Change of release and governance model for Thunderbird

Hello Mozillians:

On Monday Mitchell Baker will be posting on the future of Thunderbird.
We'd like you to be aware of it before it goes public.  However, this
is *confidential* until the post is pushed live Monday afternoon PDT.
Please don't tweet, blog or discuss on public mailing lists before
then.

In summary, we've been focusing efforts towards important web and
mobile projects, such as B2G, while Thunderbird remains a pure
desktop-only email client. We have come to the conclusion that
continued innovation on Thunderbird is not the best use of our
resources given our ambitious organizational goals.  The most critical
needs for the product are on-going security and stability for our 20+
millions users.

However, Thunderbird is one of the very few truly free and open source
multi-platform email applications available today and we want to
defend these values.  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. 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.

We are going to open this plan for public discussion to individuals
and organizations interested in maintaining and advancing Thunderbird
in the future on Monday. We are looking for your feedback, comments
and suggestions to refine and adapt the plan in the best possible way
throughout the summer so we can share a final plan of action in early
September 2012.

If you have any questions prior to Monday please reach out to me
[[email protected]] or Mitchell [[email protected]].  Again, this
information is for Mozillians-only until Mitchell's post goes live.

Regards,

Jb Piacintino
Thunderbird Managing Director


Additional information:

    New release and governance model for Thunderbird will be available
    here concurrently to Mitchell's post:
    https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Proposal:_New_Release_and_Governance_Model

        Info on Modules and Thunderbird owners:
        https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules


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##################### A Comment From the Paster ######################

Oh, you'd like to repudiate the headline?  Not necessarily because it's
inaccurate, but because, well... it just hasn't been massaged into the
right form, has it?

This:
    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. 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.

Means this:
    The Thunderbird team at the Mozilla Corporation (the one absorbed
    from Mozilla Messaging) will be essentially dissolved.  A few will
    be allowed to continue development as their primary "assignment",
    in a token gesture.  Others *will* continue to work on
    Thunderbird, of course, but it will be in their free time.  In
    that sense, they could just as well be spending their time
    analyzing the history of East Asian pottery glazing techniques,
    but with this, we'll be able to point to them and say "Look!
    See?  They're-- C'mon, they're still there.  See?"

    This will happen in a half-sincere* hope that a "community-driven"
    model will come up and take over, leaving unpaid volunteers and
    contemporary open source companies to fill the gaps.

    (*) Whether or not this is successful is not really much a
    concern.

And a more broadly focused post script that won't necessarily make
sense to those outside Mozilla (or even a good chunk of those within):

The fact that this message was marked "confidential" is part of a
deeply, deeply troubling trend.  The biggest irony?  Uninitiated
employees--those being discussed in .governance right now, and who
feel that there's actually quite a lot at Mozilla that shouldn't
happen in the public--will point to this incident to try to make their
point, in a tremendous display of Not Fucking Getting It.

Let's rewind a year or three, MoCo.