Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Frederik Schwarzer]

Am 27.04.2016 23:33 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
El dimecres, 27 d’abril de 2016, a les 23:15:00 CEST, Frederik 
Schwarzer va

escriure:

Am 27.04.2016 23:09 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> El dimecres, 27 d’abril de 2016, a les 13:35:41 CEST, Frederik
> Schwarzer va
>
> escriure:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I share Eike's concerns about the extra workload for our sysadmins and
>> I
>> think they should definitely have a word in this.
>> While a welcoming atmosphere is a great goal and should be strived for
>> in general, technical issues should be handled as such.
>> So I guess we need to ask concrete questions like:
>> - what do the Thunderbird developers expect from their future host and
>> can we deliver that?
>> - what are the costs in terms of manpower on our side?
>> - are our sysadmins willing to let a bunch of contractors paid by
>> Mozilla run through our infrastructure and tell them what to do and
>> how?
>
> As far as i understand it, there would not be any contractor paid by
> Mozilla
> since Thunderbird wouldn't be Mozilla anymore, no?

As Jos pointed out, they are seeking to have a contractor help with 
the

migration.
https://careers.mozilla.org/position/ohUW2fwT


Sure, helping with the migration.

I don't know where you end up in "run through our infrastructure and 
tell them

what to do and how" from "helping with the migration".

What I would understand from "helping with the migration" is "make sure 
you
help Thunderbird land correctly in the destination organization by 
helping

such organization in whatever is needed."


Yep, well, whenever I see external contractors, they come, criticise 
what they see, make suggestions that there is no manpower available to 
realise, help implementing the suggestions half-bakedly and then rush 
out to the next contract. Surely that's a naysayer's point of view, 
which is based on my sceptical opinion about this. :)


Regards,
Frederik
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 2:42 PM, Eike Hein  wrote:


> 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.
>
>
It's probably the perfect moment to implement the Thunderbird UI using Qt
Quick, and start replacing all the technology piece by piece.

IMHO Mozilla is betting all their future on Firefox (which is declining)
instead of making a recurring business of Thunderbird.

What they did: abandon Thunderbird. "Sorry pals, now you are on your own"

What I would have done: create a thunderbird.com service, competing with
GMail and Outlook.com. Plus provide Thunderbird as a desktop/offline
client, like Microsoft does with Outlook. THAT would have been a logical
step: further develop one of your products, provide a cloud version, take a
% of a successful existing market (e-mail outsourcing) which provides
recurrent income, etc
In that regard, Kolab is probably the most fit organization to get
Thunderbird, as they can provide the server side already. With a
SPICE-based approach like Open365 uses, a Thunderbird.com service can be in
public beta in a couple of months. Once it's business case is proved and
money starts coming in selling, the next step would be to have a pure-web
UI, mobile app, etc.

-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dimecres, 27 d’abril de 2016, a les 23:15:00 CEST, Frederik Schwarzer va 
escriure:
> Am 27.04.2016 23:09 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
> > El dimecres, 27 d’abril de 2016, a les 13:35:41 CEST, Frederik
> > Schwarzer va
> > 
> > escriure:
> >> Hi,
> >> 
> >> I share Eike's concerns about the extra workload for our sysadmins and
> >> I
> >> think they should definitely have a word in this.
> >> While a welcoming atmosphere is a great goal and should be strived for
> >> in general, technical issues should be handled as such.
> >> So I guess we need to ask concrete questions like:
> >> - what do the Thunderbird developers expect from their future host and
> >> can we deliver that?
> >> - what are the costs in terms of manpower on our side?
> >> - are our sysadmins willing to let a bunch of contractors paid by
> >> Mozilla run through our infrastructure and tell them what to do and
> >> how?
> > 
> > As far as i understand it, there would not be any contractor paid by
> > Mozilla
> > since Thunderbird wouldn't be Mozilla anymore, no?
> 
> As Jos pointed out, they are seeking to have a contractor help with the
> migration.
> https://careers.mozilla.org/position/ohUW2fwT

Sure, helping with the migration.

I don't know where you end up in "run through our infrastructure and tell them 
what to do and how" from "helping with the migration".

What I would understand from "helping with the migration" is "make sure you 
help Thunderbird land correctly in the destination organization by helping 
such organization in whatever is needed."

