Thunderbird to Leave Mozilla Foundation

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that Mozilla Thunderbird is to move to a 'new separate organizational setting' as the Mozilla Foundation focuses more and more on Mozilla Firefox. Citing a blog post by Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker, MozillaZine outlines the three possibilities for Thunderbird that are being considered: 'one is to create a entirely new non-profit, which would offer maximum independence for Thunderbird but is organisationally complex. A second option is to create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird, which would keep the Mozilla Foundation involved but may mean that Thunderbird continues to be neglected in favour of Firefox. A final option is to recast Thunderbird as community project, similar to SeaMonkey, and set up a small independent services and consulting company to continue development. However, there are concerns over how the Thunderbird product, project and company would interact'. Lead Thunderbird developer Scott MacGregor favours the third option."

Comments

I submitted this story yesterday...

[Anonymous Coward]

Before it even hit MozillaZine... and what do I get? Nothing.

Re:Poor thunderbird

[slapout]

And when you try to find Thunderbird extensions, they're all mixed in with the firefox ones and you can't tell which is for which.

To be honest, Thunderbird is not up to par

[Lord Satri]

I suspect its because thunderbird doesn't really offer anything more than its competitors and because it has few must-have extensions. I use Thunderbird as my only email client at work, but in my opinion, Thunderbird doesn't offer more, it offers less. Not less such as in less bloated, but less such as in features-that-I-would-like-and-I-can-find-in-other -email-clients. The addressbook sucks. Search too. As you said, there isn't enough good extensions so far (e.g. the pitchdark theme that I like so much as not been updated to TB2.0). No support for user tags (no, the "tags" they included in 2.0 (which were there in previous versions) does not count as support for tags). Poor support of non-english characters. etc.

But why do I keep using it? Because I hope it will become as good as Firefox and switching email clients is never as straightforward as one would like. And I'm not saying FF does not have flaws, in my opinion benefits outweighs the flaws. I'm not sure if this is true with TB. I have no idea, and I'm probably not alone failing to predict the future, if a new status for Thunderbird will actually help the project or not... I guess we'll find out in a few months/years!

Re:Poor thunderbird

[keithjr]

In the enterprise world, it's not uncommon for companies to not use Outlook but still rely on an Exchange infrastructure. Thunderbird as a standalone mail client is fine, but if it wants to compete it's going to have to integrate much better with robust calendar and resource scheduling programs. Lightning or Sunbird betas aren't going to cut it.

What is the Foundation not providing?

[kimba]

This is disappointing news, and begs the question why the Mozilla Foundation can't provide the needed resources to Thunderbird?

Given the Mozilla Foundation HAS a substantial amount of money, presumably spinning Thunderbird out into a separate entity will mean Thunderbird will have even less money than it has today because it can not be cross-subsidised by Firefox's search revenues. Spinning Thunderbird out, which will cost it more and earn it less, doesn't sound like a recipe for success if your problem is lack of resources.

Exactly what I was thinking.

[pavon]

Whatever little Mozilla Foundation is providing to Thunderbird has to be better than nothing, which is what they would be getting from them if they went their own way. Unless the foundation is hindering development in someway, I really don't see the point of spinning off.

Huh?

[pavon]

There are many, many quirks in Firefox, not just Thunderbird, that should be fixed, but no technically oriented manager to organize that. That isn't here job and shouldn't be. It is the job of the lead developers. Her responsibility is to manage the non-profit - getting donations making business deals and determining the best way to distribute the budget they have between advertising, upgrading equipment, and paying developers.

If you have a problems about how she is doing in that role, then say so, but otherwise you are complaining about the wrong person.

Re:Poor thunderbird

[nine-times]

Also, when you go to a web page and browse for Firefox extensions, you're doing it in Firefox. You click on the link to an extension, it automatically installs, and takes effect immediately. The Thunderbird, you still browse for extensions in your web browser, you have to download them, and then install them into Thunderbird through Thunderbird.

The whole process feels very different.

Of course the most obvious answer...

[SeaFox]

"Stop fawning over Firefox so much and develop the projects more equally" isn't even mentioned.

It's just a case of glory seekers. From the Mozillazine forums/Bugzilla, it appears MScott is pretty much the only truly dedicated developer of Thunderbird. It's not as "sexy" as Firefox, so people want to contribute to the browser instead. Firefox has brand recognition to almost make it a household name like IE is now. Thunderbird, not nearly so much.

Re:Poor thunderbird

[nine-times]

I find it fast and a much better program than Outlook. Now if you compare it to Outlook plus Exchange then it really isn't in the same league. To me that is the problem.

I think you're right-- that's the problem. How to solve that problem, I don't know, but that is most likely the reason why Thunderbird doesn't have a larger user base.

I think most people who use e-mail fall into a couple groups.

• The first is the business power user, for whom nothing matches Outlook+Exchange+Blackberry/WindowMobile. This is a huge market
• The second group would be very casual users, for whom being able to read their e-mail is sufficient. They'll just use whatever comes on their computer, or else webmail. They really don't care as long as they can send and receive e-mail. This is a huge market.
• For the sake of the discussion, I'll lump everyone else into a third group, and those are people with particular preferences or specialized needs. These people use the e-mail client they choose or else the e-mail client they need to. This group probably goes to Thunderbird pretty often, but there are still people using things like Pine, or some totally random client.

The only real group that Thunderbird could go after would be the business users. However, in order to do that, you need to be able to connect to Exchange and do calendars, notes, task lists, and Exchange contact lists. Of course, you could also replace Exchange with something else, but that something else would have to have the same sorts of features, and Thunderbird would still have to connect to it.

Contrary to what many geeks think, Exchange/Outlook is very helpful for a lot of businesses. Connecting tasks, calendars, e-mail, and contacts all together, and making that available through client software, on the web, and on mobile devices has turned out to be the big-business killer app.

gmail

[MobyDisk]

Thunderbird has to compete with not only client-side apps like Outlook and Eudora, but also webmail packages, which are becoming very sophisticated thanks to AJAX. Years ago, webmail sucked - limited space, no search ability, etc. But now it is really good, and I'm finding I envy my colleagues who don't need Remote Desktop to check their email. I even wonder if POP3's future is looking grim.

Re:Poor thunderbird

[suv4x4]

You have to wonder why thunderbird doesn't compete as well in the email marketspace as firefox does in the browser market space.

Because there's no reason it would. First wave of Firefox adoption was developers and savvy users. They got development extensions and they cared about good CSS/JS support.

You don't develop for e-mail. You could assemble the occasional HTML email but that's hardly "development".

Second wave of adoption came from the fact not that Firefox is good, but that IE was bad. No tabs (the mythical tabs) and poor security led companies and users to switch.

There were some VBS related exploits for Outlook (part of Office) but nothing last few years about Outlook Express (part of Windows). Outlook Express is a very decent mail client, and people just use it for what it is.

Killer features can't push people to adopt Thunderbird since people care to receive and send their email only. Thunderbirds spam filtering isn't noticed by anyone using Outlook Express. (hm.. what about email tabs...? naah).

Re:Doesn't it seem like...?

[itlurksbeneath]

And who's fault is that? The user community. They crave a lean and mean application that's just the basics. Then they want more and more features with every release until they realize "this thing is a bloated piece of crap", demand a leaner, meaner application then the cycle starts again.