On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 10:11 PM, Mitchell Baker <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
Can you comment why you think Thunderbird (or maybe even email in general) is not part of this Web that we love that is at risk? I've been wondering whether the focus of Mozilla on HTML and related technology is a bit too narrow, when a lot of the battle in my view is being fought around ecosystems (both in terms of app stores and "cloud" technology) where Thunderbird/Lightning and its ecosystem might actually be more of an asset. I think it makes sense to separate Thunderbird and Firefox more from a technical perspective, just because loose coupling is a good thing. I think this is the same promise XULRunner and the Firefox SDK were going to fulfill, though, and it always looks to me like they were never really a viable strategy, in part due to a lack of resources available to make that really a good technical bet. Also, this lack of focus on Gecko being a viable platform is kind of weird when viewed through the lens of what's happening on the other side of the fence with the Electron ecosystem, with Atom and Nylas N1 and whatever else is being built on top of that. If Mozilla had invested more in XULRunner, would we have all of those developers as part of our community now? There's a lot of noise being made about participation, but this seems yet another instance where Mozilla takes the stance that a sizable part of its community is not actually welcome, and one might wonder whether actions speak louder than words. Cheers, Dirkjan _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