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> Regards,
> Frederik
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Frederik Schwarzer]

Am 27.04.2016 23:09 schrieb Albert Astals Cid:
El dimecres, 27 d’abril de 2016, a les 13:35:41 CEST, Frederik 
Schwarzer va

escriure:

Hi,

I share Eike's concerns about the extra workload for our sysadmins and 
I

think they should definitely have a word in this.
While a welcoming atmosphere is a great goal and should be strived for
in general, technical issues should be handled as such.
So I guess we need to ask concrete questions like:
- what do the Thunderbird developers expect from their future host and
can we deliver that?
- what are the costs in terms of manpower on our side?
- are our sysadmins willing to let a bunch of contractors paid by
Mozilla run through our infrastructure and tell them what to do and 
how?


As far as i understand it, there would not be any contractor paid by 
Mozilla

since Thunderbird wouldn't be Mozilla anymore, no?


As Jos pointed out, they are seeking to have a contractor help with the 
migration.

https://careers.mozilla.org/position/ohUW2fwT

Regards,
Frederik
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dimecres, 27 d’abril de 2016, a les 22:13:27 CEST, Alexander Neundorf va 
escriure:
> On Wednesday, April 27, 2016 17:49:56 Boudhayan Gupta wrote:
> > Hi,
> 
> > On 27 April 2016 at 17:05, Frederik Schwarzer  wrote:
> ...
> 
> > > - how much of our infrastructure can Thunderbird actually benefit from?
> > > 
> > >  ... or rather, are they willing to benefit from it at all? I have
> > > 
> > > Translations in mind. Will they switch to our way of doing things or
> > > will
> > > they be an encapsulated project within KDE?
> > > 
> > > In short: this should not solely be a community decision but a technical
> > > one as well.
> 
> ...
> 
> > work, can't do more". Given that Thunderbird uses absolutely zero KDE
> > libraries and shares no development processes with KDE, I suspect
> > T-bird can make use of exactly nothing of our existing infra (except
> > project management and perhaps CI).
> 
> hmm, if that's the case, are they actually qualified to become a "KDE
> project" ?
> From the manifesto: "The project stays true to established practices common
> to similar KDE projects"  (https://manifesto.kde.org/commitments.html)
> 
> So, would they share any practices with similar KDE projects ?

There would not be similar KDE project. AFAIK we don't have any project that 
is an email client built on XUL/GTK.

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> Alex
> 
> 
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dimecres, 27 d’abril de 2016, a les 13:35:41 CEST, Frederik Schwarzer va 
escriure:
> Hi,
> 
> I share Eike's concerns about the extra workload for our sysadmins and I
> think they should definitely have a word in this.
> While a welcoming atmosphere is a great goal and should be strived for
> in general, technical issues should be handled as such.
> So I guess we need to ask concrete questions like:
> - what do the Thunderbird developers expect from their future host and
> can we deliver that?
> - what are the costs in terms of manpower on our side?
> - are our sysadmins willing to let a bunch of contractors paid by
> Mozilla run through our infrastructure and tell them what to do and how?

As far as i understand it, there would not be any contractor paid by Mozilla 
since Thunderbird wouldn't be Mozilla anymore, no?

Cheers,
  Albert

> - do the possible changes increase daily maintenance workload after the
> contractors left?
> - how much of our infrastructure can Thunderbird actually benefit from?
>   ... or rather, are they willing to benefit from it at all? I have
> Translations in mind. Will they switch to our way of doing things or
> will they be an encapsulated project within KDE?
> 
> In short: this should not solely be a community decision but a technical
> one as well.
> 
> Regards,
> Frederik
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 27 April 2016 at 15:13, Jos van den Oever  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
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Eike Hein]

On 04/27/2016 10:13 PM, Jos van den Oever wrote:

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.


Have a look at the actual commit logs. There's a gap between December
'15 and March '16 with no commits, and a lot of the work since is stuff
like multi-part pulls of external code, cleanup, and light bug fixing.

Not that it matters. Maybe they're hiding all the fancy new cool stuff
in feature branches. It's certainly not been showing up in their
releases the last couple of years, though.


Cheers,
Eike
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Jos van den Oever]

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.

