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Mozilla Weighs Options for Thunderbird

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

July 26, 2007, 5:07 PM

Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker suggested Thursday that its Thunderbird e-mail client be spun off, but is soliciting the opinions of users before making any final decision.

Baker said in her blog that Thunderbird is being "dwarfed by the enormous energy and community focused on the web, Firefox and the ecosystem around it." By spinning it off, she believes that the project would allow the application to thrive.

Firefox will be the Foundation's priority for the foreseeable future, meaning Thunderbird may not have the chance to flourish under the current company setup.

"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," Baker wrote. "We're not yet sure what this organization will look like. We've thought about a few different options."

The first option would be for Thunderbird to become a non-profit organization in and of itself, much like the Mozilla Foundation. The problem with this is that it would be the most complex move, and would likely in the short term hurt the project.

Another option would be to place Thunderbird as a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. This is much like the first option, but it would require less organizational structure due to the fact that the Mozilla foundation and board would still oversee the project.

"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," Baker added. "The Thunderbird effort may therefore still end up with less focus and less flexibility."

A final option calls for the project to be released as a community project, much like SeaMonkey currently is. However, Baker said that still poses several problems on how to create the organizational structure to remain non-profit.

Some were upset that the Mozilla Foundation seemed to be leaving Thunderbird behind, but understood the focus on Firefox. "Sad to see the 110 focus on Firefox. But if that's what it takes to beat Internet Explorer then we got to make that decision," developer Henrik Gemal wrote.

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By AntiochMedia

edited Jul 31, 2007 - 1:36 AM

E-mail Clients are quite useful when they are being used to sync with PDAs and include a Calendar App (Lightning) -- and I see Thunderbird as being the only real competition to Outlook - thus I see it being an extremely important project.

I like Mozilla being Firefox + Thunderbird and think that to separate the two would be a bad branding move. I support option #2 - set it up as a subsidiary.

If Thunderbird was to be spun off as a separate organization ... I'd see this having to do with a joint venture from Qualcomm after the announcement of Eudora becoming merely a compile of Thunderbird... [shrugs] - Qualcomm's corporate backing could go far ... although I like the reputation of Mozilla being strongly behind the product alongside Firefox.

Score: 0

By Aires

posted Jul 28, 2007 - 5:17 AM

The trick would be to integrate a slimmed down Thunderbird into Firefox. If it was part of Firefox I would probably use it. But the fact is that most of my e-mail is web based.

Score: 0

By Metshrine

posted Jul 30, 2007 - 8:06 AM

But wouldnt that defeat the purpose of having firefox? I thought firefox was created because not everyone wanted their email client included in their browser as was the case with the mozilla suite.

Score: 0

By jgra

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 12:28 PM

Email Clients are Pointless, now that we have Gmail and the like, now we only need Google Gears to make gmail work offline and all the problems of the world will be solved.

Score: 0

By JeremyGNJ

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 8:52 AM

Wow, Mozilla is really stupid. They're completely betting on Firefox to be their entire business. Dumb, dumb dumb-dumb...DUMB

Of course I guess they are saying "wow we had all these years to do something with Thunderbird and it's not much better than the other crapware our there, we best get rid of it".

Score: 0

By pitdingo

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 9:59 AM

I believe Mozilla is a non-profit, so earning big $$$'s is not their #1 goal.

Score: 0

By uberfly

posted Jul 28, 2007 - 1:20 AM

This is far from the truth. If you look into their deal with companies like Google, you'll quickly see that $$$ IS their #1 motivator. Not that it's a negative, but don't buy into the open source for the common good bit. Maybe it starts that way, but all the open source branches that have met with success are now big business. It's the Darwinist natural order of things in the end.

Score: 0

By JeremyGNJ

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 11:24 AM

Non-profit does not mean "dont make money", it means that the COMPANY makes no money. The employees can still be paid hefty salaries, and bonuses.

Score: 0

By pitdingo

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 2:18 PM

I did not say they did not want to make money. I said making big $$$ is not their largest motivator. There are no greedy shareholders pushing for ever increasing profits and expansion.

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 11:43 AM

...and have *really* nice hardware to work on.

I worked for a non-profit back when I was still a young-gun and I gotta admit it was probably one of the nicest places I've ever worked. Always had the latest hardware, great pay, exellent benefits.

Management was a bunch of pansies, but you can never have it all, eh?

Score: 0

By Stingray57

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 8:32 AM

I wish they would take Thunderbird and OpenOffice, develop it more and put it head to head with MS Office, as a complete suite of office products.

I stopped using Outlook a while back, now I only use OO, Thunderbird and Firefox. OO gives me the basic functions that I need to do and I have no complaints. FF and Thunderbird allows me to do what I want to do, how I want to do it.

But saying that, I want Thunderbird to be the Outlook killer. I want Thunderbird developed to integrate the functions of Sunbird to the point Outlook is ridiculous to buy.

If your going to knock Microsoft out, your going to need a heavy punch.

Clearly the opportunity is there.

