Mozilla Opens Thunderbird Email Subsidiary 186
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.
Exchange Server? (Score:2, Interesting)
I can has program improvements? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I know, wishful thinking, good luck.
Better Search Sounds Good (Score:5, Interesting)
The company producing the software, Stata Labs [statalabs.com], sold the technology to Yahoo in 2004. It has since been resold to Corel for use in their WordPerfect Mail.
Never let reality temper imagination
Flooded client market; use standards (Score:2, Interesting)
Encryption (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, what I'd like to see is an e-mail client that comes by default with working encryption... that is to say, it tells other e-mail clients what encryption choices it offers and learns from messages it receives and always chooses the best encryption option when sending messages to others. Further, I'd like that choice to handle when I send a message to a CC list of 30 people, such that it will send messages to all users, some encrypted and some not, but still letting all users get the full CC list for responses. Ideally I'd like to see this built upon an open standard that has buy in not only from the Thunderbird team, but also other major vendors (IBM, Sun, Apple, etc.) as well as other types of software (IM, VoIP, video conferencing, etc.)
Seriously, in this day and age doesn't ist seem idiotic that easy to use encryption is not a built in feature for most e-mail clients? I know why Google hasn't done this (they have a conflict of interest) but what have e-mail software vendors been doing for the last 5 years? How is it possible that someone like Apple hasn't jumped on this and made a snarky advert where the "Mac guy" says, "Oh really, I put my mail in envelopes so random strangers and people at the post office can't read the letters I send to my bank and girlfriend."
Re:The real story (Score:5, Interesting)
Polishing the current Thunderbird is (at least from the impression I get) actually one of the main goals for Thunderbird 3. It's not all that exciting to talk about, so it only got the "a set of other user interface improvements" line in davida's article, but it's definitely known that making the program just a little bit better in many small ways (my personal pet peeve on this plane is not being able to search across all accounts) would make it hugely more useful for many people, and just good enough for a whole bunch of new potential users.
And no, spinning Mozilla Messaging off actually means it has the chance to finally get the attention it deserves. The Mozilla Corporation has been totally focussed on Firefox (since that's their big cashcow, and it's hard to do two things well), and the Mozilla Foundation is mostly just an oversight and broad planning organization, so a separate organization was needed to let email stand on its own. The Mozilla Foundation hopes that Mozilla Messaging will find its own source of income fairly soon, but they're heavily investing in it right now, and I suspect that if Mozilla Messaging is successful in furthering the goals from the Mozilla Manifesto [mozilla.org], but without attracting a lot of income of its own, that funding will just keep on coming (bankrolled by the money Firefox earns). That's pure speculation on my part, and obviously MoFo won't say anything like that, because that would remove much of the incentive for Mozilla Messaging to find its own sources of funding - but it'd make sense.
How is the Penelope project affected? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Open source and standards ftw! (Score:5, Interesting)
As much as I might like Linux and OSS ideologies to replace Windows and MS, I honestly believe you would have to be living in dream land to think that MS is all of the sudden going to implode, let alone do it within the next 2-3 years. Just like Firefox has slowly and steadily taken market share from IE6+7, Linux will slowly and steadily take market share from Windows.
Why won't it happen fast? Firefox is a (if not the) poster child OSS program, and receives a significant amount of word of mouth advertising. It is free (in many ways, but cost is the only one that the vast majority cares about), and is almost 100% of the time rated as better than IE in reviews. And yet despite all these reasons its (albeit growing) market share is around 15%, compared to the vastly worse IE 6's 42ish% and IE 7's 32ish%.
Obviously, technical superiority and free-ness are not good enough reasons to get everyone to switch over in one big surge. Over time as Linux and OSS software in general continues to improve, the momentum to change will increase, but this change will not happen overnight. Here's to hoping for a majority market share in the next 3-4 years, but I wouldn't bet money on anything less than 6 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if it took 10 or more.
I'm not trying to be pessimistic or defeatist, but rather realistic. If it weren't for the fact that I am a tech nerd and encouraged people to switch I think nearly all my friends and family would still be using IE, let alone know what Linux is.
*Disclaimer: Yes I realize no market share analyzer is 100%, or even 90% accurate, and yes I realize these often have a tendency to under-represent Linux, but these statistics do give at least a general idea of where the majority is at.
Re:Encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
The last version I tried only supported SMIME which was not on by default and did not generate a key by default. It also was a pain when dealing with any other client since it includes an attachment to the file, which most people assume is a virus. Random chars in your sig are okay, but attachments are not in a normal work environment. It never seemed to learn that those addresses don't have SMIME support and stop sending them and did not handle CC's as I outlined above, making group discussions a mess. Basically, I had to know about it and set it up, and then it was still so user unfriendly I had to disable it. If this has changed in a recent version, please let me know. I'll try it again in a few months anyway, but I don't have a lot of hope.