Cheers,
Jos

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/releases-comm-central/pulse/monthly
 This is a git mirror of the mercurial repository of Thunderbird
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Luca Beltrame]

Il giorno Wed, 27 Apr 2016 21:42:12 +0900
Eike Hein  ha scritto:

> 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

My thoughts exactly, and while this makes me unhappy (because it has a
large following and is filling important niches in this "browser only"
world), I think Mozilla is just pulling an Oracle OpenOffice here and
allow it to die without causing too much backlash.


pgpjTjVsZdvAk.pgp
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Eike Hein]

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.



Cheers,
Dan


Cheers,
Eike
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Boudhayan Gupta]

Hi,

On 27 April 2016 at 17:05, Frederik Schwarzer  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I share Eike's concerns about the extra workload for our sysadmins and I
> think they should definitely have a word in this.
> While a welcoming atmosphere is a great goal and should be strived for in
> general, technical issues should be handled as such.
> So I guess we need to ask concrete questions like:
> - what do the Thunderbird developers expect from their future host and can
> we deliver that?
> - what are the costs in terms of manpower on our side?
> - are our sysadmins willing to let a bunch of contractors paid by Mozilla
> run through our infrastructure and tell them what to do and how?
> - do the possible changes increase daily maintenance workload after the
> contractors left?
> - how much of our infrastructure can Thunderbird actually benefit from?
>  ... or rather, are they willing to benefit from it at all? I have
> Translations in mind. Will they switch to our way of doing things or will
> they be an encapsulated project within KDE?
>
> In short: this should not solely be a community decision but a technical one
> as well.

Speaking on behalf of KDE Sysadmin, here's our deal now.

The Phabricator migration is stretching us to our limits. It turns out
the Phabricator migration isn't a simple "install this and import
data" thing, but we have to re-architect significant parts of our
server infrastructure, upgrade and/or spin up new servers/containers,
kill old services and preserve data, and wait around on Phabricator
upstream to fix things to better accommodate our use-cases.

We're understaffed as it is. Tickets and the general churn of things
take up a lot of our time. Scarlett single-handedly has to battle
against the CI demons and there are days when CI wins. Me and my GSoC
student plan to overhaul Git and get it ready for Phabricator over the
summer. I'll also have a day job in addition to SoC.

That said, we're not going to throw up our hands and say "too much
work, can't do more". Given that Thunderbird uses absolutely zero KDE
libraries and shares no development processes with KDE, I suspect
T-bird can make use of exactly nothing of our existing infra (except
project management and perhaps CI). If manpower and funds are
available, we're more than willing to co-operate with and accommodate
a dedicated team who'll work on the Thunderbird bits of our infra.

My personal opinion that T-bird will go the way of the dodo
notwithstanding, I think the board needs to take a look at whether
this is feasible in terms of funds and manpower. If the Kommunity
wants it, and the board can fund it, we'd love to accommodate T-bird,
but we'll need a lot of help.

-- Boudhayan Gupta
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Re: [kde-community] [Kde-pim] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Volker Krause]

On Wednesday 27 April 2016 11:36:27 Daniel Vrátil wrote:
> On Tuesday, April 26, 2016 4:03:43 PM CEST Jos van den Oever wrote:
> > Hello KDE-ers,
> > 
> > Mozilla Thunderbird is looking for a new home [1]. They are evaluating a
> > number of options. KDE was not in the initial list of options, but I think
> > KDE and Thunderbird would be an excellent fit.
> > 
> > This mail goes to kde-community@kde.org and to a number KDE members that
> > work on email. Please respond to kde-community to keep the thread on one
> > place.
> > 
> > I would like to hear what you think about the idea of Mozilla Thunderbird
> > joining KDE next to KMail, Kontact, Kube, and Trojita. I think we can all
> > benefit from being in one community and infrastructure.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> 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.
> 
> From KDE PIM point of view (but speaking just for myself, not for the team)
> I don't see any conflicts there. We don't have much to share with them
> (probably except for hate of obsolete email protocols), but there are
> certainly things we can learn from each other. As was mentioned elsewhere
> already, having Thunderbird in KDE can only foster (friendly) competition
> between the email clients, which I think would be much welcomed and can
> help push both projects forward.

I agree with Dan. I also don't see this as a problem from the KDE PIM point of 
view.

regards,
Volker

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