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Mozilla May Separate Itself From Thunderbird Email Client (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A company-wide memo distributed throughout the Mozilla Foundation by chairperson Mitchell Baker argues that the organization should disentangle itself from the Thunderbird email client in order to focus on Firefox. She said, "Today Thunderbird developers spend much of their time responding to changes made in core Mozilla systems and technologies. At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to pay a tax to support Thunderbird." Both projects are wasting time helping each other, and those demands are only going to get worse. She says many within Mozilla want to see it support community-managed projects without doing the bulk of the work on it, and perhaps Thunderbird could be one of those projects. Baker stresses that no decisions have been made yet — they're starting the conversation early to keep the community involved in what happens to Thunderbird.
They had their time, and we've moved on.
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So, a community-supported Thunderbird, just like SeaMonkey? Offload everything to the community. The community then spends 80 % of its time figuring out how to fix the build breakages MozCorp introduced this month.
And then their build infrastructure gets 'best-effort' support treatment from Mozilla and then they have to wait half a year to get a OS / compiler upgrade before they can get a Windows build working.
I'm not treating this as welcome news.
(Incidentally, SeaMonkey's mail client is pretty tightly coupled with Thunderbird, and bugfixes to TB are bugfixes for SM.)
Would the LIbreOffice project be interested in picking up Thunderbird? After all Microsoft Office has Outlook.
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When advising users who want to leave Windows, I tell them to install T-bird, let it import all their emails and address book from , and copy the result to Linux, when T-bird picks it up and uses it in a "It Just Works" manner. I have never seen another migration that was so effortless. You may understand that I don't want T-bird to disappear, or updating to stop, because there needs to be a painless way to get your stuff out of the hands of the Beast.
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I think I know what happened, and it's more logistical than technical. The new batch of developers didn't write the old code (no matter how good it was), and the new batch of managers didn't make the old decisions (no matter how good they were). As a developer, one is typically partial to one's own creations. (It's my baby now.) And as a manager, one is typically partial to one's own policies. (It's my troop now.)
My hunch is simply that the major direction changes in firefox/thunderbird coincided with the replacement of both developers and managers. The new developers had little respect for the old code, and the new managers had little respect for the old decisions, and the result is a 180-degree change of direction from both the old code and the old policies.
I agree with the sentiment, although for reasons that probably differ from Mozilla's. Mozilla has been mismanaging and making Firefox an increasingly undesirable browser. That Mozilla has pretty much been ignoring Thunderbird has meant that it has escaped much of the awfulness they have been inflicting on Firefox.
Formally making the two completely independent would be welcome to me because it would further insulate Thunderbird from the actions of Mozilla.
This is really a desire of Mozillia to separate Thunderbird from Mozillia's money. Mozillia has lots of income from Google. Thunderbird has no independent source of money and could not survive independently without Mozillia's money.
I do think Firefox and Thunderbird need to separate. There purposes are very different and they don't need a whole lot inter connectivity to each other. Thunderbird itself needs some restructuring in it's scope. That's the real problem with the Thunderbird project. Thunderbird needs to bite the bullet and be come a full PIM... yes like Outlook.
When do you ever JUST need e-mail. Just being an e-mail client is too limiting. E-mail, calendaring, tasks, contacts are so closely connecting nowadays. It is very hard to separate any of those and have them work well together. Thunderbird is still holding on to that though and it is hampering its development.
Yes I know there is lightning but it often feels like it is a half-backed hack. Thunderbird needs to connect itself with official support (or start it's own) open-source groupware server. I know there many out there but most of them have partial support at best.
No good deed goes unpunished.
I know many accountants who use Thunderbird (whole companies, as a matter of fact). They want to be able to access their email offline, and Thunderbird is safe and easy to use. All of them (4 companies, over 15 people) happened to move from Outlook to Thunderbird by just trying different email clients. They were not recommended Thunderbird by a FLOSS advocate or anything like that. Which is interesting.
This does not mean that Mozilla should not drop it: sure, focusing on FFox might be a good thing. I'm just saying that there is an actual market.