Mozilla and Thunderbird are to divorce
Mozilla may separate from Thunderbird, its stand-alone e-mail client, the company’s CEO has disclosed.
In a posting to her blog Wednesday, CEO Mitchell Baker said that Mozilla’s first priority is, and will continue to be, its open-source browser, Firefox. “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,” said Baker.
Thunderbird’s community, which includes a large number of unpaid programmers, should be cut loose “to determine its own destiny,” she said.
The e-mail app, which was just updated to version 2.0.0.5 last week, is Mozilla’s answer to Microsoft Outlook and Entourage, and other stand-alone e-mailers such as Mail, which is bundled with Mac OS X. Like Firefox, it’s free to download, and comes in editions for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
A Choice of Fates
Baker laid out three possible fates for Thunderbird, including creating a new non-profit organization similar to the Mozilla Foundation to focus on the e-mail program; building a new subsidiary of the Foundation just for Thunderbird; and releasing Thunderbird into the wild as a community-only project. The latter was the path taken by SeaMonkey, the name for what was once called Mozilla Suite, when the latter was dropped by Mozilla in 2005.
“We don’t know the best answer yet,” Baker said. “And we don’t expect to without a broad public discussion and involvement.”
From the comments left on Baker’s blog, that discussion may not be polite.
“I see it as a bad idea for the Mozilla ecosystem as a whole,” said a user identified only as Dean. “Already there have been misgivings from some developers about the Foundation/Corporation’s dedication to Mozilla as a platform.”
“This is a crazy,” said another used, tagged as Benoit.
Some Backing
Others, however, backed Baker, and took up sides on which option would be the best for the e-mail program. Scott MacGregor and David Bienvenu, the Mozilla employees who lead Thunderbird development efforts, voted for option No. 3. “We believe, creating a separate independent company focused on the Thunderbird mission is the best way for us to take care of our users, while having the most flexibility to grow and support our mission,” said MacGregor in an entry at his own blog. “Our vision is to create an independent company responsible for developing future versions of Thunderbird.”
Although neither Baker or MacGregor mentioned Web-based mail in their missives, users weren’t as hesitant to blame the likes of Gmail, Windows Live Mail and other free online services for Thunderbird’s woes. One in particular put it succinctly: “I don’t know what I’ll be using in a couple of years but my safest bet would be some other Web mail application and not a desktop e-mail client,” said a user who called himself John Q Public.
Mitchell did not hint at a timetable for making a decision or when internal Thunderbird development and support would stop. Likewise, Mozilla did not comment on those issues or what, if any, impact Baker’s message will have on Thunderbird 3.0, a major update that until today presumably was still in the works.
Mozilla to push Thunderbird out of the nest
In a blog entry written yesterday, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker discusses plans to create a new organizational structure for Thunderbird so that Mozilla can focus exclusively on the Firefox web browser.
Thunderbird 2.0 flies the coop
Mozilla’s CEO is concerned that the organization can’t give Thunderbird the attention it needs without degrading its efforts to continue building and supporting the Firefox ecosystem. The top priority, Baker says, should be “delivering the web, mostly through browsing and related services.” What Thunderbird needs now, according to Baker, is “a separate organization focused on Thunderbird [that] will both be able to move independently and will need to do so to deepen community and user involvement.”
Mozilla wants to give the Thunderbird project more autonomy and create an independent organizational structure that is better equipped to the needs of the Thunderbird community. Baker hopes that placing the responsibility for managing Thunderbird in the hands of an independent body will create new potential for innovation and help the project achieve broader community involvement.
In order to facilitate public discussion, Baker articulates the benefits and challenges of three potential organizational models. Mozilla could create a nonprofit Thunderbird Foundation, establish a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation just for Thunderbird, or push Thunderbird back into the community and help the Thunderbird developers create their own independent services and consulting company.
Commercial software companies tend to broaden their focus and expand vertically into other markets as they grow, but Mozilla is moving in the other direction and increasingly embracing greater specialization. On the surface, Mozilla’s decision to spin-off Thunderbird as an independent project may seem counterintuitive, but when one takes a closer look at the community dynamics and the relationship between Firefox and Mozilla, the reasoning begins to make more sense. Mozilla—both the foundation and the corporation—exists to serve as a vehicle for moving development forward by coordinating the efforts of a globally dispersed community, and interfacing with other organizations and corporate entities that have a vested interest in empowering Mozilla to achieve its goals or leveraging the resulting technologies.
Baker recognizes that, despite considerable overlap in agenda and underlying technology, Thunderbird and Firefox both have their own distinct communities with very different needs. Nothing of tangible relevance is gained by maintaining both projects within the same organizational infrastructure, and nothing is lost by pushing Thunderbird out of the nest, especially since an independent Thunderbird would likely still have access to Mozilla’s considerable financial resources. Mozilla is already providing funding to other closely aligned external projects that are leveraging Mozilla technologies and there is nothing that would preclude similar provision of funding for Thunderbird.
Establishing a separate foundation or creating a Mozilla subsidiary for Thunderbird would increase the flexibility of both projects by allowing them to each focus on their own agendas, operate in a manner most conducive to their own individual growth, and establish their own partnerships with external organizations. Mozilla has ensured a sufficient level of transparency in the process of organizational transition by starting the debate out in the open and involving the community. I think we can look forward to seeing exciting new opportunities for Thunderbird emerge as it becomes independent and flies out of the nest.
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