About the future of Thunderbird
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Most people are familiar with software that is 'good enough to ship, could do more' where the software goes through release cycles and gets features added Etc. But sometimes, and this more common with embedded programmers, the programming is 'done.' All the features you could reasonably want are implemented, bugs as they come up are swatted, but basically the software itself is as it is and will be forever. Its done.
I expect to see more of this over the coming decade. While it is certainly true you can reimagine and reimagine, and of course you might want to port from form factor or OS to another, but the kinds of things that non-developer's do with computers is like a monte carlo plot getting more and more samples.
Personally I think its a Good Thing, as it might stem some of the gratuitous changes we see on things. It also has the chance of making the world a bit more stable.
Kind of interesting that this doesn't appear to have explicititely happened very often before with email software -- but intuition might imply that it should have.
Interesting times.
It most certainly did.
Pine
Mutt
Eudora
All are basically done, and are maintenance only. Pine turned into Alpine which added unicode, and that's about it.
There is actually a lot of software where this happens. Tex, and gzip come to mind immediately. I'm sure there is more.
I like tabs in urxvt, vim, Firefox, etc. But they don't work well for me in Tbird.
Disclaimer: I haven't used Thunderbird for years, but I'm not too satisfied with the clients I'm currently using.
Happy, because for once a company didn't see a perfectly good--but decade-old--piece of software and think, "Gee, this has been around for a decade and it hasn't changed, let's RE-INVENT EVERYTHING!!!" (See: Gnome 3, Windows 8). Thunderbird is stable, works, and does its job excellently; no need to turn a wheel into a square just because it's old.
On the other hand, there is still some room for improvement in Thunderbird: Gmail integration is kind of hacky and gross-looking (A "[Gmail]" folder? Really?), it could use better Linux desktop integration (notification icons, OSD bubbles, etc.--all of these kind of work, but in half-assed way, I've found). And of course, the ever-important security updates. Even stable software needs security updates on occasion, and someone has to provide that.
So with that said: kudos to Mozilla for not undertaking change just for the sake of change like so many other big software projects have of late; but I hope Thunderbird gets just a little more polish before it's placed atop its permanent pedestal, and I hope someone sticks around to keep it secure for its second decade of life.
I am quite content with Thunderbird as it is and welcome this news.
Chat Integration, who cares when you don't even have a decent addressbook integration?
However, Thunderbird is one of the very few truly free and open source multi-platform email applications available today and we want to defend these values. We’re not “stopping” Thunderbird, but proposing we adapt the Thunderbird release and governance model in a way that allows both ongoing security and stability maintenance, as well as community-driven innovation and development for the product. This will mean an eventual shift in how we staff Thunderbird at Mozilla Corporation – we are still working out details, but some people will likely end up on other Mozilla projects.
I don't believe this was an "internal" email at all. It was sent out on a Friday, they knew it would get out. We were the intended audience.
The mail seemed entirely clear to me. I think it was just not written in language suitable to non-technical people. I believe most people involved with OSS would recognize this shift into a community maintainer / BFDL as typical and non-threatening.
A "tech journalist" misinterpreted the letter as meaningless corpo-speak since he didn't understand the context or the real-life relevance of its content, and that's what sparked this whole thing about Thunderbird becoming dead. I don't believe it was meant to get spread in that way even if the execs thought some leakage would occur.
Thunderbird is a very widely used piece of software without many adequate competitors and I think there will be plenty of people interested in tinkering with its code for a long time to come.
"Thunderbird is not dead. We have announced a change in the way we develop new features for Thunderbird."
... in the sense of "not doing that anymore".
Kindof glossing over the issue, no?
Oh, actually, that's not true! I'm still using TB3 installed with my Ubuntu 10.10, and there's nothing missing there. I'm sure that the latest 2013 TB is going to be usable through 2015 at least. No need to look for replacement now.
http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabil...
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Proposal:_New_Release_a...
Mozilla is a non-profit (or is it a not-for-profit?), but I guess they're trying to make each project self-sustaining, and if thunderbird doesn't provide any bacon (pure speculation on my part here), then -- yes, that market might look like a waste of time.
For anyone working on software at the scale Mozilla is, this truth will be recognizable: focus can be a lot more important than financing.
Mozilla has and will continue to invest heavily in projects which have no or minimal revenue associated with them. Sustainability matters, of course, but there is no rule that every project or product must be individually sustainable.
[quote] Firefox went to live because of the IE dominance in the corporate and private world. In the same idea, Thunderbird went to live to offer an alternative to the Exchange/Outlook pair domination (and is still widely used in the corporate world).
We have a few very good alternative to Exchange outside (Kerio and Zimbra for instance) but Thunderbird lacks good Card/CalDav support which is a feature request that Mozilla has completely fail to deliver. And that’s were the real innovation was (think about it twice, please). Instead, we are seeing Thunderbird chat coming in. “Great”. Are you kidding?
Furthermore, I don’t get Mozilla communication ATM. When I hear “What Thunderbird users have in common is the need for a very stable and secure email product – first and foremost.”, I just think the guy saying that is making fun of the users.
Finally, as I said yesterday on Baker’s blog (comments), Mozilla should remove the Donate link on its website, as long as the long term goals are as unclear as they are now.
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I also think that the decision to stop Thunderbird is based on a falacy: WebMail does not make e-mail clients obsolete, or even less important.
Folks, remember, the source code will be here, community contributor will still exist and contribute, etc.
I gave up on Thunderbird when it started to demand most of my system memory. I switched back to mutt.
That Eudora and now Thunderbird should be end-of-lifed makes for very few good free options.
sooooo please can someone at Mozilla fixes this YEARS old bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531002 before TB's funeral ?
Also, thread conversations sucks and don't properly show new mails.
The article mentions over 20 million.
http://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2012/07/06/bringing-s...
It was TechCrunch who somehow translated that into "So, that's it for Thunderbird." :/
Seriously, there are a lot of open source mail servers/client, some of which might be good enough for you, e.g. http://cworth.org/sup/a-mail-client-for-geeks/
The main problem with running a mail server is properly keeping it up, secure, spam free, and trusted by peers to actually send email. These are not exclusively _software engineering_ problems with the existing (SMTP/RFC822-based) infrastructure. Rather, there's a large management component here, that is unlikely to be solved by software alone (open or closed source).
This will only change with a radical infrastructure change, along the lines of djb's Internet Mail 2000 proposal. Until then, if you want your mail server to remain reliable without working hard yourself, you'll have to delegate it (to google or hundreds of other available services).
Neither am I.
> They are letting Google occupy whole the internet by not creating an alternative for Gmail.
Now that statement makes absolutely no sense.
They have ~20 million users after 10-18 years (depending if you count from the original Thunderbird or the original Netscape 2.0 which added a mail client). Gmail has > 500 million accounts, let's say ~400 million users.
With 5% of the users, they're not making a difference either way.
Furthermore, it's still an apples-to-oranges comparison: I suspect at least 50% (if not 90%) of those mozilla users have at least one Gmail/GoogleApps mail account set up in their TB.
The main problem that gmail solves for most people, and which TB can't offer (being a software product rather than a service), is a reliable mail service. (I wrote that already, but you seem to have not noticed that).
> They are letting Google occupy whole the internet by not creating an alternative for Gmail.
Services available for you that are not google: fastmail.fm, hotmail.com/live.com, mail.com.
Mail clients that are available for you that are not gmail: Opera Mail, Claws, Postbox, Evolution, Outlook, Mail.app, and a whole lot more (though only Opera is really cross-platform).
What's the problem again?