A new Mozilla Foundation effort to improve its Thunderbird open-source e-mail software now has an official name--and its first public goals.
Thunderbird 3.0 is due to ship by the end of the year with a more comprehensive search feature and official integration of the Lightning calendar add-on, said David Ascher, chief executive of the newly named Mozilla Messaging subsidiary. The first alpha release will come sooner, though, for those who want to test the software.
"I'm expecting we'll have some public releases probably within three months," Ascher said.
Mozilla is best known for its success with the Firefox browser, which has dented Microsoft Internet Explorer's dominance and sparked programmers to build a rich selection of extensions. Now the group is trying to apply the formula to e-mail software. Even though many rely on Web-based services for the chore, e-mail software is still widely used, and Thunderbird could open another major beachhead for open-source software in mainstream computing.
Although Mozilla Messaging's priority is to produce good software, not specifically to dethrone Microsoft's dominant Outlook software, the new calendar ability makes Thunderbird a more viable competitor, particularly in corporate environments.
Adding a third Mozilla group can be confusing, so let me spell out the distinctions for those of you who haven't scrutinized every development in the last 10 years since Netscape and its acquirer, AOL, spun off the Mozilla project in 1998. The Mozilla Foundation, a not-for-profit group, is in charge overall; for-profit subsidiaries Mozilla Corp. and Mozilla Messaging run the Web browser and e-mail projects, respectively.
Mozilla Messaging also has named a three-person board of directors: Ascher; Chris Beard, general manager of Mozilla Labs; and Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL, the open-source database company Sun Microsystems has just agreed to acquire for about $1 billion. More are likely to be added later as the organization grows, Ascher said.
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Mozilla's new CEO, John Lilly
(Credit: Mozilla)Mozilla Corp., the for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, has promoted Chief Operating Officer John Lilly to chief executive, the organization behind the Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird e-mail software said Monday.
Former CEO Mitchell Baker will remain chairman, the organization said, where she'll focus on high-level issues such as standards, interoperability, and issues around people's data.
"John Lilly is the right person to guide the product and organizational maturity of MoCo. John has been doing more and more of this since he took on the COO role in August of 2006. John understands Mozilla, is astonishingly good at operations, and has an innate facility for our products and technologies and the directions in which they should develop," Baker said on her blog on Monday. "Once I allowed myself to think about this, I realized that John will be a better CEO for the MoCo going forward than I would be."
Before Lilly joined Mozilla in 2005, he had been founder and CEO of Reactivity, a software company Cisco Systems acquired in 2007. On his blog, Lilly said his priorities will include shipping Firefox 3.0, currently in its second beta version; helping out with the new Mozilla mail company launch; and improving communications about Mozilla's economic situation and its hybrid for-profit/not-for-profit state.
Shortly after the Mozilla Foundation announced a subsidiary to focus more attention on the Thunderbird e-mail software, two of its main developers are leaving Mozilla for other pastures.
Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu each announced their departures on blog postings last week. And David Ascher, chief executive of the Thunderbird company, confirmed the move Saturday on his own blog.
"Both Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu have posted that they are leaving Mozilla Corp. My understanding from chats with them weeks ago...is that they have decided to start a new venture," Ascher said. "They've worked on Thunderbird and its predecessors within Mozilla and Netscape for a long time, and I can certainly understand their desire to do something different."
McGregor and Bienvenu both said they were leaving Mozilla on October 12, but added that they planned to continue work on Thunderbird, an open-source program for checking, writing and storing e-mail.
Ascher added that the Thunderbird company, called MailCo for the time being, is trying to hire new staff and that all Mozilla programmers already involved full time were offered positions.
(Via Slashdot)
Them's fightin' words!
That was my reaction when later last night I got the official Microsoft comment on my story about the Mozilla Foundation pumping new energy and funding into development of the Thunderbird e-mail software.
I'd asked about whether Microsoft was worried about competition from the project, given that Firefox has fared relatively well against Internet Explorer, and whether Microsoft would help Thunderbird programmers get their software working with Microsoft's Exchange e-mail server software.
What I got from Clint Patterson, public relations director for Microsoft's Unified Communications Group, went a couple notches beyond the "competition is healthy" category of platitudes I'd expected. Instead Patterson offered a broad criticism of open-source businesses that hark back to days of yore when top executives called the collaborative programming philosophy "un-American" and a "cancer."
"The open-source development model has yet to demonstrate the ability to support profitable software businesses that can drive the coordinated research and testing necessary to sustain innovation," Patterson said. "Many in the open-source software community have shifted to hybrid business models. They are making the same business decisions as any commercial software company in terms of what products and services to give away, what intellectual property to protect, how to generate revenue, and how to participate in the community."
It's true that there's a spectrum between fully open and fully proprietary; Microsoft deems it judicious to offer a few open-source projects, while companies at the other end such as Red Hat try to be as purely open-source as possible. Some are in the middle: Adobe has made some significant open-source moves, as with its Flex tool for Flash animation creation, while keeping its cash-cow Creative Suite firmly proprietary. Sun Microsystems, meanwhile, is in the process of moving its entire software suite into the open-source realm, with major portions such as Solaris and Java already moved.
But Matt Asay, vice president of business development at open-source document management company Alfresco (disclosure: Asay also is a blogger for CNET Networks), sees things differently from Patterson.
"The open-source community has actually been shifting away from hybrid models," he said, pointing to Alfresco, Funambol and MuleSource as examples. "Hybrid was yesterday's model, when people were still trying to get comfortable with the shift. Tomorrow's is 100 percent open, with 'proprietary services' on top."
Those services, Asay predicted, could be either for support, as in Red Hat's case, or as in Internet-hosed services--the kind of thing Yahoo is getting more serious about with its $350 million acquisition of open-source e-mail software maker Zimbra.
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