I am tired boss…
literally all they had to do was maintain the good old status quo and everyone would have loved them for it
I don’t think their market share/relevance would start rising if they just maintained the status quo.
Which isn’t to say this direction is great or the way to go about it, but they can’t do nothing either.
Mozilla can’t get more based
Even if it’s shit, why does Mozilla think it’s going to beat the rest?
Sounds like this is in the same space as OpenWebUI? It would be good to have some more choice there.
At last a useful comment thread about the actual functionality in question.
While I am not moving back to reddit, Threadiverse is just terrible on any nuanced conversations on modern ML tools and approaches.
The tech is not the issue here. It has legitimate use cases and it is here to stay (this is not a blockchain pump and dump scheme ala Web 3.0). The issue here are American tech companies and broader support for crime/corruption in US society (as of today, doesn’t mean that this can’t/won’t change in 20-30 years). We need truly independent open source systems and tools.
I am aware OpenWebUI is based in San Francisco and Mozilla Foundation is based in the US. I am always on the lookout for alternatives.
It sounds like a step further than open-webui; it’s an enterprise grade client-server model for access to agents, workflows, and centralized knowledge repositories for RAG.
In addition to local chatbot for executive/admin use, I can see this being the backend for developers running Cursor or some other AI enhanced IDE, with local knowledge stores holding proprietary documents and running against local large models.
I am also curious about time share and prioritization of resources; I assume it would queue simultaneous requests. Presumably this would let you more effectively pool local compute, rather than providing A100 GPUs to each developer that may sit unused when they’re not working.
Edit: Somewhat impressively, this whole stack does not even include a local inference provider; so it does everything except local models right now, and requests are forwarded to cloud inference providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc). But it does have the backend started for rate limiting and queuing, and true “fully offline/local” is on the roadmap, just not there yet.
After reading through the GitHub docs, the most impressive thing is that they open sourced their Thunderbolt coding agent for Claude Code. There are quite a few skills available for implementation planning, dependency/build environment setup, coding, linting/cleanup, QA, and managing agent pull requests. Pretty good examples if you are looking at building Claude Code skills.
I thought gstack already gave developers God Mode?
It looks like it, it doesn’t seem to be doing any self-referencing/agentic things out of the box so the end user would need to build a bit to cover their specific use cases.
They seem to be aiming more at the startup/small company demographic than at self-hosters. This is just based on a skim of the repo and their product page, I haven’t looked at it too hard yet.
God dammit. All the whining they do about needing donations to keep developing and this is what they come up with.
This is actually funded by Mozilla, not Thunderbird donations.
Nobody asked for this
Indeed… As far as I know at least the Thunderbird donations are not going towards this, its Mozilla funded. I just cannot see that anyone asked or needed this, such a waste of time that should have gonw towards Thunderbird.
If anybody needs to know: this is why you should not not donate to the Mozilla Foundation. No money goes towards Firefox or Thunderbird through it!
The products I care about:
- Firefox is funded by Google
- Thunderbird is funded by donations
The groups I don’t:
- “Thunderbolt is funded through a dedicated investment from Mozilla”,
- …and Mozilla is funded by separate donations too.
You opened my eyes
spoiler
Keep in mind that that there is a strong likelihood that XLE is a demagogue and is dedicated to shitting up any mozilla/Firefox/TB thread with lies and gross exaggerations that function as lies. XLE almost certainly does not use Firefox or Thunderbird (it wouldn’t make sense considering their posting history).
XLE claimed that “Firefox is bursting at the seams with ads.” This is clearly not true.
As an example they cited “sponsored search suggestions”, which to my mind isn’t a big deal and can easily be disabled. For the sake of transparency, I will note that I’ve never got them and it seems I can’t enable them even if I wanted to (likely due to my region?)
XLE also claimed that the on-hover sponsorship notice for the Firefox weather widget as an example of “Firefox bursting at the seam with ads.” I haven’t used the default new tab page in a decade plus, so maybe this impacts how I see things. From my perspective, an on-hover sponsorship notice for optional widgets is a misleading example for their claims.
You can make up your own mind and read our conversation here: https://piefed.social/comment/10831188
P.S. I am not saying you shouldn’t cancel your donation. I’ve donated to Mozilla Foundation before and cancelled, so I would be a hypocrite for defending donations to MF.
