14 DAY TRIAL // With Firefox falling in browser market share statistics, Mozilla is looking for a way to spin off Thunderbird development and have someone else take it off its hands.
The organization's plans have been neatly laid out on one of Mozilla's Google Groups threads by Mitchell Baker, Executive Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation.
Thunderbird, one of the most used open source email clients around, was created in 2004 and was unofficially left for dead in 2012, when Mozilla developers stopped adding new features and only provided security fixes.
Mrs. Baker explains that most of the Mozilla staff assigned to Thunderbird have been primarily working on keeping Thunderbird updated to the latest changes in Firefox and Mozilla's systems and technologies.
For this reason, she and other executives feel that it’s time for Thunderbird to be spun off into its own standalone project.
Mozilla wants to focus on Firefox
"Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact," Mrs. Baker notes. "With all due respect to Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential."
"Given this, it’s clear to me that sooner or later paying a tax to support Thunderbird will not make sense as a policy for Mozilla," she concluded. You can read Mrs. Baker's full message below this article.
If Mrs. Baker has her way, the Thunderbird project should be taken over and managed by the open source and the Thunderbird communities.
In the past, when Adobe wanted to ditch Flex, the Apache Foundation stepped in to rescue the project. The same thing happened with the Groovy programming language this year, and my intuition is that the Apache Foundation is the most likely candidate to take over Thunderbird development.