Hi all
As a follow on to Mitchell’s post, I want to outline more specifically
how the Foundation got involved and the ways in which I believe the
Foundation can assist in this situation.
Mitchell and I have had a number of discussions regarding Thunderbird.
The Thunderbird Council has also come to each of us at various times. We
agree it could be helpful for some of the Foundation's capabilities to
be part of this work. Specifically, I’ve put forward an offer of
Foundation staff time and resources to:
1. Advise and support the Council as they come up with a plan. Mitchell,
myself and many at the Foundation care about the long term health of
Thunderbird and feel some responsibility to help get it to a good spot.
2. Beyond time, we’ve offered the Council a modest amount of money to
pay for contractors who can help develop options for both the
organizational and technical future of Thunderbird.
2.1 As Mitchell said, this *does not* mean that MoFo is making technical
decisions about Thunderbird -- just that we want to make sure the
Council has access a technical architect, a business planner, etc. to
generate plans and options that the community can consider together.
2.2 As part of this, we’ve also (loosely) offered MoFo's meeting
facilitation team run by Allen Gunn to bring together a set of
Thunderbird stakeholders to discuss these options. I haven't fully
discussed this part with the Council yet.
3. Finally, we've offered to accept donations for Thunderbird and
disperse funds for contractors while we're figuring out this plan.
3.1 This makes MoFo, who already owns the Thunderbird IP, into a 'fiscal
home' for the Thunderbird community during this period. We also play
this role for Firebug.
3.2 We’re talking to at least one org who is considering supporting
Thunderbird. We are also looking at adding a user donation function to
support the Thunderbird community. We will likely also supplement this
funding with some of our own resources in a small way.
Some of the items above could be done via MoCo (items 2, 2.2) or MoFo,
and since I have a bit of energy to focus on this now, Mitchell and I
agreed we should take advantage of this energy. Other items make much
more sense to be handled from the Foundation (item 3).
I'm not sure where all this leads -- but I am certain that we need to
invest some time and resources in figuring out a good future for
Thunderbird. That's what I've offered to help with.
If people have questions or want to somehow help out themselves, I'd be
happy to discuss.
ms
On 2015-11-30 4:11 PM, Mitchell Baker wrote:
This is a long-ish message. It covers general topics about Thunderbird
and the future, and also the topics of the Foundation involvement
(point 9) and the question of merging repositories (point 11).
Naturally, I believe it’s worth the time to read through the end.
1. Firefox and Thunderbird have lived with competing demands for some
time now. Today Thunderbird developers spend much of their time
responding to changes made in core Mozilla systems and technologies.
At the same time, build, Firefox, and platform engineers continue to
pay a tax to support Thunderbird.
2. These competing demands are not good for either project. Engineers
working on Thunderbird must focus on keeping up and adapting Firefox’s
web-driven changes. Engineers working on Firefox and related projects
end up considering the competing demands of Thunderbird, and/or
wondering if and how much they should assist Thunderbird. Neither
project can focus wholeheartedly on what is best for it.
3. These competing demands will not get better soon. Instead, they are
very likely to get worse. Firefox and related projects are now
speeding up the rate of change, modernizing our development process
and our infrastructure. Indeed, this is required for Mozilla to have
significant impact in the current computing environment.
4. There is a belief among some that living with these competing
demands is good for the Mozilla project as a whole, because it gives
us an additional focus, assists Thunderbird as a dedicated open source
community, and also supports an open source standards based email
client. This sentiment is appealing, and I share it to some extent.
There is also a sense that caring for fellow open source developers is
good, which I also share. However, point 2 above — “Neither project
can focus wholeheartedly on what is best for it” -- is the most
important point. Having Thunderbird has an additional product and
focus is *not* good overall if it causes all of our products —
Firefox, other web-driven products and Thunderbird — to fall short of
what we can accomplish.
5. Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our
leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like
Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact. With all due respect
to Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for
years that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential.
6. Given this, it’s clear to me that sooner or later paying a tax to
support Thunderbird will not make sense as a policy for Mozilla. I
know many believe this time came a while back, and I’ve been slow to
say this clearly. And of course, some feel that this time should
never come. However, as I say, it’s clear to me today that continuing
to live with these competing demands given our focus on industry
impact is increasingly unstable. We’ve seen this already, in an
unstructured way, as various groups inside Mozilla stop supporting
Thunderbird. The accelerating speed of Firefox and infrastructure
changes -- which I welcome wholeheartedly -- will emphasize this.
7. Some Mozillians are eager to see Mozilla support community-managed
projects within our main development efforts. I am also sympathetic
to this view, with a key precondition. Community-managed projects that
make the main effort less nimble and likely to succeed don’t fit very
well into this category for me. They can still be great open source
projects -- this is a separate question from whether the fit in our
main development systems. I feel so strongly about this because I am
so concerned that “the Web” we love is at risk. If we want the
traits of the Web to live and prosper in the world of mobile, social
and data then we have to be laser-focused on this.
8. Therefore I believe Thunderbird should would thrive best by
separating itself from reliance on Mozilla development systems and in
some cases, Mozilla technology. The current setting isn’t stable, and
we should start actively looking into how we can transition in an
orderly way to a future where Thunderbird and Firefox are
un-coupled. I don’t know what this will look like, or how it will
work yet. I do know that it needs to happen, for both Firefox and
Thunderbird’s sake. This is a big job, and may require expertise that
the Thunderbird team doesn’t yet have. Mozilla can provide various
forms of assistance to the Thunderbird team via a set of the Mozilla
Foundation’s capabilities.
9. Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation and I are both interested in
helping find a way for Thunderbird to separate from Mozilla
infrastructure. We also want to make sure that Thunderbird has the
right kind of legal and financial home, one that will help the
community thrive. Mark has been talking with the Thunderbird
leadership about this, and has offered some of his time and focus and
resources to assist. He will detail that offer in a separate message.
We both recognize that the Thunderbird community is dedicated to
sustaining a vibrant open source project, which is why we’re currently
looking at how best to assist with both technical separation and
identifying the right long-term home for Thunderbird. These
discussions are very early, so it’s easy to you can definitely think
of a lot of questions for which there are’s no answers yet.
10. The fact that the Foundation is facilitating these discussions
does not necessarily mean that the Foundation is or is not the best
legal and financial home for Thunderbird. The intent is not to make
technical decisions about support of Thunderbird by Mozilla employees,
or merging repositories, etc. Point 6 above is the shared organizing
principle for both of us.
11. I understand from recent discussions that merging mozilla-central
and comm-central would provide some reduction of effort required to
ship Thunderbird, at least in the short term. This would make sense if
our path was long term integration of the projects. As i noted above,
I believe our path has to be the long term separation of these
projects, so that each can move as fast as possible into new things.
Given that, I’m not sure that merging them makes sense. I have to
learn a bit more about the cost / benefit analysis of merging
repositories given the need to separate these project. I’m asking the
platform and release folks to comment on this.
12. This message is about the future and there’s a lot to work out.
It’s explicitly not to announce changes in daily activities at this
point. People using Thunderbird will not see any change in the
product they use. We have started this conversation early because
Mozilla works best when our community is engaged. This is how we
gather the people who are interested, and enable those folks to engage
productively within the process. It also of course allows those who
prefer a different course of action to be vocal. We’ve seen this
before with Thunderbird. Building a positive response and a positive
conversation will be a very useful first step in making a good future
for Thunderbird.
Mitchell
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