Dear all,
on Monday, Mozilla Foundation has decided to reduce development
resources on the email/PIM programme Thunderbird after version 17
expected by November this year (please see the links below this email),
basically to to bug fixes only.
Besides my personal disagreement with the analysis behind that decision
(underlying assumption of their decision: there is not room for
innovation in PIM programmes), I assume that Mozilla's decision will
have severe impact on the uptake of LibreOffice. The often promoted and
natural combination of office programmes (if not Microsoft Office) is
LibreOffice/OpenOffice together with Thunderbird/Lightning. Both are
suitable for companies/organisations/universities and both are
cross-platform.
After that decision, the uptake of Thunderbird installations will go
down in the long run (and even now IT staff will have hard time to
convince management to migrate to a "dying" - exaggerated of course -
platform). The result is that LibreOffice misses a competitive PIM
programme vs. MS Office. This will unevitably reduce LibreOffice uptake.
In bigger and cross-platform installations, there are no real Open
Source alternatives to Thunderbird/Lightning. In my opinion, it will
have quite some negative impact on LibreOffice.
The main question of my email is whether the Documentfoundation shall
act and, contact the Mozilla foundation and discuss the severity of
their decision. Whether they revise their decision or to discuss other
strategies to reduce development costs, i.e. better involve actors and
start a real donation challenge like the Documentfoundation did it (and
there Mozilla has the advantage that the website shown during
Thunderbird start could be used for such a message).
Best greetings,
Gerry
Mozilla's decision:
https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2012-July/thread.html#1639
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