Mozilla Opens Thunderbird Email Subsidiary

alphadogg is one of several readers to note the opening of the Mozilla Foundation's new subsidiary, Mozilla Messaging, charged with developing the free, open source Thunderbird email software. Mozilla Messaging will initially focus on Thunderbird 3, which aims at improving several aspects of the software, including integrated calendaring and better search. ZDNet UK's coverage leads with the interest the new organization has in developing instant-messaging software.

Open source and standards ftw!

[Tibor the Hun]

All these stories about open source software seem to be joining in a symphony that is ringing a death knoll for MS.
I guess not everything needs to be a MS killer, but where will they be once jabber based instant messaging, calDAV calendaring, and SSL IMAP are commonplace, easily integrated, federated and administered?
What FireFox did to their web dominance, these open protocols, standards and software will do to the rest of their business. (Embarrass and decimate.)

What advantages will Exchange have over a system that integrates and works nicely on a dozen different hardware devices, from servers to phones, without having to pay MS a single dollar?
Sure they'll still have their Visual Studio and Office, but boy they'll be crying over how much money they should/could have been making.
Consider their failures:
-XBox
-XBox 360 (May be early to call it a complete failure, but now that HD-DVD is dead, sony will ride them like a reverse cowgirl)
-Live? wtf?
-MSN Search
-Windows Mobile

They are truly stuck in a rut, a rut that seems to be getting deeper and deeper. (I should add...Thanks to Linux, Mozilla, FOSS, open-ness in general and other ideas that MS simply can't comprehend.)

Shared Calendars are what's needed

[sasha328]

Email is not what people are after. Dopn't get me wrong, people want to send and receive email. That's a no brainer, but, there are a myriad to clients out there that do the job quite well. Some of the clients are stand-alone and some are web based.
Some of the clients also offer a "calendar" where you can store events.
However, what the world needs (to avoid Microsoft's dominance) is a shared calendaring system integrated into the same email client. I use Outlook at work. At the end of the day, I care nothing what I use to send emails with, but I do care that I can view others' calendars in Outlook, and that I can send them invites and see if they've got something in the calendar or not. That is what many people are looking for, not another email client.
This will never happen on the client side if there is no server backend to manage the data and the sharing permissions.
If you build it, people will come.
My two cents.

Re:Open source and standards ftw!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

All these stories about open source software seem to be joining in a symphony that is ringing a death knoll for MS.

I don't mean to rain on your parade, but I've been hearing that for at least 10 years now, be it with Linux or other non-Microsoft software ventures. Truth is, Microsoft is still there and it still beats the crap out of most of its competition by virtue of its monopolies.

I love Linux as much as the next guy, I use it professionally, but Microsoft is still the big rabid dog of a bad software company it's always been, and it won't go away anytime soon.

Re:Shared Calendars are what's needed

[ivan256]

You're right, of course...

However, I can't help but think we'd see double digit percentage productivity gains if such things didn't exist. Shared calendars mean that people can see you're available and book you up solid with meetings, leaving no time to work. There isn't even plausible deniability, because they can see your calendar. You have to schedule fake appointments for yourself to get some time to work.

Re:Open source and standards ftw!

[moderatorrater]

You're absolutely right. I'm sure that the XBox360's higher install number and sales rate that keeps pace with the PS3 [vgchartz.com] are all just a backwards sign of it's utter failure. With the rate that Windows is losing ground to Linux, it'll only be another 30 years before it's no longer the dominant player! Windows Mobile also being the dominant player in that field is a fluke, I'm sure, and it's going to fail soon. When you take those factors into account, they've only got a few decades of ridiculous power and profits! THEY'RE DOOMED!!!!

That is, unless they break into a new market or do just about anything else that keeps the status quo. Also, since Firefox hasn't cut IE's install rate to below 50%, the terms "embarrass" and "decimate" might be premature, although decimate does technically apply.

