On 12/7/2015 6:45 AM, Paul wrote:
Does Thunderbird have a role in the future of Mozilla?
I think that the Mozilla powers-that-be have made it fairly clear that they do not believe Thunderbird is an important piece of the Mozilla web-focused strategy, which is the primary mission of at least MoCo. Whether Thunderbird has a role within Mozilla more broadly, as an entity focused on internet freedom and privacy, is still an open question.
Thunderbird's primary existence should be to showcase the versatility of the Mozilla Platform.
Representing Thunderbird, we would not agree that is an important part of why Thunderbird exists.
Of course Thunderbird is a tax on Firefox as things stand. ... but we can create the Mozilla Platform ecosystem and have a low-maintainence Thunderbird flourish.
What I hear Mozilla saying is no, we cannot continue to support the Mozilla platform, and applications such as Thunderbird that use the Mozilla platform are strongly encouraged to stop.
But maybe I am hearing the wrong message. Another possible message from Firefox would be "We're really busy with our own issues now, so please don't expect much from us, but it is cool if you guys hang around and try to do things with our platform."
This is in the context of a Firefox that is under enormous pressure to re-establish themselves as a market- and mind- share leader. They could have decided to do that by stressing the flexibility of the Mozilla platform, and encouraging third-party applications, and complex addons. Apparently though they have not chosen that path. I am not asking for any change in path (though I suspect much of our community would probably ask that), I am just asking for as much clarity as can be offered about what the decisions are. Without clarity, it is very difficult to achieve the unity of direction that we need within the Thunderbird community to make some very difficult decisions on our own direction.
-- R. Kent James Chair, Thunderbird Council @rkentjames _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
