In search of a home for Thunderbird

Posted May 5, 2016 12:50 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784)
In reply to: In search of a home for Thunderbird by roc
Parent article: In search of a home for Thunderbird

What about all the Mozilla service projects and products, though? I know that Mozilla has to have things that support various client-side features (albeit with some protests about some of those features, too), but I have the impression that there's a lot of focus on that these days. Of course, actually enumerating Mozilla's activities is frustrating if you try and find out about them by just clicking around on mozilla.org. Or as I noted in a not-yet-moderated comment on Mark Surman's blog:

I’ve made my opinions quite clear elsewhere about the way Thunderbird appears to have been managed, but I can easily add them here, too. As someone who has an interest in developing or improving Thunderbird, the whole “volunteer” experience is incoherent and frustrating. Just trying to find the canonical resources to get started is a challenge. Most Free Software projects these days lead you to the code very quickly, but Mozilla’s assets are just an unmaintained mess: not exactly what one would expect from such a well-resourced “Web company”; it’s probably easier to start from a GNU/Linux distribution package and follow the links to the upstream repository.

The Mozilla organisation seems to put vision ahead of the little things that, if done right, would go a long way to deal with the viability problems Thunderbird development is said to have. Should Mozilla be less well-resourced in future, its other products will suffer the same way unless the organisation learns how to focus on the basics.

If mozilla.org spent a tenth of the effort apparently directed towards advocacy on getting interested developers involved, maybe there would be more of a community around Thunderbird. Also, spending money on getting the difficult work done might help as well, rather than expecting people to do it around their day job and for nothing.