Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond to my mail/Thunderbird posts. (Well, to almost everyone anyway.) We’re assimilating those comments now. After speaking at some length with the lead Thunderbird developers (Scott and David) here’s what we’ve assimilated so far.
- Great interest in seeing Thunderbird move forward. Both in terms of a healthy existence, and in terms of development of new features.
- Option 1 of my initial post — a separate Thunderbird and /or mail Foundation didn’t generate much interest. This option requires a significant number of people deeply interested in the organization and administration of the effort; running a Foundation is work. This option is at the end of the list now.
- There’s a fair amount of desire for things to stay the same. That desire is not shared by Scott, David, the Foundation or the Corporation.
- There is some interest in Option 3, where the developers would form a independent company themselves to make the Thunderbird product based on the code in the Mozilla mail project.
- There’s also a lot of interest in seeing Thunderbird remain part of the Mozilla Foundation as a product. It will stay as a Foundation project whether we take Option 2 or Option 3. In either case the code stays in the Mozilla world under Mozilla policies. The open question is what group takes that code, makes the Thunderbird product from it, releases and supports that product.
Next Steps:
Scott, David and I are working on describing in more detail what Options 2 and 3 would look like; what would be needed, but the unresolved issues are, etc. We hope to get some more information posted shortly.