Wednesday, 19 September 2007

Mozilla Spins Off Thunderbird Into Separate Company

Mozilla has spun off its Thunderbird e-mail client into a new subsidiary. The open source company has seeded the for-profit company with USD 3 million in start-up money.

"The new organisation doesn't have a name yet, so I'll call it MailCo here," said Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker. "Technically, it will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, just like the Mozilla Corporation." The move is similar to the one made by Mozilla Foundation in 2005 when it created Mozilla Corp. to manage Firefox, the world’s second most popular web browser.

Today most people use popular email service such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail and as a result mail clients such as Thunderbird are not in demand. Hence after a lot of internal discussion about the future of Thunderbird, Mozilla decided to spin off Thunderbird into a separate company. The talks began in July. Then Baker said that as Firefox was Mozilla’s first priority, it had to divest itself of Thunderbird. Among the options she thought of were: Creating a new nonprofit organisation similar to the Mozilla Foundation to focus on the e-mail program; building a new subsidiary of the foundation just for Thunderbird; and releasing Thunderbird into the wild as a community-only project.
Most Thunderbird users have not been very receptive to this idea.

The new company will focus on developing communications software based on the current Thunderbird product, its code base and its brand. The goal is to create a community of developers, similar to the one already in place for Firefox, that's dedicated to working on Thunderbird and associated products. "We can spark the same kind of excitement and energy level and innovation in the email/communications space," Baker said.