Happiness = free, stable centralized calendering (Score:2, Interesting)
Give the money to KDE (Score:4, Interesting)
I am convinced that this question is irrelevant. (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I think that in trying to emulate outlook in this respect, open source projects such as thunderbird have lost the innovative edge that other OSS projects have. I am convinced that Exchange Server is as good as dead and google docs is going to kill it. Google docs does everything that Exchange Server does, and it is in many respects better. It is innovative (labeling, for example), and most importantly, you don't need a client of any kind to use it. Just a web browser and there is no client side configuration at all. From an IT side, it is certainly easier to deploy and manage than Exchange server. Google already offers domain accounts for free, I think at least in part to prevent small and growing businesses from getting hooked on Exchange in the first place.
I bet that in the near future google is going to start selling the software that runs google docs for clients to run on their own servers. I would also bet that they will develop Exchange Server migration tools soon.
However, there is no reason why an open source project could not have done this. In the arena of website content management systems, open source projects such as TYPO3, Joomla! and phpwebsite are the leaders because instead of trying to emulate Microsoft Frontpage, they came up with good, innovative solutions oriented toward real people. Similarly, SugarCRM and phpBMS are leaders in small to medium business client management systems for the same reason: instead of emulating Microsoft Access, they are innovative, powerful, easily managed web-based solutions. None of these projects are less ambitious than google docs.
In getting so hung up on the question you just posed, we are going to see yet another generation of Outlook clones that will never be as good as Outlook because the open source developers cannot take the Exchange Server apart like Outlook developers can. We should stop asking that question and start asking what we can do to make that question irrelevant.
No mention of Eudora (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it would be a shame if all we got out of Qualcomm's Eudora are some very superficial changes (new buttons, etc). Then again, maybe I have an overly rosey memory of Eudora and it really didn't have much to contribute.
While I have my little soap-box, how come Thunderbird doesn't start off with a Junk email folder so that I can mark something as Junk and have it go to that folder? Apparently, there are people out there who don't get Junk email!
Re:I am convinced that this question is irrelevant (Score:4, Interesting)
Including sit physically secure in my server room? I hate Exchange too, and also think email clients should stick to email instead of adding the kitchen sink, but Google isn't going to kill MS until people can have control over the hardware it runs on.
Re:I am convinced that this question is irrelevant (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The real story (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullocks.
As far as I see, this is their chance to quietly get rid of Thunderbird without making it look like they are ditching it.
Who is the big funder of the mozilla (firefox) project now? Google. Why? So they have a nice browser to use their search engine and show their ads that MS can't set with MSN as the default search engine/ad-shower. They want everyone to have that firefox instead of IE, since Google doesn't make a browser of their own.
Now what about email? Google has gmail. They'd like you to use it so they can mine all your data, show you ads, etc. Why would they want to provide you with an email client that would get set to other mail servers as much or more often then their own? They have no interest in such an email client, and definitely no interest in funding it. Therefore, it's being pushed out of the next on it's own to find it's own funding or wither and die.
Evolution is not enough (Score:4, Interesting)
I happen to be one of the unfortunate masses whose employer insists on MS Exchange for all its scheduling needs. Since I work on a linux box, this is a constant source of frustration. My day job will become noticeably easier if the OpenChange [openchange.org] project yields a solid and reasonably featured open source Exchange client.
Re:The real story (Score:4, Interesting)
So basically, Mozilla is telling Thunderbird people, "go find your own sugar daddy, we're not sharing ours." All this talk of a new messaging platform is obviously a way of attracting funding. But I'm not optimistic that it will be forthcoming.
Hopefully I'm wrong. Because if I'm not, Thunderbird's progress, already slow, will cease altogether. And then it won't matter who's humming the show.
Re:I am convinced that this question is irrelevant (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason it isn't working is because there are too many open-source exchange like projects. Therefore, none of them gets all of the features which are needed.
To succeed, they should bundle all forces and create ONE solution.
When we were looking for a Groupware solution, I have tried several open source solutions.
They all failed in one of the following:
- Open source Outlook connector isn't working properly;
- PDA synchronization is poor (of doesn't support a lot of devices);
- No windows client exists;
- Features were missing.
In the end, they all failed the pilot.
So we ended up with Novell Groupwise (through Novell Open Workgroup suite), which I have become a great fan of. It also made me see the immaturity of the open source projects.
Groupwise includes -any- feature our users are asking for, while the open source solutions lacked a lot of things.
Also, with Groupwise Mobile Server it is possible to synchronize mail, contacts, appointments with any smartphone over GPRS. (A feature we are using very intensively, since it's actually a complete blackberry alternative for no additional cost)
If you look at the development model of Groupwise you can clearly see why open source can't succeed.
For one, Groupwise has been developed for at least 10 years.
Also, Novell purchases all kinds of company's or additional products to quickly add a lot of extra features in the standard package they sell.
Since the open source movement has to develop everything themselves and didn't have such a large head-start, it is almost impossible for them to succeed.