I’ve been a user of Mozilla products since the name change from Phoenix to Firebird, and been through, thick and thin, the struggles the team faced then. And overcame those, we did.

Firefox was a completely volunteer effort for the first year of its life (major contributions from blake, dave, joe, jan, pch, me, bryner, and kerz, none of them paid to work on Firefox.) We had a thriving community of unpaid developers, testers, advocates and evangelists, a clear product roadmap through the first six milestones, a plan for building momentum and a significant user base migrating from IE — all of this before the Mozilla Foundation even existed (and long before the formation of the Corporation).

So yes, Firefox didn’t just happen overnight. It was a small community project that was able to build amazing momentum among a growing group of dedicated volunteers and users. We had a product roadmap and a large community of supporters turning that document into reality.

And eventually it saw increased interest from the Mozilla Foundation and much later the Mozilla Corporation.

So, I guess you’re sort of correct.

- A

Thunderbird is actually very succesfull. I could not find any numbers on market shares, but I found an article (http://www.spreadfirefox.com/node/27909) that says that Thunderbird reached 50 million downloads this july. This happened just two years after Firefox reached that same number(when it had half the current market share). That’s a lot of users. Thunderbird is now at the position where Firefox was two years ago.

What about the credibility of the Mozilla brand. Most users dont know about open source or the Mozilla Organisation. They just use these products from something called Mozilla. The last couple of years Thunderbird has been prominently promoted on the Mozilla web site front page. It does NOT really show responsibility to your users, when Mozilla would suddenly stop supporting it. Or worse, discontinue it, which is what I think Option 1 amounts to(becauses Thunderbird looses the Mozilla brand).

It would more sense to me when this change had come a couple of years ago when Mozilla had much less resources. But now when there is a lot more income, this change comes as a really big surprise. In fact I expected that Mozilla would look to broaden it’s application range instead of narrow it, given it’s goal of keeping the *internet* open and accessible.