Firefox and Thunderbird: A Fork in the Road

Re:Firefox and Thunderbird: A Fork in the Road by r3bl on Tuesday April 26, 2016 @05:04PM (#11575616)

I honestly hope that LibreOffice will take over the development of Thunderbird. They seem to be doing an excellent job at running a successful open source project and Mozilla looks like it lost its course a couple of years ago (before someone asks me why I think that: https://blog.r3bl.me/en/mozilla-dissatisfaction/)

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Re:Firefox and Thunderbird: A Fork in the Road by wsha on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @10:26AM (#11580681)

There are some parallels between LibreOffice and Thunderbird that make The Documentation Foundation's adoption of Thunderbird attractive.

1. Both LibreOffice and Thunderbird are desktop implementations of applications for which most of the recent momentum has been behind web-based implementations (Google docs, GMail, Office 365, etc.). So TDF is used to the desktop vs. web dynamic.

2. Both LibreOffice and Thunderbird has large installations in business/government environments.

3. Both LibreOffice and Thunderbird started out being governed by different organizations and would be adopted by TDF (slightly different situation for LibreOffice which was a fork, though Thunderbird will be forking off its shared base with Firefox). So TDF is used to adopting legacy code and continuing to evolve it.

That said, I hope the TDF scrutinizes Thunderbird and only takes it on if it is confident that Thunderbird fits into its overall mission and infrastructure. In recent times I have liked what I have seen from TDF and been somewhat disappointed by Mozilla, so I wouldn't Thunderbird to hamper LibreOffice's momentum.

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