Following last Wednesday’s announcement that Mozilla is evaluating alternatives for a new organizational model for Thunderbird as a project, people (including me) has been reacting in blogs and media outlets alike raising concerns what this could mean for Thunderbird as a product and Mozilla as an open source project.

Fortunately and as expected, Mitchell Baker, Mozilla CEO is already addressing some of these valid concerns.

In her first take she strongly denies the “Google wants Thunderbird dead” theory. It really didn’t come to my mind but it’s good to see it clarified anyways.

Later she addressed my concern regarding how trimming an email product aligns with Mozilla mission of strengthening the Internet as a platform and a public service and good. My concern only grew after reading Thunderbird Lead Engineer Scott McGregor’s view on the topic. In his post his understanding is that Mozilla is about advancing the open web.

Mitchell reaffirms Mozilla is about the Internet and not the web alone: “The Mozilla mission is very broad; broad enough to encompass many aspects of human interaction with the Internet.”

So, as usual with this kind of discussions, it’s not a binary decision of whether it’s aligned or not with Mozilla’s mission which definitely it does. Instead, is is about whether it is the most effective way for Mozilla to get involved with Internet messaging. And since the doubt exists, Mozilla, as it is currently organized, may not be the most appropriate environment for Thunderbird to develop. At least that’s my reading from this paragraph: “We are trying to figure out the best way to use resources effectively. This includes Thunderbird, this includes a potential new approach to mail, and it includes new ideas that may emerge over time.”

And the problem with how Mozilla is currently organized is attention, or lack of it: “Each day the development team can work on Thunderbird, which serves its users well. Or they can work on Firefox, which affects a giant swath of the web industry, and serves a user base that is at least an order of magnitude larger.”, reads her latest post.  “[This] is not a good setting for Thunderbird to get sustained attention and focus. Hiring more people doesn’t solve the problem. It doesn’t change the equation for determining relative attention.”

Lack of attention is an understandable concern to prompt the task of looking for alternatives on how to set an appropriate environment for Thunderbird development. I’ve read somewhere else that team Thunderbird at Mozilla Corporation is just 2 or 3 persons. The numbers alone evidence what Mitchell refers to in the previous quote and Scott notes in his latest update on the topic: “[For] example a dedicated Thunderbird build engineer, will make a huge difference. In fact, just that one person would have enabled us to release Thunderbird 2.0 a couple of months earlier.”

Now, every company has a star product. That’s Firefox. But that doesn’t (necessarily) mean it has to get rid of the others but could instead create a new division with a different support team. This sounds like Option 2: creating a Mozilla Foundation subsidiary like Mozilla Corporation that would develop and market Thunderbird, with its own complete team to ensure the timely attention Thunderbird deserves.

Unfortunately this would mean duplicate costs in some cases: double accounting, double legal department, double IT infrastructure. So what about a Mozilla Shared Services? The Mozilla Corporation and Thunderbird Corporation would focus in development and marketing alone while Mozilla Shared Services would provide all the other support services. This could also ease the ability of Mozilla to embrace new projects and allocate resources more efficiently but would also mean an even bigger effort to set this new organization.

There are still some points for Mitchell to address. I must note how unique is the possibility to participate in this discussion. even for an open source project given the visibility and media coverage Mozilla enjoys.

More interesting takes on the Thunderbird topic:

• Gervase Markham
• Myk Melez
• Alex Vincent
• Robert Kaiser
• Robert Accettura
• Tristan Nitot