Leaving python-dev behind

Posted Aug 2, 2022 20:30 UTC (Tue) by bartoc (guest, #124262)
In reply to: Leaving python-dev behind by Wol
Parent article: Leaving python-dev behind

Yeah, you need to create an account. To contribute to an email-based project from work I would need to have a seperate email account created, that can only be accessed while remoted into a specific machine, and only from the cooperate network (from VPN you need to remote into some other machine first, then from there remote into the blessed email client machine).

Now, it's fair to say that this is because Exchange and Outlook are broken email clients that are unsuitable for doing any real kind of communication, but that doesn't really help, fixing it usually means allowing non-outlooks clients that lack some security features ("insufficient" spam filter, no platform attestation, etc), and that becomes such a hard sell that it's not worth it for all but the most important projects (like linux itself). It's a sorry state of affairs, to be honest.

Judging from the recent linux foundation effort to provide such email accounts for people in my situation I doubt my situation is unique.

Leaving python-dev behind

Posted Aug 2, 2022 23:14 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (3 responses)

Email is simply not as universal as its fanboys pretend. Sure, the unauthenticated, spam-, scam- and phishing-ridden variant of it is "universal" enough. But surprise, surprise, many companies don't want that one. So for the lack of a better option they embraced proprietary crap that does not even let you bottom post or send plain text.

So email is fragmented too and the otherwise supersmart and highly respected people who buried their head in the sand and kept claiming email is perfect are partly responsible for that sad state of affairs.

Leaving python-dev behind

Posted Aug 3, 2022 0:55 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> So email is fragmented too and the otherwise supersmart and highly respected people who buried their head in the sand and kept claiming email is perfect are partly responsible for that sad state of affairs.

That's not fair; it's more accurate to say that the rest of the world moved on/away, perpetually chasing after the latest shiny.

No matter how "supersmart" someone is, email is a _service_ and that costs money to provide. Free webmail pretty much killed the ability to charge for non-corporate email (with the final blow delivered by still-don't-be-evil Google) which also destroyed the ability to meaningfully advance the protocol stack -- it didn't help that the 800lb gorilla (ie Microsoft/Outlook) was actively crapping all over the place.

So instead, email is being replaced with a hundred different purpose-specific silos, each trying to monopolize their users' attention, mostly paid for through advertising/datamining -- which further reinforces this balkanization as the focus becomes growth for growth's sake, which requires user lock-in. Dropbox is a really good example of this, but so is instant messaging.

Until non-greybeards actually start caring about truly owning their own data, nothing will change -- because again, we're competing with "free".

Leaving python-dev behind

Posted Aug 3, 2022 8:43 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> > So email is fragmented too and the otherwise supersmart and highly respected people who buried their head in the sand and kept claiming email is perfect are partly responsible for that sad state of affairs.

> That's not fair; it's more accurate to say that the rest of the world moved on/away, perpetually chasing after the latest shiny.

I wrote "partly" - you gave a great summary of the rest. The open-source community can and has been pioneering amazing things without much business support but this required great leadership. It does not happen when leaders claim that everything is fine, there is no problem and nothing to fix.

For instance I'm amazed at how little publicity gname.org ever got. It was an amazing service that you could only discover... by chance. I'm not saying it was the answer to all email problems but it was at least successfully solving a number of them.

Leaving python-dev behind

Posted Aug 3, 2022 10:23 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And then it imploded, in part because the sponsor could not monetise it enough to pay the bills, iirc :-(

We need to think outside the box and - rather than some micropayment system - see if we can come up with a "you scratch my itch, I'll scratch yours" system. Like the Linux Foundation. Like some sort of trade association.

Where small groups can come together and seriously push the Open Source "many eyes" and fast response advantages.

The problem is getting enough people to buy in at the start to get it off the ground.

Cheers,
Wol