Mozilla Messaging, Out and About

The Mozilla Foundation announced yesterday that it opened Mozilla Messaging to develop its free, open source Thunderbird email software. Thunderbird was put on hold back in autumn, but now they're taking it on again and the foundation sees a bright future ahead of it.

David Ascher, Mozilla Messaging's CEO, started with the premise that "email is broken": "Email and other forms of internet communications present us with a paradox. The stunning proportion of our days spent communicating online clearly indicates that as a society, we are more intricately connected via the internet than ever before….Yet as the number of such interactions grows, and as the number of ways in which we interact grows, the joy that communication can bring is too often replaced by frustration, confusion, or stress. One common short-hand for the above is to say, somewhat flippantly, that 'email is broken'."

Initially, Mozilla Messaging will focus on developing Thunderbird 3 and adding to its slew of services some new ones, like calendaring, enhancing the search and the overall user experience at that, as the statement went. The open source model will of course be kept, combining the small work force employed with contributors around the world.

"….we see our primary role as that of facilitating collaborative approaches to problem solving and incremental progress, through a combination of leadership and facilitation work. This is an unusual approach, and it can be chaotic and slow. But it seems to have worked well for Firefox and the web, and I believe it can work well for Thundebird and email," Asch mentioned.

Let's not forget here that the Mozilla Foundation managed to come up with Firefox, a worthy competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. As the battle rages on between the two browsers, the overall feel is that Mozilla's offspring is catching up to the veteran Windows default by a few percentage points every year.