The trouble with her reasoning, however, is that Mozilla plans to continue development of other products that would seem to be much more of a resource drain and much less likely to have any real “industry-wide impact,” as was pointed out by thumperward in a comment on LWN: In other words, she comes to bury Thunderbird, not to praise it. However… Having Thunderbird has an additional product and focus is *not* good overall if it causes all of our products - Firefox, other web-driven products and Thunderbird - to fall short of what we can accomplish.” There is also a sense that caring for fellow open source developers is good, which I also share. This sentiment is appealing, and I share it to some extent. “There is a belief among some that living with these competing demands is good for the Mozilla project as a whole, because it gives us an additional focus, assists Thunderbird as a dedicated open source community, and also supports an open source standards based email client. In other words, she might not have as much support among the rank and file as she would have us believe: However, her memo makes clear that this “overwhelming majority” doesn’t necessarily include those outside the leadership ranks. With all due respect to Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential.” “Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact. Tech media have been quick to point out in reports on Monday’s memo that Mozilla’s flagship product, Firefox, once the dominant “third party” browser, has been bleeding market share for quite some time and has been eclipsed by Google’s Chrome, making it essential for the organization to focus on Firefox development.įor what it’s worth, Baker says as much in her memo, perhaps being a little patronizing and without going into the Firefox-bleeding-market-share part: We also want to make sure that Thunderbird has the right kind of legal and financial home, one that will help the community thrive.” “Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation and I are both interested in helping find a way for Thunderbird to separate from Mozilla infrastructure. Neither project can focus wholeheartedly on what is best for it.”Īlthough she stresses that for the time being the status quo will be maintained, she makes clear that eventually Thunderbird must find a new home. “Engineers working on Thunderbird must focus on keeping up and adapting Firefox’s web-driven changes Engineers working on Firefox and related projects end up considering the competing demands of Thunderbird, and/or wondering if and how much they should assist Thunderbird. Although widely used on GNU/Linux, OS X and on Windows, the organization now seems to pretty much view it as a liability.Īccording to Mozilla executive chairperson Mitchell Baker in a company-wide memo written Monday and widely published online, the Thunderbird project is now seen as a “tax” by Mozilla because it distracts and takes time away from the organization’s software engineers. Mozilla wants to shed itself of Thunderbird, its popular cross platform email client.
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