The end of Thunderbird?

[Lemon Juice]

Thanks, tanstaafl, I visited the tb-planning list but didn't dive deep enough to read the funding thread. This quote makes things much clearer. Fortunately, Kent seems to be an appropriate person in the TB leadership role.

[LoudNoise]

As for number 4, I once heard someone suggest this schema for a different project. The marketplace charges a fee, say $5.00 a year, to post on the marketplace. They would take a fee of 1% for each purchase but don't take that fee until their share would have been $5.00. Very popular extensions would not have to pay the $5.00 since it is known that they will earn the marketplace more than this anyway.

The idea behind this is the basic costs get paid and if someone wants to give their extension away they can do so by paying the $5.00. It also presents a small barrier to bad ideas.

The $5.00, btw, is a figure I pulled out of air.

[tanstaafl]

The future of SeaMonkey thread.

[tanstaafl]

Ideas for the integration of Thunderbird with LibreOffice is interesting, especially the "Directions for Thunderbird’s legal and financial home" section.

[Drumbrake]

(...)
If you are asking if the entire direction of Mozilla is counter-intuitive to the real-world problems facing Firefox, then I think that's pretty obvious. Mozilla has been out-of-touch with the user base for a long time and doesn't want Firefox to be a "niche" browser, which is a shame because there are HUGE niche markets just waiting for a champion... and Firefox was always traditionally a "niche" browser to begin with... fighting for standards isn't exactly mainstream stuff.

Well said, and it also helps to remember that such "niche" was not long ago as big as Google Chrome's or Microsoft's market share, and even bigger for a while.
The steady decline of the last years should make them rethink what they are doing, instead of axing Thunderbird (they can name it what they want, but they are essentially killing Thunderbird as we know it) .

[Nomis101]

Interesting, there is now a merge of comm-central and mozilla-central
http://hg.mozilla.org/projects/cypress/file
I was able to build Thunderbird successfully from there. Since Mitchell Bakers memo I thought Mozilla wants to split Firefox from Thunderbird to develop both separately. This is quite the opposite, isn't it?

[LoudNoise]

Ideas for the integration of Thunderbird with LibreOffice is interesting, especially the "Directions for Thunderbird’s legal and financial home" section.

Interesting article. One point-- transferring trademark issues from Mozilla (USA) to TDF (Germany) won't be much of an issue. A simple Thunderbird foundation could be created in the USA, buy the rights to trademarks, and then license the marks to TDF for $1.00 a year.

[tonymec]

Interesting, there is now a merge of comm-central and mozilla-central
http://hg.mozilla.org/projects/cypress/file
I was able to build Thunderbird successfully from there. Since Mitchell Bakers memo I thought Mozilla wants to split Firefox from Thunderbird to develop both separately. This is quite the opposite, isn't it?

See this BMO bug, especially the recent developments, and this tb-planning thread. This Cypress project is to allow Thunderbird and SeaMonkey to develop independently from Firefox, by having (ultimately) within comm-central a clone of mozilla-central which would not have to be identical with the latest mozilla-central. It would also allow Mitchell and others to stop caring about Thunderbird and SeaMonkey, and in particular they could remove from (Firefox's) mozilla-central everything that is used by Thunderbird and SeaMonkey but not by Firefox, hopefully with no ill effects for the former two.