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Mozilla to Give Thunderbird the Heave-Ho

July 27th, 2007

Pcworld.com:

An open-source shakeup is in the works, with the Mozilla Foundation announcing it will seek a way to spin off its Thunderbird e-mail client.

After reading the blog entry where Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, describes the pending parting of the ways, along with a post from Scott MacGregor, one of Thunderbird’s developers, it sounds like Thunderbird isn’t getting much love at Mozilla. MacGregor writes that “Thunderbird has been a lower priority for quite some time,” and Mitchell posts that “the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it.”

Solution? Thunderbird will be spun off in one of three ways:

Option #1: “Create a new non-profit organization analogous to the Mozilla Foundation – a Thunderbird foundation.” Mitchell says the benefit would be maximum independence. Cons as described by both Mitchell and MacGregor are heavy overhead and complexity. Mozilla has the money and manpower to support the structure; on its own Thunderbird might not.

Option #2: “Create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird.” Neither Mitchell nor MacGregor seems to like this idea much, since it would mean that Thunderbird might get a little more independence, but would still have to be balanced against Firefox’s demands. And Firefox getting all the love is supposed to be the impetus for these changes in the first place.

Option #3: “Thunderbird is released as a community project much like SeaMonkey, and a small independent services and consulting company is formed by the Thunderbird developers to continue development and care for Thunderbird users.” MacGregor and fellow developer David Bienvenu vote for this option. Mitchell writes that it would be “extremely difficult” to do this as a non-profit, and that running an “independent taxable company” is the way to go.

People are weighing in with comments left and right on both blogs on the three options. For my part, as someone who uses the excellent program every day, I think option #3 would be the way to go. As Mitchell points out, many open source projects go this route.

But it does seem like it would depend on getting enough community involvement to move the project forward. Otherwise it could just stagnate, as many promising open-source projects seem to do.

Also, as my colleague Eric Dahl points out, Webmail is probably going to come along and eat every mail program’s lunch anyways. I don’t think that will happen for years, myself. As much as I like Yahoo’s slick Webmail interface, it doesn’t come close to Thunderbird’s feature set. But eventually, e-mail may fully merge into the browser.

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