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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.
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 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.