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

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 2:42 PM, Eike Hein <hein at kde.org> wrote:


> Make no mistake, Thunderbird is a dead project. It's built on a toolkit
> that's EOL, and hardly has enough of a development community to sustain
> the app, much less the stack beneath it. That it has users (like me)
> that still use it despite the mounting bitrot and deteriorating
> performance doesn't change that outlook. Many people who use Thunderbird
> want to switch away from Thunderbird.
>
>
It's probably the perfect moment to implement the Thunderbird UI using Qt
Quick, and start replacing all the technology piece by piece.

IMHO Mozilla is betting all their future on Firefox (which is declining)
instead of making a recurring business of Thunderbird.

What they did: abandon Thunderbird. "Sorry pals, now you are on your own"

What I would have done: create a thunderbird.com service, competing with
GMail and Outlook.com. Plus provide Thunderbird as a desktop/offline
client, like Microsoft does with Outlook. THAT would have been a logical
step: further develop one of your products, provide a cloud version, take a
% of a successful existing market (e-mail outsourcing) which provides
recurrent income, etc
In that regard, Kolab is probably the most fit organization to get
Thunderbird, as they can provide the server side already. With a
SPICE-based approach like Open365 uses, a Thunderbird.com service can be in
public beta in a couple of months. Once it's business case is proved and
money starts coming in selling, the next step would be to have a pure-web
UI, mobile app, etc.

-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
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