On 27 April 2016 at 15:13, Jos van den Oever <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wednesday 27 April 2016 21:42:12 Eike Hein wrote: >> On 04/27/2016 06:36 PM, Daniel Vrátil wrote: >> > I like the idea of having Thunderbird in KDE. It shows that we are an open >> > community and welcoming towards "outside" projects and of course it would >> > be also a good PR for both sides. >> >> No, it wouldn't. The message wouldn't be "KDE community is open to the >> outside", it would be "KDE offers shelter to legacy project, hoping to >> salvage some attention from it". >> >> Make no mistake, Thunderbird is a dead project. It's built on a toolkit >> that's EOL, and hardly has enough of a development community to sustain >> the app, much less the stack beneath it. That it has users (like me) >> that still use it despite the mounting bitrot and deteriorating >> performance doesn't change that outlook. Many people who use Thunderbird >> want to switch away from Thunderbird. >> >> KDEPIM does face some similar challenges, but is actually much further >> along on componentizing its codebase to where e.g. moving from QWidget >> tovother toolkits is feasible, and QtCore is far from dead. As a >> developer, if I wanted to work on email stuff, I'd rather go there than >> invest my hours into Thunderbird. And that's part of the problem, too. >> >> If we were to incubate Thunderbird, it would need to supply really >> really strong answers for how it's going to pull its own weight to >> offset the resource and PR cost. > > Years ago, LibreOffice split off from OpenOffice. Apache OpenOffice is now > barely > alive. They hardly manage to release security fixes. And yet, still more > people > know about OpenOffice than about LibreOffice. Most of these people are on > Windows. > LibreOffice is working hard to change this but it takes very long. > > Thunderbird is a very familiar program to many. It is a strong brand. If > Thunderbird deteriorates, it will leave many to give in and go to webmail > hosted by an advertising company. That way the number of people using real > mail clients might be halved. > > If the Thunderbird team were to decide to update their codebase and perhaps > move to use Qt components, they might retain their userbase. Subsurface and > Gcompris went this way too, to technical success. Any such decisions should be > made by the Thunderbird developers and there are quite a few of those. > > Looking at the commit logs of Thunderbird, the programs certainly does not > seem dead at all. Last month there were on average two commits per day by 18 > authors. [1] Sure they might have technical debt, but so did OpenOffice. > Moving > away from the link to the Firefox release schedule, might even give breathing > room for more fundamental work.
If I could be more practical, my advice would be as radical as: - legally get the Thunderbird brand while it's *still* known and positive - rename KDE PIM to Thunderbird - make the Windows port shine - grab the userbase - ... - profit? No offense. It's win-win. For Thunderbird it's escape from the technical debt (using Mozilla's own words). -- regards, Jaroslaw Staniek KDE: : A world-wide network of software engineers, artists, writers, translators : and facilitators committed to Free Software development - http://kde.org Calligra Suite: : A graphic art and office suite - http://calligra.org Kexi: : A visual database apps builder - http://calligra.org/kexi Qt Certified Specialist: : http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek _______________________________________________ kde-community mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
