Mozilla

Posts Tagged with “Thunderbird”

Thunderbird — Google question

July 26th, 2007

The first theme in the comments to the Thunderbird and mail post I want to address is the idea that this decision is somehow related to Google, Google products or Google revenue. I want to be as clear as possible about the complete lack of Google involvement.

I have no idea if Google thinks the Thunderbird announcement is a good idea, bad idea, irrelevant or if they even know of it.

To be more specific:

  • Google and Google products had nothing to do with this decision.
  • We did not ask Google about Thunderbird product planning, Thunderbird revenue, gmail product planning or gmail revenue.
  • We did not ask Google’s opinion.
  • Google’s plans for gmail — whatever they are, and they are unknown to me — are irrelevant to this decision.

Thunderbird Discussion

July 26th, 2007

There is a lot of content in the comments to my Thunderbird and email post. I’m going to try to respond to general themes, although not every post specifically. I’m going to start by addressing the themes in separate messages; I think that will make it easier to get to clarity.

The themes I see so far are:

  1. Google is involved somehow.
  2. Thunderbird and the Mozilla mission.
  3. Feature thoughts about Thunderbird.
  4. Why can’t Thunderbird and Firefox both prosper inside the Mozilla Corporation?
  5. Is Mozilla exclusively focused on Firefox?
  6. Revenue is the determining factor.

There may be other themes that appear or that I’ve missed with this first pass. Or two may show up as part of the same message, I’m not sure yet since I haven’t written them. But these are the topics I know now that I want to address.

Email Call to Action

July 25th, 2007

Do you think email is important part of Internet life? Are you interested in seeing something interesting and exciting happen in the mail space? Believe that Thunderbird provides a much-needed option for open source email alternatives and want to see it get more attention on its own? Long to see something more innovative than Thunderbird in the mail space happen?

So does Mozilla.

Are you someone who could contribute to such an effort? Do you have expertise and a desire to be involved in an innovative mail effort and/or a focused Thunderbird effort? If so, Mozilla would like to hear from you.

Thunderbird

Mozilla has been supporting Thunderbird as a product since the beginning of the Foundation. The result is a good, solid product that provides an open alternative for desktop mail. However, the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn’t focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus — delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services — is the correct priority. At the same time, the Thunderbird team is extremely dedicated and competent, and we all want to see them do as much as possible with Thunderbird.

We have concluded that we should find a new, separate organizational setting for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.

Mozilla is exploring the options for an organization specifically focused on serving Thunderbird users. A separate organization focused on Thunderbird will both be able to move independently and will need to do so to deepen community and user involvement. We’re not yet sure what this organization will look like. We’ve thought about a few different options. I’ve described them below. If you’ve got a different idea please let us know.

Option 1: Create a new non-profit organization analogous to the Mozilla Foundation — a Thunderbird foundation. If it turns out Thunderbird generates a revenue model from the product as Firefox does, then a Thunderbird foundation could follow the Mozilla Foundation model and create a subsidiary.

This model probably offers the maximum independence for Thunderbird. But it is also the most organizationally complex. There is lots of overhead to create a new foundation, find good board members, recreate the administrative load. When we started the Mozilla Foundation Mitch Kapor, our-then business development lead and I spent a bunch of time on this work. The current Thunderbird developers don’t have this level of business assistance. If there is revenue that requires a subsidiary then the overhead goes up even further. There is serious concern that this will detract from serving Thunderbird users, since the core Thunderbird team is small and developer-focused.

Option 2: Create a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation for Thunderbird. This has less overhead, although it still requires a new company that serves the mission of the Mozilla Foundation. In this case the Mozilla Foundation board and personnel would remain involved in Thunderbird. Thunderbird would continue to need to be balanced and prioritized with Mozilla’s focus on delivering the web through Firefox, its ecosystem and the Open Web as the platform. The Thunderbird effort may therefore still end up with less focus and less flexibility.

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. Many open source projects use this model, it could be simpler and more effective than a Mozilla Foundation subsidiary. However, creating this as a non-profit would be extremely difficult. Running a services company as an independent taxable company is the simplest operational answer. We would need to figure out how such a company relates to the Thunderbird product itself. What’s the best way for such a company to release a product? How does that relate to the community project that stays within Mozilla?

