Re: Thunderbird, the future, mozilla-central and comm-central

[Mitchell Baker]

Hi Benjamin And yes, we want to see a good setting.  Both Mark and i are among the dedicated Thunderbird user group, and I use Thunderbird to organize vast parts of my life.   When I say that Thunderbird and Firefox must disentangle, it's not because I don't value Thunderbird.  I value it both as an open source project and because i personally rely on Thunderbird to be productive. There is currently a community driven governance structure, through the Thunderbird Council.   We'll be working with the Council. Mitchell On 11/30/15 7:45 PM, Benjamin Kerensa wrote: I think this is rather disappointing and wish Mozilla would continue to support Thunderbird as a Mozilla community-driven project. Thunderbird has continued to grow[1] despite Mozilla removing paid staff from its development and eliminating resources it had. (Actually has more users than Firefox OS) I think there are alternatives to the current infrastructure and build situations that are taxing that would allow Thunderbird to continue on as a Mozilla community-led project but it seems like that is not open for discussion. That said, if Thunderbird is to become a separate project I do hope you and Mark will consider giving Thunderbird a generous financial parting grant to help it transition and continue to thrive, also ensure good protections are in place to protect the Mozilla Thunderbird brand and trademark, and that a good governance structure is proposed for any independent Thunderbird that results. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/02/thunderbird-usage-continues-to-grow/ On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 1:11 PM, Mitchell Baker <mitch...@mozilla.com> wrote: This is a long-ish message. It covers general topics about Thunderbird and the future, and also the topics of the Foundation involvement (point 9) and the question of merging repositories (point 11).   Naturally, I believe it’s worth the time to read through the end. 1. Firefox and Thunderbird have lived with competing demands for some time now. Today Thunderbird developers spend much of their time responding to changes made in core Mozilla systems and technologies. At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to pay a tax to support Thunderbird. 2. These competing demands are not good for either project. Engineers working on Thunderbird must focus on keeping up and adapting Firefox’s web-driven changes. Engineers working on Firefox and related projects end up considering the competing demands of Thunderbird, and/or wondering if and how much they should assist Thunderbird. Neither project can focus wholeheartedly on what is best for it. 3. These competing demands will not get better soon. Instead, they are very likely to get worse. Firefox and related projects are now speeding up the rate of change, modernizing our development process and our infrastructure. Indeed, this is required for Mozilla to have significant impact in the current computing environment. 4. There is a belief among some that living with these competing demands is good for the Mozilla project as a whole, because it gives us an additional focus, assists Thunderbird as a dedicated open source community, and also supports an open source standards based email client. This sentiment is appealing, and I share it to some extent. There is also a sense that caring for fellow open source developers is good, which I also share.  However, point 2 above — “Neither project can focus wholeheartedly on what is best for it” -- is the most important point. Having Thunderbird has an additional product and focus is *not* good overall if it causes all of our products — Firefox, other web-driven products and Thunderbird — to fall short of what we can accomplish. 5.  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.    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. 6.  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.    I know many believe this time came a while back, and I’ve been slow to say this clearly.  And of course, some feel that this time should never come.  However, as I say, it’s clear to me today that continuing to live with these competing demands given our focus on industry impact is increasingly unstable.  We’ve seen this already, in an unstructured way, as various groups inside Mozilla stop supporting Thunderbird.  The accelerating speed of Firefox and infrastructure changes -- which I welcome wholeheartedly -- will emphasize this. 7.  Some Mozillians are eager to see Mozilla support community-managed projects within our main development efforts.  I am also sympathetic to this view, with a key precondition.  Community-managed projects that make the main effort less nimble and likely to succeed don’t fit very well into this category for me.  They can still be great open source projects -- this is a separate question from whether the fit in our main development systems.  I feel so strongly about this because I am so concerned that “the Web” we  love is at risk.  If we want the traits of the Web to live and prosper in the world of mobile, social and data then we have to be laser-focused on this. 8.  Therefore I believe Thunderbird should would thrive best by separating itself from reliance on Mozilla development systems and in some cases, Mozilla technology. The current setting isn’t stable, and we should start actively looking into how we can transition in an orderly way to a future where Thunderbird and Firefox are un-coupled.   I don’t know what this will look like, or how it will work yet. I do know that it needs to happen, for both Firefox and Thunderbird’s sake.  This is a big job, and may require expertise that the Thunderbird team doesn’t yet have.    Mozilla can provide various forms of assistance to the Thunderbird team via a set of the Mozilla Foundation’s capabilities. 9. Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation and I are both interested in helping find a way for Thunderbird to separate from Mozilla infrastructure. We also want to make sure that Thunderbird has the right kind of legal and financial home, one that will help the community thrive. Mark has been talking with the Thunderbird leadership about this, and has offered some of his time and focus and resources to assist. He will detail that offer in a separate message. We both recognize that the Thunderbird community is dedicated to sustaining a vibrant open source project, which is why we’re currently looking at how best to assist with both technical separation and identifying the right long-term home for Thunderbird.  These discussions are very early, so it’s easy to you can definitely think of a lot of questions for which there are’s no answers yet. 10. The fact that the Foundation is facilitating these discussions does not necessarily mean that the Foundation is or is not the best legal and financial home for Thunderbird. The intent is not to make technical decisions about support of Thunderbird by Mozilla employees, or merging repositories, etc. Point 6 above is the shared organizing principle for both of us. 11. I understand from recent discussions that merging mozilla-central and comm-central would provide some reduction of effort required to ship Thunderbird, at least in the short term. This would make sense if our path was long term integration of the projects.  As i noted above, I believe our path has to be the long term separation of these projects, so that each can move as fast as possible into new things. Given that, I’m not sure that merging them makes sense. I have to learn a bit more about the cost / benefit analysis of merging repositories given the need to separate these project. I’m asking the platform and release folks to comment on this. 12.  This message is about the future and there’s a lot to work out. It’s explicitly not to announce changes in daily activities at this point.  People using Thunderbird will not see any change in the product they use.   We have started this conversation early because Mozilla works best when our community is engaged.  This is how we gather the people who are interested, and enable those folks to engage productively within the process.  It also of course allows those who prefer a different course of action to be vocal.  We’ve seen this before with Thunderbird.   Building a positive response and a positive conversation will be a very useful first step in making a good future for Thunderbird. Mitchell _______________________________________________ governance mailing list governance@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance -- Benjamin Kerensa http://benjaminkerensa.com/

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