Re:Open source and standards ftw!

[jdoss]

I'm far from an MS fanboy but the only real failure I see on your list of "failures" is MSN Search. XBox did well enough, and XBox 360 is a definite win to the extent that it has creamed Sony with this generation of consoles so far. Live is a rebranding of their MSN services just as they've had forever... it can certainly be considered a failure in that it doesn't bring in the money it needs to or should, but I see that set of services as a stop-gap between them in everyone else. No need to give other companies the power and money that all those unsolicited IE programs opening to the Live homepage brings. And Windows Mobile? No doubt its crap, but there's also no doubt that its one of the standard bearers on the mobile market to this day.

Now if you think that Blue-Ray's win will give Sony a leg up, I can cede that point to you, but if there's no backward compatibility between the PS3 and earlier PS consoles, you're in for a rude awakening. People who've done their homework who care about it are not pleased. And people who have not done their homework and buy one anyway will be getting some severe buyer's remorse. Sony's fragmented their PS3 line 3 or 4 ways due reduce cost. Blue-Ray wins but it does not necessarily follow, at this point, that the PS3 will gain ground to the degree that people expect. The PS3 is, in the end, a gaming machine. Taking away the backwards compatibility aspect is a bad, bad decision I think they'll regret.

Re:The real story

[Otter]

The CEO of this new Mozilla Messaging company writes the most insightful blog post containing the most hopeful look at the future of messaging ...

Out of curiosity, what do you think is so insightful about it? Ascher seems enthusiastic, and a pleasant guy to work for, but I didn't see any specific novel ideas in there, just a lot of "Email is important...room for improvement...add useful features...listen to our users" boilerplate.

It also struck me as odd that a decade after Netscape stuck email into the web browser and few years after Firefox stripped it back out, he's proposing to put it back in!

Re:The real story

[fm6]

That's all very interesting, and a lot of Ascher's ideas sound really good. But before they start converting Thunderbird into the Collaboration Platform for the 21st Century[TM], I wish they'd spend a little time polishing up its rough edges. Nothing major, just irritating stuff like there not being keyboard shortcuts for all the editing commands.

Another thing: does Mozilla spinning off Thunderbird mean that it will get even a smaller share of their revenue for R&D? Tbird has not exactly been growing and improving by leaps and bound, and the Mozilla foundation seems to have little interest in it. Spinning it off into a separate organization sounds suspiciously like they're just plain cutting it loose. And if the new TBird org can't find it's own funding, the mail client's future is anything but bright.

Re:Exchange Server?

[Sorthum]

Lord I hope so. Right now we're approaching it from the other end; using Zimbra to support Outlook users. I'd love to offer a complete groupware solution that worked cross-platform...

Re:Instant messaging eh?

[Tarlus]

Supports "the big four." And then some. [pidgin.im]

Re:Open source and standards ftw!

[Anonymous Coward]

I kind of agree. I think too much is made of beating Windows and replacing it with any alternative, where most users don't want to buy in to that zealotry (or perfect ideal, depending on your viewpoint). What would make a big difference is to let users keep Windows and slowly undermine the applications they run on there - reducing the marketshare of Office would stick MS where it really hurts.

If thunderbird could beat Outlook and Exchange then that'd be quite something - but it'd need to integrate very easily with Active Directory, and Exchange calendaring (or no existing Outlook user could user it). Nobody really cares about integrated IM though, the challenge lies in making it work with what the user currently uses.

That's partly how firefox made it - you could replace IE with it and continue to do everything you used to do. Its a shame I cannot replace Outlook with Thunderbird in the same way.

