Two mozilla thunderbird developers call it quits - leave Mozilla Corp

[Josh]

It is official, 12OCT2007 will be the last day for employee's Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu at Mozilla Corporation. Both of these employee's are the two lead developers for the thunderbird project. What does this mean for the project's future?

[tinjaw]

You can get some background on this on Om Malik's blog.

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[Ralf Maximus]

I read the whole article and about 2/3 of the comments.  I must say, I'm a bit confused as to what Mozilla is doing.  Spinning off a product is usually a tactic utilized when the product in question doesn't fit in with the rest of the company's direction.  OR when there are political back-stories that drive people apart.  OR ownership/legal issues.

Does any/all of that apply here?

I ditched Outlook for Thunderbird about two years ago and am very pleased with the software, but a bit dismayed at the length of time between build releases.  Will this change under new management?

Then I get a grip and tell myself: IT'S FREE SOFTWARE.  They gave it to me for FREE.  As in "less than cheap".  If they refunded my money I'd get NOTHING.  If they never released another version EVER I've already gotten 100 million billion kajillion times my money's worth times infinity.

On the other hand, I can see this evolving into a free/premium kind of thing where actual money will change hands for a "premimum" edition.  What I use now (or its younger brother) will remain sort of like what I have now.

But then... then comes Thunderbird Deluxe!  [cue rampaging elephants]

They will pump it so full of so-called features and artery-clogging stupidity no one will want anything BUT the "lite" version.  Yes, I am looking at you, WinAmp.

So... anyone knows how this is gonna pan out?

[Laughing Man]

It could also do with Mozilla's acquisition of Eudora.

Though I like TB alot, it's going be a pain funnelling all my emails without the webmail extension (I use webmail extension to get hotmail and yahoo without pop3).

[tinjaw]

I don't think Mozilla acquired Eudora, not in the sense of one company buying another. Yes, Mozilla is a company, but Eudora is morphing into a uber-extension to run inside Thunderbird.

For some more on this "breaking news story" 

david ascher - » Open letter to the Thunderbird community
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[Ralf Maximus]

Hmmmm.  Random thoughts:

1. Uh oh.  He's talking about "synergy".  My experience has been that people who throw that word around are trying to get oxen to mate with polar bears.

2. In the same message user feedback is requested to help improve the product.  Again, my experience has been that when Management says these kinds of things they're trying to buy time because they don't know what to do yet.  User feedback?  I bet they have megabytes of it sitting around in BugZilla feature requests.

3. I foresee two "versions" of Thunderbird in the middle future, forked from the current TB code.  One will be the officially sanctioned edition (bugs and all), the other will be radically improved, with even more high-power bugs.  Both will do essentially the same thing.

4. Eventually, one version will evolve into an all-seeing, all-knowing clone of GroupWise and become completely unusable.

5. Ralf's head will explode from cynicism-gland overload.