The comments I've read from Mozilla HQ are that the Thunderbird devs will
carry on, but they will look for a new institutional home for the project
(Apache? Software Freedom Conservancy?). Basically they see that most people
are now using handhelds (iThings, Androids, SailFish, all with proprietary
layers) and webmail, and a desktop email client seems more and more like a
niche project.
I don't know what is going on with Mozilla these days. It seems like the
for-profit company that was set up to fund the not-for-profit Mozilla
Foundation has brought in a whole lot of managerialist corporate types, and
it seems that the lunatics have taken control of the asylum. Everything
that's happened with FirefoxOS, Adobe (Adobe!) being hired to write the "EME"
DRM module, the Hello WebRTC thing with the proprietary back-end etc etc
points to this conclusion.
Maybe the Mozilla dev community needs to take inspiration from the developers
of Tox, and those who forked LibreOffice and NextCloud, and take their
projects back from the $-focussed managerialists?
