I think bringing Thunderbird fully under the umbrella of The Document
Foundation, and as a sister project of LibreOffice, is a fantastic idea,
it just makes the most sense to me as a formal and permanent home for
Thunderbird going forward.
The fact is, in spite of the fact that Thunderbird development has
actually improved dramatically ever since Mozilla 'killed it' thanks
*only* to the fantastic volunteers who stepped up, its long term future
is in jeopardy right now.
I would dearly love to see Thunderbird adopted, providing it the legal
infrastructure and resources it will need if it is to remain viable.
As both a long time Thunderbird user, since well before it reached
version 1.0, and supporting our 60+ Thunderbird users at our office this
entire time, I would be happy to provide assistance on this list. Not to
brag, but there are very few Thunderbird issues that I couldn't either
solve, or at least point you to the bug # covering the bug. And since
Lightning is now a bundled Addon, people have to explicitly 'opt out' of
Calendar functionality, so the fact that TB has a calendar is now much
more 'discoverable' for new users.
Anyway, I hope something comes of this...
Charles
On 2/26/2016 8:15 AM, Tom Davies <tomcecf@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi :)
How do people here feel about approaching the Thunderbird people to bring
them into the LibreOffice project a bit more? Perhaps they could become
the official default email client?
As most of you know - many organisations, particularly OpenSource ones,
have departments/sections/sub-groups that focus on supporting external
projects that are used within their own project. For example Ubuntu,
Redhat, openSuSE, Mageia, Fedora (and so on) each have people able to
help
their users deal with most issues to do with Thunderbird, LibreOffice and
many other apps. Typically such people can handle quite a lot of issues
but sometimes seek help from 'upstream' (such as to here if it's a
LibreOffice issue) or/and invite the user to take their issue upstream
themselves. Many of such people stay within one OS and help with many
apps
within that OS but some support the same app in many different OSes.
There
are even generic forums, such as "LinuxQuestions.org" that handle a lot
of
different OSes.
This mailing list has helped quite a few people with "off topic" issues,
such as helping with other apps or choosing a good "gateway" distro (such
as Mint, Ubuntu etc) for people who want to break free of Windows or even
helping with quite detailed "off topic" issues in very geeky Gnu&Linux
OSes
(such as Slackware). Also there's a good chance that some people from
Thunderbird might start offering weeu's support through our support
systems, such as this mailing list - if we were welcoming and supportive.
How would people here feel about this mailing list offering support to
Thunderbird users, particularly ones who use LibreOffice as their Office
Suite?
Another option might be for "The Document Foundation" to fully take on
the
whole of the Thunderbird project, and bring in all of their
infrastructure
and maybe kinda merge parts together where it's easy enough to do so.
Personally i prefer this sort of approach The Mozilla Foundation chose
to
split TB away from their web-browser (a good linuxy thing to do) so they
could be more independent and therefore be used by people who use a wide
range of other web-browsers - also helping those few Firefox users who
were
using something else to benefit more from a more streamlined Firefox. A
few years ago Mozilla decided to drop almost all it's support for
TBeaving
it all to just volunteers. The TB volunteers have done a fantastic job
but
it would be great to give them a new home so they can "spread their
wings"
a lot more.
To me it seems that either way, or something similar would greatly
benefit
both (or even all 3!) separate projects.
It at long last would solve the main perceived 'blocker' that many people
seem to struggle with when trying to move away from MS Office = that LO
doesn't have a drop-in replacement for Outlook.
Although Outlook includes calendar functionality (and a lot more) it
seems
that the most frequent problem that people ask about is just about
emails.
On this mailing list it's even been suggested the TDF create a new email
client, but i think most of us already use TB anyway and it's probably
better to just use something that has a good, well-proven track-record
rather than try to cobble something together from scratch.
Some of us inevitably try to point out that there are many other choices
of
email client to suit particular niche-markets - such as Claws (for a much
smaller foot-print and thus faster on lower-spec machines) or Evolution
(for a totally complete "drop in replacement" for Outlook in terms of
look&feel (but has limited support and is not cross-platform, and can't
even cope outside the Gnome DE so it limits which versions of Gnu&Linux
it
can be used on)) and some really fancy ones with more project-management
functionality.
Such alternatives would still be available and supported but by having TB
as our default it would dissolve one more perceived 'blocker' . People
would no longer be forced into doing a tonne more research into which
email
client to choose, and TB would be the perfect one for the vast majority
of
them.
Microsoft and Apple seem to be successful largely because they remove
people's options and give them "Freedom FROM choice". The tech industry
seems to value that above almost anything else. As soon as there are
choices they start grumbling about "fragmentation", and that it's
difficult
to choose "which is best" because different use-cases may have different
requirements and therefore may need make slightly different choices. In
every other industry monopolies are seen as bad - choice and diversity
are
applauded as being "good competition" allowing "market forces" to help
drive innovation, efficiency and all that sort of thing.
In the Gnu&Linux world we fight hard to make sure there is "Freedom OF
choice", but a lot of people struggle when given options - they just want
to settle with what they are given and then grumble about it!
Giving people a default and then allowing them to easily replace it as
been
hugely successful for "gateway distros" and i think it would probably be
great for us too. How do other people here feel?
Also, just out of curiosity, do we happen to already have people here who
help other people with Thunderbird issues in another forum or support
network? We probably do already have some with some level of expertise
on
this mailing list, or at least people who can quickly learn how to
resolve
the most frequently asked issues.
Many regards from
Tom :)
On 26 Feb 2016 10:25, "Florian Effenberger" <
floeff@documentfoundation.org>
wrote:
Hello,
the following decision was taken on October 5, 2015 in private as the
board
saw a need for confidentiality.
It is now made public in accordance with our statutes.
Proposal: Authorize Simon Phipps to explore Thunderbird options with
Mozilla
The Board of Directors at the time of voting consists of 7 seat holders
without deputies. In order to be quorate, the vote needs to have 1/2 of
the
Board of Directors members, which gives 4.
A total of 5 Board of Directors members have participated in the
vote. The vote is quorate.
A quorum could be reached with a simple majority of 3 votes.
Result of vote: 5 approvals, 0 neutral, 0 disapprovals.
Decision: The request has been accepted.
This message is to be archived by the BoD members and their deputies.
Florian
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