Like many other people, I was somewhat perplexed by the Summer announcement of the Mozilla Foundation that Thunderbird would be further developed by a separate structure, a spin-off of the Mozilla Foundation.

The foundation has a huge heap of money generated by Firefox (Google donates a lot of it), whereas Thunderbird generates no significant revenue. Separating structures means that the Mozilla Foundation will have to inject cash (currently $3M as seed funding) to keep the new structure running until it is self-sustaining (which probably won’t happen overnight). It also means that Thunderbird will lose some of the huge visibility associated with the Mozilla Foundation.

From a strategic standpoint, I was perplexed. So I assumed that other, internal considerations went into play. Accounting, management, organizational reasons; whatever; I don’t know.

Last month, the new structure (dubbed Mailco for now) was finally announced.

Just a few days ago, both full-time (paid) lead developers of Thunderbird announced, in turn, they would leave the foundation next Friday. They will continue working on Thunderbird as (unpaid) volunteers. They didn’t explain why they were leaving, one can only assume they disagree with the new setup.

So now I’m even more perplexed. Things don’t seem to bode very well for Thunderbird, at least in the immediate future.

Note: from now on, my articles will be tagged either en or fr according to the language they’re written in, as I don’t intend to translate every article. This will hopefully make it a tiny bit easier for readers. I haven’t yet figured out a way to generate separate RSS feeds for that, though.