Score: 0

By frankwick

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 10:29 AM

I actually STARTED using Outlook again with version 2003. Outlook 2007 is perhaps the best email UI ever (if you're connecting to an Exchange server). It is major overkill if you simply have a POP account.

I seriously doubt that Thunderbird is going to be an Outlook killer. I think the real target for Thunderbird should be the MS POP client -- Windows Live Mail. WLM is in beta, but it is a solid offering meant to replace Outlook Express and Windows Mail. It would be interesting to see a head-to-head comparison of TB and WLM. TB touts their biggest advantage is junk mail filtering. However, I think WLM has the same rule set as Outlook 2007. These rules do an excellent job detecting junk, but you have to keep it updated every month.

Score: 0

By mjm01010101

posted Jul 29, 2007 - 12:50 AM

I use outlook for corp client, gmail for personal, and thunderbird for newsgroup. I'm not particularly attached to any of them. I could live without outlook, although the contact/calendar/mobile access via pocketpc is so essential to how I work I can't imagine another way of working without it. I'm sure google will think of a way.

I'm sick of Microsoft and Office, but it pays the bills, so I stick with it.

Score: 0

By yokozuna

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 3:57 AM

Do not get me wrong but maybe it is better. I use Thunderbird (I do not use FF though, I use Opera and K-Meleon) and I think that something is wrong with Mozilla Corp. When I see SeaMonkey or K-Meleon I have to say that the products are far more user friendly in that sense that the comunity is far more responsible and willing to help. I think that Mozilla Corp. - as any other corporation - is concentrating on making business, not necessarily the satisfaction of individual customers. Therefore one can observe "the numerology" that the number of versions go higher and higher without any correlation to the quality of code (Netscape also suffered from it), ignoring some long existing bugs, adding features that look nice but are not really useful, etc.
SeaMonkey is developed by community and I think that the quality of code and user friendliness is higher than in FF.

PS BTW, the same illness has touched OpenOffice.org lately. About v. 2.3 that will come in two months: "The most exciting enhancement in Writer may be that Writer now centers documents in their view". Oh, and in 2.2 it was "kerning enabled". C'mon!

Score: 0

By DonGato

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 1:03 AM

I have no complains with current development. You always have extensions to extend features or change functionality.

I agree some features are missing but would be nice to have. In any case they are not that important IMO. Every day I convince a new user to switch from bloated clients like Outlook. And they never look back.

Score: 0

By crashoverride

posted Jul 26, 2007 - 8:05 PM

I say spin it off as a separate non-profit. If it stays with in or becomes a subsidiary of the Mozilla foundation Thunderbird clearly isn't going to get the attention it needs and if it becomes a community project lord knows what will become of it. Sure they release Seamonkey to the community but it was already a mature piece of software. Thunderbird is fairly stable and has some great features but is far from being mature.

Score: 0

By RandySinclair

posted Jul 26, 2007 - 7:25 PM

The T Bird is a great program, stable and functions well on the platform... likewise does
the Great Fire Fox. Keep 'em on board and just make 'em better! - "Fan of the Bird & Fox"

Score: 0

By iamtux

posted Jul 26, 2007 - 6:35 PM

I wouldn't mind a spin off if Tbird was taken care of and started to get more momentum like FF. I'm not too thrilled about the idea of it becoming the next Seamonkey though.

Score: 0

By wataru

edited Jul 26, 2007 - 5:46 PM

So how can you do a whole article on the future of Thunderbird without once mentioning the Penelope project, which is seeking to merge T-bird and Eudora?

Score: 0

By iamtux

posted Jul 26, 2007 - 6:36 PM

Because Eudora sucks, plain and simple.

Score: 0

By cupsdell

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 1:40 AM

If that is you opinion, fine, and I'm glad that there are other email programs which better meet your needs.

I, however, will continue to use Eudora, because it has features I need which TB does not have. I will not switch until Penelope is released, stable, and meets my needs.

Score: 0

By wataru

posted Jul 26, 2007 - 7:23 PM

Let me see if I can frame iamtux's comment just a bit.

Eudora is a seriously bloated program with a large following, some excellent features and some important functional lacks.

Thunderbird is a seriously bloated program with a large following, some excellent features and some important functional lacks.

Penelope seeks to combine the two, but in the past year or so has failed to address how it will deal with the features both programs are missing, or how it will fix their weaknesses.

But don't you think this project deserves some mention in an article about the future of Thunderbird?

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jul 27, 2007 - 9:13 AM

Meh...

Penelope would basically be a fork or separate product. Their not talking about derivatives, their talking about the actual product.

Score: 0

By guru_v

posted Jul 26, 2007 - 5:26 PM

Mr Gemal's comments seem totally inane.

Firefox is already well ahead of IE. The work that is done on Firefox will not get them to 100% usage, no matter what they do. Some will always stick with what is included with the OS.

The second thing I am very amazed by is that I believed that there were ALREADY separate efforts underway. This does show why the changes from Tbird 1.5 to 2.0 made it such a buggy piece that I no longer run it.

And what about Penelope? This was to be the melding of Thunderbird and Eudora. Can't they make up their minds?

Score: 0

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