Mozilla's Privacy and "Openness" Bluff, a Look at Thunderbird
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Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Privacy Blog: NTIA Affirms the Importance of Openness in AI
This week, we got an eagerly anticipated look at how the US Government is thinking about openness and AI, a question that we’re focusing on a lot at Mozilla. On Tuesday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) published their review of “open-weight” foundation models, and the risks, benefits, and potential policy approaches. NTIA’s report is the result of a public consultation process coming out of the Biden Administration’s Executive Order on AI. Mozilla weighed in with our views, sharing our history in the open source movement and the value of openness in AI.
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LWN ☛ Lessons from the death and rebirth of Thunderbird
Ryan Sipes told the audience during his keynote at GUADEC 2024 in Denver, Colorado 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. He would also like it quite a bit if Linux distributions stopped turning off telemetry.
Sipes is managing director of product for MZLA Technologies Corporation, the subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that allows Thunderbird to take donations and so forth. When Sipes joined the Thunderbird project on a part-time contract as community manager in December 2017, one of the most common questions he was asked was "isn't Thunderbird dead?" That wasn't, he said, an unreasonable question.