We don’t know the best answer yet. And we don’t expect to without a broad public discussion and involvement, which we hope this message will trigger. Today someone suggested to me that perhaps there is another foundation that might be a good home for Thunderbird. I hadn’t thought of this; it’s a creative idea.

If you’ve got thoughts or — even better — want to get involved, please let us know. Some suggestions for making sure Mozilla is aware of your comments are at the end of this post.

Broader Mail Initiative

We would also like to find contributors committed to creating and implementing a new vision of mail. We would like to have a roadmap that brings wild innovation, increasing richness and fundamental improvements to mail. And equally importantly, we would like to find people with relevant expertise who would join with Mozilla to make something happen.

If we can see a path to an innovative mail initiative in addition to supporting existing Thunderbird users, then we are interested in doing so. If we find the best way to improve mail is incremental development of Thunderbird as already planned, then we’ve learned something extremely valuable as well.

Mozilla has a range of resources — funds, code, etc. — that can be applied to this problem. We’re looking for people with expertise, vision and leadership capabilities. If you are such a person, or know of such people, please let us know.

Discussion

If you’re interested in these topics, let us know. The web is great at distributed discussions, let’s see what we think about mail. I’ll moderate comments and trackbacks here quickly. If you want to make absolutely sure that Mozilla can find your thoughts easily, feel free to leave a pointer to them here. There’s also a page for each discussion on the Mozillla wiki, although they require you to log-in to edit. So if you have a Mozilla wiki account or are willing to create one, you can find these pages at the locations below. Go to the “Discussion” tab at the top to add your thoughts or pointers back to your posts.

Thunderbird
Mail Initiative

The Future of Email

July 23rd, 2007

Do you think email is important part of Internet life? Are you interested in seeing something interesting and exciting happen in the mail space? Believe that Thunderbird provides a much-needed option for open source email alternatives and want to see it get more attention on its own? Long to see something more innovative than Thunderbird in the mail space happen?

So does Mozilla.

Are you someone who could contribute to such an effort? Do you have expertise and a desire to be involved in an innovative mail effort and/or a focused Thunderbird effort? If so, Mozilla would like to hear from you.

Thunderbird

Mozilla has been supporting Thunderbird as a product since the beginning of the Foundation. The result is a good, solid product that provides an open alternative for desktop mail. However, the Thunderbird effort is dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it. As a result, Mozilla doesn’t support Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future. We are convinced that our current focus -– delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services -– is the correct priority. At the same time, the Thunderbird team is extremely dedicated and competent, and we all want to see them do as much as possible with Thunderbird.

We have concluded that we should find a new organizational approach for Thunderbird; one that allows the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny.

Mozilla is exploring the options for an organization specifically focused on serving Thunderbird users. A separate organization focused on Thunderbird will both be able to move independently and will need to do so to deepen community and user involvement. We’re not yet sure what this organization will look like. We’ve thought about a new Mozilla Foundation subsidiary. We’ve thought about a setting where Thunderbird is released as a community project much like SeaMonkey, and a small services and consulting company is formed by the Thunderbird developers to continue development and care for Thunderbird users. Many open source projects use this model, it could be simpler and more effective than a Mozilla Foundation subsidiary.

We don’t know the best answer yet. And we don’t expect to without a broad public discussion, which we hope this message will trigger. Some suggestions for making sure Mozilla is aware of your comments are at the end of this post.

Broader Mail Initiative

We would also like to find contributors committed to creating and implementing a new vision of mail. We would like to have a roadmap that brings wild innovation, increasing richness and fundamental improvements to the mail. And equally importantly, we would like to find people with relevant expertise who would join with Mozilla to make something happen.

If we can see a path to an innovative mail initiative in addition to supporting existing Thunderbird users, then we are interested in doing so. If we find the best way to improve mail is incremental development of Thunderbird as already planned, then we’ve learned something extremely valuable as well.

Mozilla has a range of resources -– funds, code, etc. — that can be applied to this problem. We’re looking for people with expertise, vision and leadership capabilities. If you are such a person, or know of such people, please let us know.

Discussion

If you’re interested in these topics, let us know. The web is great at distributed discussions, let’s see what we think about mail. Post trackbacks to your blog posts here; I’ll moderate them in quickly. If you want to make absolutely sure that Mozilla can find your stuff easily, feel free to head to the wiki and list yourself and the location of your comments. Or leave your comments on the wiki.

Welcome Thunderbird 2!

