New perspective concerning the Thunderbird closure

Aug 14, 2007 09:18 GMT  ·  By

A few weeks ago, the Thunderbird producer Mozilla announced that it will abandon the development process of the famous email client but the application will be improved with the help of a few engineers and an impressive community of users. However, numerous comments posted on the Mozilla website accuse the parent company of being manipulated by the search giant Google which was also involved into the closure of Thunderbird.

According to some messages, Mozilla abandoned the email client because Google is one of the main partners that bring money to the company which also wants to boost the success of Gmail. If you didn't know, Google is more and more focused on Gmail, the web-based mail service that seems to evolve into a real online mail client since the company introduced the Mail Fetcher function.

"Since Google is a primary funder of the Mozilla Foundation, and since Google is actively developing and offering their own enterprise-grade e-mail ecosystem via Gmail and Google Apps, maybe they are wanting to kill off or hinder the development of Thunderbird to 'encourage' those wanting to ditch the Outlook/Exchange juggernaut to move to Google," Vaughn Reid, a user who commented the Thunderbird closure wrote according to PC World.

The official response was quite relevant when it comes to the deal between the Mountain View based company and Mozilla: "I want to be as clear as possible about the complete lack of Google involvement. Google and Google products had nothing to do with this decision, we did not ask Google about Thunderbird product planning, Thunderbird revenue, Gmail product planning or Gmail revenue, and we did not ask Google's opinion," Mozilla Corp.'s CEO Mitchell Baker, replied for the same source.

As you surely know, you can download the latest version of Mozilla Thunderbird straight from Softpedia using this link.