Bye Bye Thunderbird (and Eudora too)

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Bye Bye Thunderbird (and Eudora too)

Postby ncd » Tue 18 Sep, 2007 12:20 pm

Mozilla Foundation, or as it should be called, FireFox Foundation, has thrown Thunderbird under the wheels. Spun off today as a commercial app (along with the remnants of Eudora which previously incorporated into the email program), this leaves the open source community with just Seamonkey for email.

Not surprising, considering the track record of the FireFox developers imo.

N
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Postby James » Tue 18 Sep, 2007 12:24 pm

What are you talking about??
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Postby Fulvio » Tue 18 Sep, 2007 3:37 pm

Spun off today as a commercial app

Not true! Eudora is no longer a commercial app., and, probably Thunderbird and Eudora will be a single Open source app.
Considering that Seamonkey is a spinoff of Mozilla, what's wrong with Eudora8.0 being a spinoff of Thunderbird?
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Postby ncd » Tue 18 Sep, 2007 7:15 pm

James wrote:What are you talking about??


Today's news. Thunderbird is going commercial.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,13729 ... ticle.html
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Postby Antony » Tue 18 Sep, 2007 11:33 pm

Thanks for the heads-up.

Press release from Mozilla:
Mozilla Launches Internet Mail and Communications Initiative (17 Sept 2007)

In short:
Dr. David Ascher (CTO and VP Engineering of ActiveState) will join Mozilla to establish a new company on Thunderbird, and Mozilla will provide US$3 million for this new company.
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Re: Bye Bye Thunderbird (and Eudora too)

Postby profman » Tue 18 Sep, 2007 11:56 pm

ncd wrote:Mozilla Foundation, or as it should be called, FireFox Foundation, has thrown Thunderbird under the wheels. Spun off today as a commercial app (along with the remnants of Eudora which previously incorporated into the email program), this leaves the open source community with just Seamonkey for email.

Not surprising, considering the track record of the FireFox developers imo.

N


If you think Thunderbird is "going under the wheels", then it will join the already "commercial" Firefox.

The PCWorld article, in part, states:

Mozilla Corp. spun off its Thunderbird e-mail client into a new for-profit subsidiary on Monday and seeded the unnamed company with $3 million in start-up money, the open-source developer announced.

The move is identical to the one made by the umbrella Mozilla Foundation in 2005 when it created Mozilla Corp. to manage Firefox. "The new organization doesn't have a name yet, so I'll call it MailCo here," said Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker on her blog Monday night. "Technically, it will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, just like the Mozilla Corporation."


The bothersome part of this information is the possibility that the current developers of Thunderbird may leave and that the fact that a new "leader" is being brought in.

David Ascher, the former chief technology officer and vice president of engineering at ActiveState Software Inc., a Vancouver, British Columbia development tool maker, will lead the new company, said Baker in a statement. ...

It's unknown whether Mozilla's current in-house Thunderbird developers will continue with the new company. Baker hinted that they may not. ...

Neither Thunderbird developer Scott MacGregor, who started the project in February 2003, or his co-worker, David Bienvenu, responded to a request for comment.
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Postby James » Wed 19 Sep, 2007 12:08 am

Well...I'm still confused but not ready to bail out just yet. Do we really have enough information to know for a certainty that Thunderbird as an open sourced free app is history?
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Postby Antony » Wed 19 Sep, 2007 1:24 am

James wrote:Do we really have enough information to know for a certainty that Thunderbird as an open sourced free app is history?
No. However, the organisation of development Thunderbird is likely to be changed. Thunderbird is likely to say free and open source, but will be commercialised.
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Postby profman » Wed 19 Sep, 2007 2:02 am

A more up-beat tone can be found in an article at CNET News.com:

Mozilla tries Firefox recipe with Thunderbird
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Postby Fulvio » Wed 19 Sep, 2007 10:59 am

The subtitle of the PCWorld article is:
Mozilla has launched MailCo, a for-profit subsidiary seeded with $3 million plus open-source software.

Neither article is clear, but I am not going to lose any sleep on this.
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