Mozilla wants to disconnect Thunderbird from its infrastructure

Mozilla wants to decouple Thunderbird development from its infrastructure and development systems to focus entirely on Firefox. The foundation leaves open the option for the project to continue completely outside of Mozilla.

Thunderbird’s support is a burden on Firefox developers, and neither project gets the focus it needs, Mozilla chairman Mitchell Baker wrote in the foundation’s public governance forum. “These competing interests are not good for either project,” she says. “The competing interests are not going to get better, they’re probably going to get worse,” she says.

According to the chairman, there is a broad belief within Mozilla that the foundation should focus on activities such as Firefox because they can have an “industry-wide impact”. “With all due respect to Thunderbird and the community, we’ve been clear for years that Thunderbird doesn’t have this potential,” Baker wrote.

Thunderbird, she says, would be better off disconnected from its reliance on Mozilla development systems and partly on Mozilla technology. In addition to decoupling from the Mozilla infrastructure, she also talks about finding the “right legal and financial home base” for the project.

It is also clear that the foundation now receives donations for the project and therefore serves, at least temporarily, as a tax home for Thunderbird. “We are talking to at least one organization that is considering supporting Thunderbird,” said Mark Surman. He is an executive director at Mozilla.

When asked whether Thunderbird will now continue as a separate project within Mozilla or will be completely disconnected and continue under Apache, for example, Baker replies that this has not yet been decided. In 2012, Mozilla already announced that it would shift the development of the mail client more towards the community. However, Thunderbird and Firefox are still too intertwined, Mozilla believes.