Sunday, July 8, 2012

Mozilla Stops Development Of Thunderbird

An internal e-mail from Mozilla states that tomorrow there will be an announcement as to the future of the open source e-mail client. Already people on the project have been moved to other projects. The line is "continued innovation of Thunderbird is not the best use of our resources given our ambitious organizational goals".

Not what exactly does that mean? Is Mozilla going to save the world? Not likely. It's a software company, nothing more, nothing less. While the argument is that people are moving to mobile or web-based clients (Gmail, I guess, although I've never used it that way), the fact remains that if you want a real e-mail client that collects all your mail from multiple addresses, you need a desktop client.

I use it because although my main e-mail is Gmail, I also have an e-mail address that my ISP gives me. So instead of logging in & out of those two, I let Thunderbird handle it. I have no desire to spend $150 on Office so I can use Outlook, or register with Microsoft so I can use Windows Live. Plus I don't know if that is any good.

Mozilla is saying, at least as of Friday, that it's not going away, they will still do security updates, but how long will that last? And will anyone out there in the open source community take over development or make a fork like Libre Office forked off of Open Office? Only time will tell.

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