Over the weekend, news broke that Mozilla would no longer be developing its popular Thunderbird email client. Mitchell Baker wrote in a blog post that "continued innovation in Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla's product efforts." important web and mobile projects” such as Firefox OS or the Firefox web browser, and that “continued innovation on Thunderbird is not the best use of” resources.
While Thunderbird's managing director Jb Piacentino, mentioned in an email that was apparently leaked and verified.
"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. "
However according to Baker, the current plan for Thunderbird involves Mozilla switching to an "Extended Support Release" cycle (ESR), for bigger businesses, schools, etc that require a longer lead time before deploying software. While the 6 week release cycle will continue with what maintenance and security the Thunderbird community approves and the bug fixes will come from the ESR line.
Mozlla also notes: that the some of it feature may begin to change as well as a result of community contributions and module ownership.
Piacentino continues in the email: “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."
No doubt that Mozilla has been working on developing Firefox for mobile and being competitive while Baker writes in his post that “Most Thunderbird users seem happy with the basic email feature set. ...”
For more information and additional details about the Thunderbird Proposal: New Release and Governance Model read more here https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Pr ... ance_Model.
