems to be noticing. The current efforts seem to be directed at users of the Gmail mobile app, but it’s my guess that desktop users of Gmail will be getting be getting the same treatment soon.
Except for those using a free version of Android such as Replicant, and who install apps from free and open software sources such as F-Droid or Fossdroid, the protection of privacy on mobile devices, by design, is hopeless. Users have come to accept that most apps from Google’s store demand a whole slew of privileges whether they need them or not, and even when not being used, many apps happily go about the business of collecting and reporting everything they’re permitted to find out about us.
My laptop cover always gets looks wherever I set up to work — usually at Firefly Coffee House in Santa Cruz, where once a five-year-old stared at my cover for literally three minutes. I timed him. But yesterday, I was at Aptos Coffee Roasting Company, not far from Cabrillo College, where I hunkered down while waiting for my daughter to finish her Japanese class (sorry, Firefly — but in my feeble defense, you are not open past six).
A father and son sat at a table nearby, laptops open and I assume they were working on things individually. At one point, the father got up and approached me.
Mozilla wants to shed itself of Thunderbird, its popular cross platform email client. Although widely used on GNU/Linux, OS X and on Windows, the organization now seems to pretty much view it as a liability.
According to Mozilla executive chairperson Mitchell Baker in a company-wide memo written Monday and widely published online, the Thunderbird project is now seen as a “tax” by Mozilla because it distracts and takes time away from the organization’s software engineers.
Every month it seems like the Raspberry Pi Foundation keeps wowing us, and this November was no exception. As a matter-of-fact, this past month was jam packed with headlines, so much so that I’m eagerly waiting to see what the month of December will offer. Since there was so much that happened, here is a recap of the biggest stories that headlined the Raspberry Pi for the month of November.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Let’s talk about the future, as understood by today’s children who will ultimately shape that future.
In the course of a normal day, for every adult with whom I speak, there are two kids who add to the day’s conversations. Sometimes they are 17 year’s old, sometimes they are anywhere from 9-12. Regardless of the “sometimes,” one thing remains a constant: These kids will shape the world in which they live, equaling and surpassing the accomplishments of their fathers or even their grandfathers, those fearful but heroic men who faced withering gunfire and certain death on foreign beaches, men who prematurely ended the Third Reich to insure those after them would not have to, and men who died so those approaching the land could advance.
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of November, 2015.
1. The Devil & BSD: Leaving Linux Behind by Larry Cafiero. Published November 23, 2015. Mr. Cafiero takes a stand and makes a statement by wiping Linux from his go-to laptop in favor of PC-BSD.
2. System Requirements: When Is ‘Enough’ Enough? by Ken Starks. Published November 10, 2015. Do you have a computer that still runs great, but you can’t install anything on it because it doesn’t meet modern “system requirements”? Well, our Mr. Starks says that enough might be enough.
