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Comment by BasDirks | Hacker News Reader

"To be more specific, Mozilla will no longer focus on developing innovations for Thunderbird but will keep it safe and stable."

I am quite content with Thunderbird as it is and welcome this news.

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Happy to heard this, people working into extendible software should work into core apis and let the community build the rest. I was with very little hope when I saw the thread title. Thunderbid is the last application on wich I want a change. I was/am a Firefox fan, but I'm currently using chrome all day..

I think the chat integration is the last remaining puzzle piece. If thunderbird had builtin chat and builtin gpg support I'd be content. I have never understood why smime was baked in but gpg was not. Enigmail should not need to exist and unlike any other ff/tb plugins it used to be a pain with amd64...

Now that you mention it, yes builtin gpg support would be the last thing that I would like to see in it before they put it into maintenance mode.

What about better Caldav support and Implementation of the Carddav ?

Chat Integration, who cares when you don't even have a decent addressbook integration?

Enigmail works great here. I don't really see a need to bring it mainline, perhaps other than encouraging adoption. I use 64-bit and have used Enigmail for 3+ years without issue now -- I think it's probably safe at this point, especially if you can install from your package manager (as I can with an AUR helper on Arch).

"Enigmail works great here" that's good to know I never said it did not. We can agree to disagree about it being in mainline and receiving the same attention and support as the rest of thunderbird. I don't think your "+3 years" have really exposed you to all the growing pains enigmail has had.

I agree, Enigmail has been around longer than I've actively used it (for the record, I had installed it occasionally before, but hardly used it). The point I was making is that it seems to be stable and mature software now, and that maturity has existed for a reasonably long time. Surely there's not much point in holding a grudge against software with a buggy past; that'd severely limit the pool of available software...

So couldn't they have avoided all this by saying it's going into "maintenance mode" or something? Software development history is full of packages that have fallen into bugfix-only status. Sheesh, what a lot of drama.

Thunderbird being open source, it can continue to thrive. Anybody can contribute. That's more than just maintenance mode.

How many of the active thunderbiord developers are not mozilla funded? I do not know, but it was my understanding that there were not many.

This doesn't mean those developers won't contribute to Thunderbird in their own free time as a hobby project. It also doesn't mean that an outsider interested in the project can't see an opportunity to pick up the torch.

Thunderbird is a very widely used piece of software without many adequate competitors and I think there will be plenty of people interested in tinkering with its code for a long time to come.

That's pretty much what the original announcement did say, if you go beyond the headlines and read the announcement itself: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/06/so-thats-it-for-thunderbird...

There are decades of understandable ways to describe what is going on here, and they didn't use any of them.

Note that the email was intended as an internal (and confidential) heads-up to Mozilla contributors, not as a press release. And I'm not sure how "ongoing security and stability maintenance" is harder to understand than "maintenance mode."

Sure, and I agree, but it was buried in a whole bunch of really bad Business Writing(tm):

However, Thunderbird is one of the very few truly free and open source multi-platform email applications available today and we want to defend these values. We’re not “stopping” Thunderbird, but proposing we adapt the Thunderbird release and governance model in a way that allows both ongoing security and stability maintenance, as well as community-driven innovation and development for the product. This will mean an eventual shift in how we staff Thunderbird at Mozilla Corporation – we are still working out details, but some people will likely end up on other Mozilla projects.

That sounds reasonable to me as an internal email. Basically, they're saying that Mozilla is going to stop active feature development and assume a role as a corporate BFDL (hence "community-driven innovation", i.e., "we may merge new stuff sometimes, but will mostly likely not be writing it"), and expect new people on your product's team soon.

I'm not sure what you're giving them a pass for here, why wouldn't an internal email be more clear?

I don't believe this was an "internal" email at all. It was sent out on a Friday, they knew it would get out. We were the intended audience.

>I'm not sure what you're giving them a pass for here, why wouldn't an internal email be more clear?

The mail seemed entirely clear to me. I think it was just not written in language suitable to non-technical people. I believe most people involved with OSS would recognize this shift into a community maintainer / BFDL as typical and non-threatening.

A "tech journalist" misinterpreted the letter as meaningless corpo-speak since he didn't understand the context or the real-life relevance of its content, and that's what sparked this whole thing about Thunderbird becoming dead. I don't believe it was meant to get spread in that way even if the execs thought some leakage would occur.

Agreed. Reliability is extremely important with email programs, so I prefer this class of software be very conservative.

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