Mozilla Dumping TB?
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orealius
- Posts: 443
- Joined: June 15th, 2005, 2:16 pm
Mozilla Dumping TB?
Is Mozilla dumping TB?....I got a message on the bottom of the Inbox when I opened TB this morning but I can't retrieve the message. Something about Mozilla no longer funding TB and asking for donations. Is this real? Where does one send donations to keep TB alive and well?
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lasardo
- Posts: 182
- Joined: September 9th, 2018, 1:41 pm
Re: Mozilla Dumping TB?
Nothing new is changing AFAIK. This should give you some more information: https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/ Mozilla has not been in charge of Thunderbird since 2014. The developers of Thunderbird, similarly, are not in charge of the Gecko browser engine. Thunderbird would like to keep old extensions working, even while using secure browser engine code. Thunderbird version 60 does an admirable job of this - many extensions still work, and it has the security patches from Firefox 60 ESR keeping it essentially up to date. It will be more difficult to do the same mid next year when Firefox 68 ESR comes out, and the year after will be even more difficult.
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tanstaafl
- Moderator
- Posts: 49647
- Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm
Re: Mozilla Dumping TB?
From the sticky thread at the top of the forum:
"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated". Mark Twain, New York Journal of 2 June 1897
The chair of the Mozilla Foundation stated that Mozilla will stop developing Thunderbird in a July 2012 post that has been widely mis-interpreted as meaning Thunderbird is dead. Part of the bad PR was caused by people not being aware that the community had already been doing a significant amount of the development, and that the community did not agree with his conclusion that "it is already pretty much what its users want and mostly needs some on-going maintenance". Many people are also unaware that another project survived after Mozilla stopped development. SeaMonkey was created 12 years ago after Mozilla stopped releasing new versions of the former Mozilla Application Suite. It is now a thriving community-driven product.
The Thunderbird project is not dead, it has become a community lead project. It continues to uses Mozilla as its legal and fiscal home but is now a independent project. It is in the midst of moving to its own infrastructure. While the project primarily relies upon unpaid volunteers the Thunderbird Council (the governing body for the project) has hired several contractors and full time employees. There is a community manager, a infrastructure engineer, a build & release engineer and a continuous integration engineer. They have announced they are looking to hire three more engineers ("frontend engineer for XUL replacements, an engineer to support our add-ons strategy, and one focused on technical debt in the backend") and a manager.
I need to update that part of the thread. They've filled those three positions and are trying to hire more engineers. I think they've finished moving to their own infrastructure.
See https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/about/ for how to donate. Note the "While Thunderbird is now an independent project separate from Mozilla, Mozilla has agreed to collect donations on our behalf." You don't have to use the methods on that web page to donate, the FAQ explains how/where to donate by check for example.
"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated". Mark Twain, New York Journal of 2 June 1897
The chair of the Mozilla Foundation stated that Mozilla will stop developing Thunderbird in a July 2012 post that has been widely mis-interpreted as meaning Thunderbird is dead. Part of the bad PR was caused by people not being aware that the community had already been doing a significant amount of the development, and that the community did not agree with his conclusion that "it is already pretty much what its users want and mostly needs some on-going maintenance". Many people are also unaware that another project survived after Mozilla stopped development. SeaMonkey was created 12 years ago after Mozilla stopped releasing new versions of the former Mozilla Application Suite. It is now a thriving community-driven product.
The Thunderbird project is not dead, it has become a community lead project. It continues to uses Mozilla as its legal and fiscal home but is now a independent project. It is in the midst of moving to its own infrastructure. While the project primarily relies upon unpaid volunteers the Thunderbird Council (the governing body for the project) has hired several contractors and full time employees. There is a community manager, a infrastructure engineer, a build & release engineer and a continuous integration engineer. They have announced they are looking to hire three more engineers ("frontend engineer for XUL replacements, an engineer to support our add-ons strategy, and one focused on technical debt in the backend") and a manager.
I need to update that part of the thread. They've filled those three positions and are trying to hire more engineers. I think they've finished moving to their own infrastructure.
See https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/about/ for how to donate. Note the "While Thunderbird is now an independent project separate from Mozilla, Mozilla has agreed to collect donations on our behalf." You don't have to use the methods on that web page to donate, the FAQ explains how/where to donate by check for example.