April 18th, 2007

Today the email experience for millions of people gets even better. Mozilla’s prize-winning Thunderbird email client celebrates the release of Thunderbird 2 today.

New features. Improved security and privacy. Open Source. Available in more than 30 languages thanks to the efforts of our amazing localization communities. Personalizable. Customizable with extensions. Access to web mail services.

Thunderbird 2 has arrived. Try improving your email experience today!

Time flies when you’re having fun

July 14th, 2004

It’s already been a year since the Mozilla Foundation was created, and it’s been quite a year. The Mozilla Foundation has prospered, our products are receiving rave reviews, consumer and enterprise interest in Mozilla products is at an all time high, the awareness of the importance of choice in browser software is growing and our community remains vigorous and energetic.

The Mozilla project has long been an open source technology leader. With our new Firefox and Thunderbird products, we are now focusing on bringing a better Internet experience to millions of new users.

There have been many highlights for the Mozilla Foundation this year:

  • We’ve built a potent development team to lead continued innovation. Our small team is built entirely of veterans with many years of experience in the Mozilla project.
  • We turned our attention to the end user for the first time, after years of being solely a technology project. The result: Firefox (for browsing) and Thunderbird (for email). 1.0 launches for both products are now just a few months away. To help end users we’ve started offering CDs (we ship more than 5000 CDs for every new release!), telephone support and Mozilla wares (our new tshirts are proving to be a big hit). With help from David Shea and others, we’ve also given our web site a make-over.
  • Our friends in Europe have created Mozilla Europe, a non-profit organization that’s working to promote Mozilla throughout the continent. Similar efforts are now underway in other parts of the world.
  • We continue to innovate. Just a few weeks ago, the Mozilla Foundation spearheaded an announcement with Macromedia, Apple, Opera, Sun Microsystems and Adobe to deliver a richer plugin experience. Mozilla engineers are active participants in the WHAT Working Group, a collaborative effort with Opera and Apple engineers to bring innovation to web forms and other parts of the web.
  • US CERT, a division of the US Department of Homeland Security, recently recommended that Internet Explorer users switch to a different browser to avoid recent dangerous security exploits affecting IE. Secunia, a leading third party security firm, also recommends using another browser.

The results?

  • 5.5 million downloads of Mozilla products in the last 30 days, including over 3 million downloads of Mozilla Firefox. That’s close to 200,000 downloads a day for the last 30 days.
  • More than 300 million page views on our web site for the year. This month alone, an estimated 10 million visitors have come to mozilla.org – and we’re just halfway into the month.
  • Amazing buzz for Firefox, with more than 20,000 web sites linking to the Firefox product page!

Most importantly, the tide is finally beginning to turn: after years of increasing monopolization of the web browser market, Mozilla-based browsers (browsers based on the Gecko rendering engine, that is) are now gaining modest but noticeable market share. Both Web Side Story and OneStat.com, leading web analytics firms, confirm this trend.

All of this terrific news wouldn’t have been possible without help from lots of individuals and organizations. The Mozilla Foundation is a small organization (just a dozen people), but we have lots of friends and contributors:

  • Financial assistance from AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Mitch Kapor allowed us to launch the Foundation.
  • IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat and others employ dozens of engineers who dedicate their full time energy to the Mozilla Foundation.
  • MozillaZine has become a lively hub for Mozilla news, community feedback and end user support.
  • MozDev is home to hundreds of extensions and other projects that keep Mozilla on the leading edge.
  • Close to 4000 individuals have donated almost $10,000 per month to the Mozilla Foundation.
  • The Visual Identity Team has done an amazing job on the Firefox and Thunderbird logos and default themes – and they’re not done yet!
  • A consortium of universities, lead by Oregon State University, is providing server infrastructure helping meet bandwith requirements for our significant (and growing) downloads.
  • MozSource, the company that operates the Mozilla Store, ships thousands of CDs and Mozilla merchandise every month, processes a good chunk of the donations coming to the Mozilla Foundation, and is now sponsoring SilverOrange to improve the Mozilla web site. SilverOrange is also doing a lot of this work on a volunteer basis.
  • Most importantly: the thousands of hackers and testers who participate in producing great software.

What’s next? Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0 — just around the corner. But don’t wait. Download the preview releases today and help spread the word. And if you prefer to go with a proven, mature Internet suite that’s been around for years, make sure to download Mozilla 1.7.

Help us take back the web!

– The Mozilla Team

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