I also have a more hard-line position on MF; they’ve turned into a shitty, corrupt American tech company imitation. All open source foundations based in the US are suspect by definition (including Linux foundation, Debian foundation etc.) as US society is in a state where it is extremely unlikely that crime and corruption will be addressed in the next 20 years (I’ve lived in the US for several years, as well as other countries across NA, Europe and Asia).
But that doesn’t mean you should trust an individual like XLE, who muddies the water with bombastic BS, while at the same time defending Brave; an American criminal gang that was caught re-writing referral URLs for their own financial benefit.
Honestly it’s been what… 8? Years since chrome could play HDR…
Firefox
Just make it work already… it kinda does on Linux if you enable experimental features just…do it
Money is fungible. Donating frees up money that would have gone elsewhere to go to this.
Thunderbird team unveils… 🙂 thunderbolt… 😃self-hostable… 🤯AI😒client 😓
It does a lot more than that, ACP especially is great to have
Well guys… It’s endorsed by the CEO.
so there’s that
AND all caps “trusted by organisations that don’t compromise”
TBH that sounds like a warning.
Omg take my money!! 💸💸💸💸
Seriously loosing whatever faith i had left in Mozilla… I want to love them so badly, but this just hurts.
Oh no, they wrote a free program that you don’t want to use.
They have the audacity of doing things, that is despicable and definitely reprehensible.
I see your account is just here to troll/harass people who don’t love AI too, but we’re witnessing Mozilla burning goodwill and capital for no apparent reason.
Please don’t tell people to stick their heads in the sand.
Advocacy against Mozilla’s waste has already gotten them nervous and defensive, and that advocacy can and should continue.
Really, you’re going to follow me around calling me a troll? That’s sadder than being a troll.
Nah, what’s sadder is getting ratioed like this for being an AI shill.
You care about Karma points? On the Fediverse, even?
I care about the sentiment, not the points.
I can get behind this concept for those that want email summaries, I suppose. But absolutely not from a donation run nonprofit who was told time and again that we do not want ai shoved in every orifice.
Edit. Autocorrect
However an AI by a nonprofit is the only kind of AI I would potentially use.
I’m not against the LLM tech, it’s that by using it I would support the shittiest of megacorps that use their power for evil (from training data to direct politics, and let’s not forget markets disruptions).
AI by a for-profit has guaranteed enshitification built into the business model, otherwise they wouldn’t get any capital.
Could you explain what email summaries have to do with this announcement? Thunderbird and Thunderbolt are separate applications. Thunderbolt doesn’t include AI models, it is merely a frontend to an AI API of choice, similar to how Thunderbird is a frontend to an email server of choice.
I have read summaries of emails and meetings that had the action items all sorts of wrong, sometimes completely inverted.
It seems to me that if an email or meeting is at all important, the stakes are too high to trust the summary, and if it is not important, neither is its summary.
Add on to that the fact that locally running LLMs are even more scatterbrained, I don’t see how this fills even the limited need you’re describing in any useful way.
So, they spent their limited available manpower on an unrequested feature, and to add insult to injury, the feature is unlikely to have effective practical uses. It might be capable of more limited scope text prediction like code auto-complete, but the field is already flooded with those. I think the Thunderbird users have far more use from improvements to Thunderbird than they do for other unrelated products.
This logo reminds me of Nullsoft Winamp
It really eats… the llamas ass
I’m note sure anybody asked for this.
That said, I’ll give it a shot.
Is this a potential alternative to Open Web UI?
And this is yet another reason why I use Betterbird.
Because of a separate app that doesn’t affect Thunderbird in day to day use? What?
Because it is a pure, forked version attempting the evoke the intent of the original project.
That’s a valid reason, but why does this announcement affect your reasoning for preferring the fork? This is a completely separate app from Thunderbird.
Thanks, I had no idea that exists. I’ll give it a try.
I want to be able to login to my m365 work account without Owl (but I do love you for filling the gap Owl). Why weren’t these resources spent on making that a reality? Thats twenty times more useful for Thunderbird and its users.
Supposedly, this is a new and different team that will be taking a grant from the Mozilla Foundation. (I have no idea where these new resources came from, but in the best case scenario, they will appear out of thin air and not slow down work on Thunderbird…)
If it is “from the Makers of Thunderbird”, then I think it stands to reason that at least someone on the Thunderbird project spent time on this that they could have spent on that.
These FOSS projects barely have enough resources to complete their primary charter most of the time, so it really grates to see them squander their most limited assets.
idiots…
