Hi :) How do people here feel about approaching the Thunderbird people to bring them into the LibreOffice project a bit more? Perhaps they could become the official default email client?
As most of you know - many organisations, particularly OpenSource ones, have departments/sections/sub-groups that focus on supporting external projects that are used within their own project. For example Ubuntu, Redhat, openSuSE, Mageia, Fedora (and so on) each have people able to help their users deal with most issues to do with Thunderbird, LibreOffice and many other apps. Typically such people can handle quite a lot of issues but sometimes seek help from 'upstream' (such as to here if it's a LibreOffice issue) or/and invite the user to take their issue upstream themselves. Many of such people stay within one OS and help with many apps within that OS but some support the same app in many different OSes. There are even generic forums, such as "LinuxQuestions.org" that handle a lot of different OSes. This mailing list has helped quite a few people with "off topic" issues, such as helping with other apps or choosing a good "gateway" distro (such as Mint, Ubuntu etc) for people who want to break free of Windows or even helping with quite detailed "off topic" issues in very geeky Gnu&Linux OSes (such as Slackware). Also there's a good chance that some people from Thunderbird might start offering weeu's support through our support systems, such as this mailing list - if we were welcoming and supportive. How would people here feel about this mailing list offering support to Thunderbird users, particularly ones who use LibreOffice as their Office Suite? Another option might be for "The Document Foundation" to fully take on the whole of the Thunderbird project, and bring in all of their infrastructure and maybe kinda merge parts together where it's easy enough to do so. Personally i prefer this sort of approach The Mozilla Foundation chose to split TB away from their web-browser (a good linuxy thing to do) so they could be more independent and therefore be used by people who use a wide range of other web-browsers - also helping those few Firefox users who were using something else to benefit more from a more streamlined Firefox. A few years ago Mozilla decided to drop almost all it's support for TBeaving it all to just volunteers. The TB volunteers have done a fantastic job but it would be great to give them a new home so they can "spread their wings" a lot more. To me it seems that either way, or something similar would greatly benefit both (or even all 3!) separate projects. It at long last would solve the main perceived 'blocker' that many people seem to struggle with when trying to move away from MS Office = that LO doesn't have a drop-in replacement for Outlook. Although Outlook includes calendar functionality (and a lot more) it seems that the most frequent problem that people ask about is just about emails. On this mailing list it's even been suggested the TDF create a new email client, but i think most of us already use TB anyway and it's probably better to just use something that has a good, well-proven track-record rather than try to cobble something together from scratch. Some of us inevitably try to point out that there are many other choices of email client to suit particular niche-markets - such as Claws (for a much smaller foot-print and thus faster on lower-spec machines) or Evolution (for a totally complete "drop in replacement" for Outlook in terms of look&feel (but has limited support and is not cross-platform, and can't even cope outside the Gnome DE so it limits which versions of Gnu&Linux it can be used on)) and some really fancy ones with more project-management functionality. Such alternatives would still be available and supported but by having TB as our default it would dissolve one more perceived 'blocker' . People would no longer be forced into doing a tonne more research into which email client to choose, and TB would be the perfect one for the vast majority of them. Microsoft and Apple seem to be successful largely because they remove people's options and give them "Freedom FROM choice". The tech industry seems to value that above almost anything else. As soon as there are choices they start grumbling about "fragmentation", and that it's difficult to choose "which is best" because different use-cases may have different requirements and therefore may need make slightly different choices. In every other industry monopolies are seen as bad - choice and diversity are applauded as being "good competition" allowing "market forces" to help drive innovation, efficiency and all that sort of thing. In the Gnu&Linux world we fight hard to make sure there is "Freedom OF choice", but a lot of people struggle when given options - they just want to settle with what they are given and then grumble about it! Giving people a default and then allowing them to easily replace it as been hugely successful for "gateway distros" and i think it would probably be great for us too. How do other people here feel? Also, just out of curiosity, do we happen to already have people here who help other people with Thunderbird issues in another forum or support network? We probably do already have some with some level of expertise on this mailing list, or at least people who can quickly learn how to resolve the most frequently asked issues. Many regards from Tom :) On 26 Feb 2016 10:25, "Florian Effenberger" <flo...@documentfoundation.org> wrote: Hello, the following decision was taken on October 5, 2015 in private as the board saw a need for confidentiality. It is now made public in accordance with our statutes. Proposal: Authorize Simon Phipps to explore Thunderbird options with Mozilla The Board of Directors at the time of voting consists of 7 seat holders without deputies. In order to be quorate, the vote needs to have 1/2 of the Board of Directors members, which gives 4. A total of 5 Board of Directors members have participated in the vote. The vote is quorate. A quorum could be reached with a simple majority of 3 votes. Result of vote: 5 approvals, 0 neutral, 0 disapprovals. Decision: The request has been accepted. This message is to be archived by the BoD members and their deputies. Florian -- Florian Effenberger, Executive Director (Geschäftsführer) Tel: +49 30 5557992-50 | IRC: floeff on Freenode The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, DE Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts Legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted