Thunderbird, Mozilla’s open source desktop e-mail client, is being kicked out of its parent organization’s house, ostensibly for its own good.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker explained, “We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.”
The rationale behind the decision is that Mozilla’s ongoing effort to promote the Firefox Web browser leaves Thunderbird out of the limelight.
Baker proposed several options for Thunderbird: creating a nonprofit foundation similar to the Mozilla Foundation; creating a Mozilla Foundation subsidiary for Thunderbird; and releasing Thunderbird as a community project along the lines of SeaMonkey, an open source application suite that includes a Web-browser, e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, and HTML editor.
While Baker outlines potential difficulties with each of these approaches, she makes no mention of the fact that Web browsers like Firefox, in conjunction with the continued adoption of free Internet-based e-mail services, are obviating the need for a standalone e-mail client for many users.
Responding to Baker’s post, Rafael Ebron, founder and general manager of Browser Garage and a founding Mozilla Corp. employee, explained in a comment that despite being an avid user of Thunderbird, the e-mail application no longer meets his needs. “I honestly must say that I do not have much use for an offline client anymore,” he said. “For the last few years I have switched to entirely online options. Gmail, Hotmail, etc. solve all of my e-mail problems. Google Groups solves my Usenet problems. No more backups, importing, and synchronization. It really is an ideal system for me.”
Online e-mail services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Microsoft’s Hotmail also offer very good spam protection, unlike out-of-the-box Bayesian filters in desktop e-mail clients.
Then there are other differences between Firefox and Thunderbird, like the millions in revenue Mozilla earns for setting Google to be the default search engine in Firefox. Thunderbird doesn’t feed off the search cash cow, though with 5 million users around the globe there are probably untapped revenue opportunities.
Thunderbird has also suffered in comparison to Microsoft Outlook for its lack of calendar support. Though a calendar is under development in the form of Mozilla Sunbird, Thunderbird still faces a tougher sell than Firefox, without an obvious search ad dollar payoff. It also has to deal with competition from the likes of Zimbra in the corporate world.
Firefox rode resentment of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer monoculture to success. Microsoft Exchange and Outlook don’t seem to generate the same discontentment. Finding a new home for Thunderbird may prove to be far easier than sparking the uprising it needs to be king.
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With DSL prices like these, it’s no wonder Borat left Kazakhstan behind. A new report from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe paints a grim picture of Internet access in Kazakhstan and shows how difficult life can be for those in poor and authoritarian countries who want to join the worldwide community of Internet users.
Consider the prices for Internet access, for one. Most users (and only four percent of the country even has access) hook up through state-owned Kazakhtelecom, a company not concerned with competitive pricing for its services. An unlimited dial-up plan costs about €82 ($111) in a country where the average monthly wage is €292 ($399). As for DSL, an unlimited 1.5Mbps connection costs €2,458 ($3,355) a month, and doesn’t even included the required ADSL modem. Want a 6Mbps cable connection? It’ll cost you, to the tune of €16,144 ($22,032) a month. As the OSCE report drily notes, this is more than a thousand times the price of such a connection in Western Europe.
This doesn’t just make Internet access expensive; prices like this actually change the way that people use the Internet, as we’ve seen in other countries.
Getting a connection is only the first step, though. Internet policy decisions—such as canceling domain name registrations—can seem a bit, well, arbitrary. Borat.kz, a domain registered by UK comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, was summarily shut down by the Association of a IT Companies in December 2005. The reason: “We’ve done this so he can’t badmouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name,” the head of the association told Reuters. “He can go and do whatever he wants at other domains.”
The government is also not real excited about websites that publish “dirt,” “lies,” and threaten national security, and the country’s Minister of Information last year announced that a comprehensive policy on dealing with these issues would soon be announced. Although it has yet to appear, Kazakhstan’s “Information Security Concept” was approved by President Nursultan Nazarbayev. That “Concept” makes clear that Kazakhstan is faced with serious threats from “destructive illegal political, religious, and economic organizations,” “certain foreign political, economic, military, and information structures,” and “unlawful activities of political and economic organizations in creating, disseminating, and using information.”
Bloggers who have published items critical of the government have been charged under statutes that prohibit any violations of the president’s “honor and dignity.” In 2003, a journalist complained that one of his favorite websites is being blocked. According to the report, “the prosecutor opened a criminal case against him for compromising the security system of Kazakhtelecom. He was beaten, sentenced and sent behind bars.”
As that last example indicates, content filtering is alive and well in the country. For several years, the preferred method of blocking was apparently by IP address, but that came to an end in 2005. The method of choice is now “increasing the connection latency” so that undesirable sites take so long to load that users give up.
Kazakhstan has recently been attempting to raise its worldwide profile, and it has been a member of the OSCE since 1992. For both of those reasons, it may pay some attention to the report, which concludes by suggesting that the country get rid of the state telecom monopoly, that the OSCE should monitor networks in the country to see if Kazakhstan is still filtering content, and that the government there should work to “support affordable and safe hosting a websites with the national ISPs.”
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A federal judge denied on Friday a request from a small Virginia company to stop the online auction powerhouse eBay from using its “Buy It Now” feature, which allows shoppers to purchase items at a fixed price.
Judge Jerome B. Friedman of Federal District Court denied a motion by the Virginia company, MercExchange, for a permanent injunction to stop eBay from using the feature. The Supreme Court ruled last year that, although eBay infringed upon MercExchange’s patent for the service, it was up to the lower court to decide whether eBay had to stop using it.
In his ruling, Judge Friedman said the company was not irreparably harmed because it continued to make money from its patents, either by licensing them outright or by threatening litigation against those it believed infringed upon them.
“MercExchange has utilized its patents as a sword to extract money rather than as a shield to protect its right to exclude or its market share, reputation, good will, or name recognition, as MercExchange appears to possess none of these,” he wrote.
A federal jury found in 2003 that eBay had infringed on MercExchange’s patent and awarded the company $35 million. The amount later was reduced to $25 million.
Greg Stillman, a lawyer for MercExchange, which is based in Great Falls., Va., called the opinion a double-edged sword.
“It was sort of good news, bad news for both sides,” Mr. Stillman said. He said he was sure that eBay was relieved not to be enjoined but that the judge “made it quite clear that they’re going to have to pay for that right.”
Catherine England, a spokeswoman for eBay, said the company was “extremely pleased” in the decision to deny the injunction.
In the closely watched case, the high court ruled that judges had flexibility in deciding whether to issue court orders barring continued use of a technology after juries found a patent violation. The decision threw out a ruling by a federal appeals court that said injunctions should be automatic unless exceptional circumstances applied.
The case became a rallying point for critics who argue that the federal patent system is riddled with abuse from small businesses that sue established companies to enforce patents for ideas that have never been developed into products.
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