[kde-community] A new home for Mozilla Thunderbird at KDE?

[Boudhayan Gupta]

Hi,

On 26 April 2016 at 22:38, Eike Hein <hein at kde.org> wrote:
>
>
> On 04/27/2016 01:58 AM, Teo Mrnjavac wrote:
>>
>> This, so much. I see no reason not to expand our presence in different
>> segments of the e-mail clients market, if Thunderbird wishes to join us.
>> The
>> more, the merrier.
>
>
> I'm not sure they're a good fit for us, unless they bring significant
> manpower/funding with them or continue to enjoy Mozilla backing in some
> form. Thunderbird is used to being developed within an extensive eco-
> system of Mozilla infrastructure (including their customized or home-
> grown bug tracking, CI, test, etc. sites/systems); porting it either
> to our infra or setting up infra for them would probably be a
> significant task we don't have the resources for.
>
> There's also the problem that Thunderbird is a massive codebase with
> few people working on it, and built on technology that's predictably
> legacy (Gecko will ultimately die in favor of Servo; also nobody at
> Mozilla seems to like XPCOM or god forbid XUL for years now). These
> pose significant hurdles to the Thunderbird project I'm not convinced
> it can scale, even with our help.
>
> Incubator, yes. Project cemetary, no. I think cost/benefit and outlook
> say 'no' here.

I'm going to second Eike here. My gut feeling says Thunderbird is
going to go the way of Apache OpenOffice, and we'd just be a graveyard
for it, not an incubator.

-- Boudhayan Gupta