14 DAY TRIAL // A Mozilla-commissioned audit to explore the future of the Thunderbird email client has revealed that two other open source foundations are willing to take the reins of Thunderbird development from Mozilla's hands or at least listen to pitches.
The man behind this audit is Simon Phipps, a well-known consultant in the world of open source and digital rights. According to his report, the Software Freedom Conservancy and The Document Foundation are the two organizations that have shown palpable interest in Thunderbird.
Thunderbird definitely has a future
The organization that showed the most interest is the Software Freedom Conservancy, a US-based non-profit organization that's the current host of projects such as Git, BusyBox, Samba, and Wine, and a former host of past projects like jQuery and Mifos.
In Mr. Phipps' words, "[the Software Freedom ] Conservancy is willing to host Thunderbird" and "Conservancy’s Evaluation Committee has approved Thunderbird as a new member."
The second interested party is The Document Foundation (TDF), a German-based international non-profit charity, host of the famous LibreOffice office suite.
Mr. Phipps assessment of TDF reveals a complicated situation. According to his report, TDF is "willing to consider hosting Thunderbird."
Apparently, the current TDF Board has deferred the final decision regarding hosting the Thunderbird project to the new Board. This process also implies that, in the upcoming future, the Thunderbird Council must make an official request to TDF to host the project. TDF also said that if Thunderbird is accepted, this doesn't mean automatic integration with the LibreOffice suite.
Other foundations were approached but declined
Mr. Phipps also took it upon himself to contact other famous open source foundations on behalf of the Thunderbird project and inquire about the possibility of taking over Thunderbird from Mozilla.
The GNOME Foundation showed interest in the beginning, but after further discussions among Board members, the foundation said, "that now is not a good time for GNOME to consider such a significant change."
Software In The Public Interest, another US non-profit created to allow the Debian Project to take in donations and that has expanded to many other open source projects such as Drupal, FFMpeg, OpenWrt, Arch Linux, and PostgreSQL, was also approached.
The organization was quick to point out that they don't generally "provide extensive technical infrastructure," nor do they "engage in community governance directly."
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) was not approached at all, mainly because of its scope. ASF has always focused on developer tools and server-side software, and after taking over the OpenOffice project, it still hasn't fully integrated the project into its regular infrastructure, still using SourceForge.
A similar project like Thunderbird will likely not be of interest to ASF since it would require a separate staff and development infrastructure.
The Thunderbird Foundation?
The last option Mr. Phipps explored was a separate entity called the Thunderbird Foundation. "I would not recommend this option as a first step," Mr. Phipps noted. "However, it may become appropriate in the future for Thunderbird to separate from its new host and become a full independent entity, and the ability to do this should be considered in selecting a new home."
Mozilla released Thunderbird in 2004. The project still shares a lot of code with Firefox since it uses Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine and was unofficially left for dead in 2012 , when the Foundation stopped adding any new features.
Mozilla made it official this past December, when they announced they would be willing to part ways with the project and only focus on Firefox.