Re:Shared Calendars are what's needed

[rabiddeity]

I agree that calendars are necessary for corporate deployment. But while you mentioned other stand-alone clients, where are they? I need something that doesn't suck security-wise (*cough* Outlook Express), is supported on multiple platforms (sorry KMail), isn't packaged with a bunch of other stuff I don't need (no thanks, Seamonkey), is full-featured and graphical (I love you pine and mutt, but most users won't deal with a CLI), and doesn't have annoying interface bugs (Thunderbird, you are really on the edge here). First and foremost, I want a program that does email perfectly. A stand-alone client like that currently does not exist. (And don't tell me to go to webmail, I'm not going to put up with waiting several seconds between each email, and I need to be able to read my old mail and compose new mail on an airplane.)

Corporate users should have a "corporate plugin" with all the calendaring and shared address book stuff in there. Have it as an option during install, sure, but if I'm a home user I don't want the clutter of Outlook and I certainly don't want the bloat.

Re:Open source and standards ftw!

[moderatorrater]

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. The PS3 is certainly seeing inflated sales from being a bluray player, but you're going to have to make the argument that this marginalizes the numbers. Look at the sales of Devil May Cry 4 and you can see that they're roughly proportional to the install base of the two systems, ie the ratio of PS3 DMC 4 sales to XBox DMC4 sales is close to the ratio of XBox machines to PS3 machines.

Next, you're argument that 87% bought the system for watching movies isn't accurate, since the article doesn't claim they only watch movies, just that they had watched movies. Since they've offered free movies with the PS3 for most of its lifespan so far, most people who bought one for any reason have probably watched a blu ray movie on it.

To sum up, your argument relies on the supposition that buying the PS3 for one reason means that you're not going to use it for other reasons. This is silly.

Re:Instant messaging eh?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I've never seen an open source IM client that's adequately compatible with "the big four", ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and AIM.

Did you try Google? For me it lists 13 of them: SIM, Proteus, Pidgen(GAIM), OpenWengo, Miranda, Meebo, Kopete, Fire, Centericq, BitlBee, Ayttm, Agile Messenger, and Adium.

Is there a reason the guys at Cerulean can do IM so well where the open source community hasn't to date?

Trillian is a fine IM client, provided you only use Windows (don't need suport for other OS's) and don't mind paying for interoperability with some protocols. I used to use it when trapped on a Windows box at work years ago. That said, claiming the open source clients can't compete or don't exist just exposes that you've never bothered to look. For a reality check go look at the comments on arstechnica when the Trillian OS X client was announced. To summarize, the reaction was a big yawn, since there are several clients available on both Linux and OS X that are free (as in beer) and OSS and are as functional and polished or more. Heck Trillian doesn't even support OTR without a beta version of a third-party plug-in. In fact plug-ins only work on the pro "for pay" version so if you want to chat with something like a Google GTalk user, or XMPP over ZeroConf you have to shell out for a non-crippled version. If you're stuck using just Windows it is a reasonably easy answer, but I'd rather use Pidgin these days and probably Kopete within the next few months now that it is abstracted from the OS enough to be built for Windows and OS X.

Let me answer your question with a question. Why do you assume there are no OSS solutions instead of spending 2 minutes with Google?

Re:Shared Calendars are what's needed

[Knara]

Even so, the advent of such huge PIM and shared calendar technology, combined with the increasing use of blackberries, has made some corporate friends of mine never stop working. The technology enables their work to follow them home. My father had to turn off his blackberry when he got home because people would keep emailing and asking for meetings and so forth sometimes at horrible hours of night.

It is their choice to continue in jobs that encourage this sort of coworker behavior. Then again, if you're working for a very large (multinational?) corporation, the meeting request you just got at 1am may have come from someone in Germany. where it's an acceptable hour to be doing such things. But, then again, it's obvious that it wasn't a large problem for your father, since he TURNED IT OFF at night. Doesn't sound like it was much of an issue, does it.

Re:Flooded client market; use standards

[Nimey]

That's a stupid, terrible idea. Running an email server, especially one that won't puke under load, is expensive and time-consuming, and would be a distraction.

Mozilla.org should concentrate on their core stuff, the browser and email.