Dear all,on Monday, Mozilla Foundation has decided to reduce development resources on the email/PIM programme Thunderbird after version 17 expected by November this year (please see the links below this email), basically to to bug fixes only.
Besides my personal disagreement with the analysis behind that decision (underlying assumption of their decision: there is not room for innovation in PIM programmes), I assume that Mozilla's decision will have severe impact on the uptake of LibreOffice. The often promoted and natural combination of office programmes (if not Microsoft Office) is LibreOffice/OpenOffice together with Thunderbird/Lightning. Both are suitable for companies/organisations/universities and both are cross-platform.
After that decision, the uptake of Thunderbird installations will go down in the long run (and even now IT staff will have hard time to convince management to migrate to a "dying" - exaggerated of course - platform). The result is that LibreOffice misses a competitive PIM programme vs. MS Office. This will unevitably reduce LibreOffice uptake. In bigger and cross-platform installations, there are no real Open Source alternatives to Thunderbird/Lightning. In my opinion, it will have quite some negative impact on LibreOffice.
The main question of my email is whether the Documentfoundation shall act and, contact the Mozilla foundation and discuss the severity of their decision. Whether they revise their decision or to discuss other strategies to reduce development costs, i.e. better involve actors and start a real donation challenge like the Documentfoundation did it (and there Mozilla has the advantage that the website shown during Thunderbird start could be used for such a message).
Best greetings, Gerry Mozilla's decision: https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/ https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2012-July/thread.html#1639 -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to marketing+help@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted