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Mozilla Opens Thunderbird Email Subsidiary

Posted by kdawson on from the need-a-cute-mascot dept.

alphadogg is one of several readers to note the opening of the Mozilla Foundation's new subsidiary, Mozilla Messaging, charged with developing the free, open source Thunderbird email software. Mozilla Messaging will initially focus on Thunderbird 3, which aims at improving several aspects of the software, including integrated calendaring and better search. ZDNet UK's coverage leads with the interest the new organization has in developing instant-messaging software.

5 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Shared Calendars are what's needed by sasha328 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Email is not what people are after. Dopn't get me wrong, people want to send and receive email. That's a no brainer, but, there are a myriad to clients out there that do the job quite well. Some of the clients are stand-alone and some are web based.
    Some of the clients also offer a "calendar" where you can store events.
    However, what the world needs (to avoid Microsoft's dominance) is a shared calendaring system integrated into the same email client. I use Outlook at work. At the end of the day, I care nothing what I use to send emails with, but I do care that I can view others' calendars in Outlook, and that I can send them invites and see if they've got something in the calendar or not. That is what many people are looking for, not another email client.
    This will never happen on the client side if there is no server backend to manage the data and the sharing permissions.
    If you build it, people will come.
    My two cents.

    1. Re:Shared Calendars are what's needed by ivan256 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're right, of course...

      However, I can't help but think we'd see double digit percentage productivity gains if such things didn't exist. Shared calendars mean that people can see you're available and book you up solid with meetings, leaving no time to work. There isn't even plausible deniability, because they can see your calendar. You have to schedule fake appointments for yourself to get some time to work.

    2. Re:Shared Calendars are what's needed by rabiddeity · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I agree that calendars are necessary for corporate deployment. But while you mentioned other stand-alone clients, where are they? I need something that doesn't suck security-wise (*cough* Outlook Express), is supported on multiple platforms (sorry KMail), isn't packaged with a bunch of other stuff I don't need (no thanks, Seamonkey), is full-featured and graphical (I love you pine and mutt, but most users won't deal with a CLI), and doesn't have annoying interface bugs (Thunderbird, you are really on the edge here). First and foremost, I want a program that does email perfectly. A stand-alone client like that currently does not exist. (And don't tell me to go to webmail, I'm not going to put up with waiting several seconds between each email, and I need to be able to read my old mail and compose new mail on an airplane.)

      Corporate users should have a "corporate plugin" with all the calendaring and shared address book stuff in there. Have it as an option during install, sure, but if I'm a home user I don't want the clutter of Outlook and I certainly don't want the bloat.

  2. Re:Open source and standards ftw! by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Insightful

    All these stories about open source software seem to be joining in a symphony that is ringing a death knoll for MS.

    I don't mean to rain on your parade, but I've been hearing that for at least 10 years now, be it with Linux or other non-Microsoft software ventures. Truth is, Microsoft is still there and it still beats the crap out of most of its competition by virtue of its monopolies.

    I love Linux as much as the next guy, I use it professionally, but Microsoft is still the big rabid dog of a bad software company it's always been, and it won't go away anytime soon.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  3. Re:Instant messaging eh? by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've never seen an open source IM client that's adequately compatible with "the big four", ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and AIM.

    Did you try Google? For me it lists 13 of them: SIM, Proteus, Pidgen(GAIM), OpenWengo, Miranda, Meebo, Kopete, Fire, Centericq, BitlBee, Ayttm, Agile Messenger, and Adium.

    Is there a reason the guys at Cerulean can do IM so well where the open source community hasn't to date?

    Trillian is a fine IM client, provided you only use Windows (don't need suport for other OS's) and don't mind paying for interoperability with some protocols. I used to use it when trapped on a Windows box at work years ago. That said, claiming the open source clients can't compete or don't exist just exposes that you've never bothered to look. For a reality check go look at the comments on arstechnica when the Trillian OS X client was announced. To summarize, the reaction was a big yawn, since there are several clients available on both Linux and OS X that are free (as in beer) and OSS and are as functional and polished or more. Heck Trillian doesn't even support OTR without a beta version of a third-party plug-in. In fact plug-ins only work on the pro "for pay" version so if you want to chat with something like a Google GTalk user, or XMPP over ZeroConf you have to shell out for a non-crippled version. If you're stuck using just Windows it is a reasonably easy answer, but I'd rather use Pidgin these days and probably Kopete within the next few months now that it is abstracted from the OS enough to be built for Windows and OS X.

    Let me answer your question with a question. Why do you assume there are no OSS solutions instead of spending 2 minutes with Google?