Recently, developers email client Thunderbird announced the transfer of development of the project to a separate company, MZLA Technologies Corporation, Which is a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Since, until now, Thunderbird was sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation, which oversaw financial and legal issues, but the infrastructure and development of Thunderbird were separate from Mozilla and the project was developed separately.
The maneuver is intended to study the possibility of offering products and services that weren't possible in the context of the Mozilla Foundation. In addition, we see the possibility of increasing revenues through donations and partnerships to reinvest in the development of new products and services.
In fact, what should be emphasized is that there has been an increase in donations (for the Thunderbird project) and staff (in human resources) to the point that possible development goals due to these moves were slowed down by the internal structure of the Mozilla Foundation.
As of 2007, as resources from the Mozilla Foundation decreased, decisions had to be made strategic to avoid the certain death of Thunderbird.
The then president decided to disassociate the project from the Foundation based on the SeaMonkey management mode that is hosted on the Mozilla infrastructure, but does not benefit from the financial and human resources of the Mozilla Foundation.
In the end, a new full-fledged entity will be created with its own financial resources, but that it will fail to the point that the foundation returns to the starting point. Since 2012, the development of the messaging application was more difficult.
In late November 2015, the Foundation announced again your desire to see the courier client standing to allow your engineers to better focus on Firefox, which runs much faster than Thunderbird.
Therefore, steps have been taken to find who has the capacity to maintain the project. to ensure the survival of the project.
In April 2016, the report's findings were published and several guidelines were presented. The Foundation had the option of entrusting the project, on the one hand, to potential candidates such as the Software Freedom Conservancy organization, which already hosts a number of free and open source projects such as phpMyAdmin, Git, Inkscape, Mercurial.
In mid-2017, Mozilla has rendered its verdict at the end of the various lines of reflection carried out to guarantee the survival of the Thunderbird project and the foundation has offered to be the legal, fiscal and cultural center of Thunderbird.
This meant that the Thunderbird Council and the foundation team had to work together. to make decisions in a timely manner. Additionally, the Thunderbird team and board were expected to provide operational and technical independence from Mozilla.
In case these conditions cannot be met, Mozilla reserves the right to terminate its role as Thunderbird's tax and legal guardian, which implies that Thunderbird must be entrusted to another organization within six months.
Moving to a separate company will increase process flexibility, for example, it will provide the opportunity to hire staff independently, act more quickly, and implement ideas that would not be possible as part of the Mozilla Foundation.
En particular, training for Thunderbird related products and services is mentioned, as well as the generation of income through associations and charitable donations. Structural changes will not affect work processes, mission, development team composition, release schedule, and open nature of the project.
Therefore, seems to be a second wind for the email client. Thunderbird does not change targets due to this transfer. The messaging client remains on an open source technology based on open standards.
Administratively, there have been no changes in terms of the Thunderbird board of directors and the development team. In fact, this change is limited to speeding up and simplifying the decision-making process to act more quickly and explore new solutions.