Call me a skeptic or call me a cynic, I don’t care. The Mozilla goal is to hitch its wagon to Google and join the SaaS movement. The world doesn’t need another greedy M$. I do not need nor will I be convinced that it is in my best interest to allow a vendor of desktop software or web-based applications delivered via a browser to dictate what is best for me.

You should have seen Thunderbird as the best opportunity to provide the eMail/News module of the best open source desktop suite of applications in the world. How much did M$ pay Mozilla to kill Thunderbird? (I use it because it is safer than Outlook.) How much did Google bribe you to drive a stake into it? (Some people don’t have the latest hardware to make webMail a viable alternative.)

I wish David and Scott the best. They didn’t desert. they were betrayed.

Do we hope Scott and David remain involved with Thunderbird? Yes, of course we do. Do we think they will? They have said they want to. Is it their choice? Absolutely. If they want to make a private company and try something new, it is absolutely their choice and I intend to try to be supportive. Are we willing to stand still and leave Thunderbird as it is, to stay with the status quo? No. Do we wish there were more developers who had authority in the Thunderbird code already? Yes, we do, that’s an explicit goal for the future. Do we treat the need to build a strong Thunderbird community with more great people involved as a serious and important task? Absolutely, this is part of how we will measure success.

David and Scott have always been devoted to the Thunderbird userbase; I have every expectation that this will continue. Does that mean they will help train other people? That’s their decision, it’s not something we can force to happen. I suppose that helping people get up to speed on the code and able to contribute is a part of being a good module owner. That’s a discussion that’s broader than Thunderbird though and probably should be addressed elsewhere.

In any case, there’s a lot of work to do in the mail space, that’s for sure.

@Martino : it would be laughable if it was not so serious and unfair. We all remember that Firefox did not create a community in the beginning because checkins in mozilla/browser were limited to the team of 4 or 5. We all remember that major features were unexpectedly (JS console) removed without discussion with the community. And as the author of Nvu, I know too well how hard it is to build a community of core contributors on a complex code.
Thunderbird has a lot of extensions and support. It also has Milimail (milimail.org), contributors to the core.
Firefox has a wider community because it’s a BROWSER ! Because any help you provide is visible to litteraly a hundred million people. Because the internals of a Mail User Agent are terribly complex (just for the record, I implemented one in a former professionnal life). Because when you’re only 2 or 3 on a product like thunderbird, you unfortunately don’t have time to mentor new people ; happened to me with Nvu exactly.

I use a free rebranded Thunderbird - known also as Iceweasel - as my main email client since I discovered it. It is not perfect, but the closest thing to perfect I’ve found. It is small enough, yet modular so I can use extensions like Enigmail or even Calendar if I would need that. The best thing about Tunderbird/Iceweasel is that it is no bloatware.

Please don’t change it. If you want an Outlook killer for the Executives, then develop a server of equal quality like Thunderbird.

What am I missing? Openness, maybe, in the discussions. You said:

“So either I was wrong to not start the public discussion much earlier, OR I was right to do a lot of ground work first and have an outline of how we would proceed before opening the discussion. Or I was *both* right and wrong, and there is no perfect solution.”

In developer space, we say “release early, release often”, because only openness leads to success and to quality. Why didn’t you let us hear the discussions? Where is the mailing list where we could follow your opinions - plus those of your lead developers?

It’s all about trust in the free software world. There is nothing like “users”; forget about that term. A so-called “user” could be your best QA officer, or have the one idea that will earn you billions later.

So please tell us: where can we get the thoughts of Scott and David?

cheers,
wjl
http://wolfgang.lonien.de/
http://blog.thedebianuser.org/

You want to cut off everything that’s not firefox from the googlebucks.

You make up flimsy excuses about email not being important or the web exploding in 2005/6. The only thing exploding was your coffers maybe.

And now instead of 2 to 150 or so TB to FF devels we have 0.

Say hi to Larry and Sergeyi for us.

But you don’t have to look at Firefox. Just take a look at SeaMonkey or the Calendar project. Both were often pronounced dead in the last few years, but both have gained a large supporting community mainly because their front people actively communicate via blogs, forums, newsgroups or conferences.

That is a major item that needs to change in Thunderbird-land for it to gain more traction in the consumer and enterprise market

Great question. I agree that there’s a significant learning curve. I’m hoping that Scott and David and Mozilla will figure out a working relationship even if they’re no longer employees, that will make it worthwhile for them to continue to assist as they have for many years. In addition, there are other people who have contributed to the mailnews codebase over the years, several of whom seem interested in helping me (and via me, Thunderbird) out.

IMO that is the main reason why Firefox has attracted such a huge community with so many outside developers, testers and people spreading the word.

Therefore I for one applaud the decision of the Mozilla Foundation here and I really hope that David Ascher does a good job in selecting adequate developers with at least some communication skills.