OffHand
February 20th, 2008, 07:31 PM
It looks like Thunderbird 3 development is finally taking off. I for one am looking forward to a new release. It's still my favorite email client.
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2008-02-19-faq.html
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This is what I got from the mailing list. (Unfortunately I do not have the questions, but that doesn't really matter.)
I'm traveling this week, so my bandwidth is limited, but I'll try to
address as much as I can.
Thanks for all the feedback, it's really useful.
1) Agreed, it's taken too long. Starting a random company doesn't take
that much time, but starting a mozilla company takes longer. In part
because of the legal infrastructure and processes required to make a
subsidiary of a non-profit, in part because part of this launch was to
identify the right people to start (both board and staff). I'm
confident we'll be able to move faster now.
2) Figuring out the appropriate communication channels is a huge
challenge. This list is a great way to reach the inner core of people
who have been involved in Tb development so far. However, I believe
it's a lousy way to reach people who might want to become involved, but
currently aren't. And I see a significant part of my job as to grow the
number of people who want to become part of the community. So I have,
probably excessively, targeted my communications to those people,
primarily through my blog and its syndication on planet.mozilla.org.
Something which could help would be a Planet Thunderbird, which would
allow people who care about Thunderbird to get most of the info they
need, without having to drink at the planet mozilla firehose. Then it
would be easy to do things like post summaries of IRC conversations, so
that people who weren't around there would still get the key information.
3) You're absolutely right, there has been little in the way of what I'd
think of as an "operating project". There are a few wonderful folks who
are pushing ahead on bugs that they care about, but there's been little
coordination. That's simply been because of a lack of people with
enough time to do it. So I've focused on recruiting full-timers, and
now I think we can re-start the project following the conventional
model, including status calls, minutes on the wiki, etc.
4) I'm surprised you didn't know I was hiring -- again, it's something
I've blogged about a lot and it felt like everyone knew. Sorry about
it. Next week I'll introduce the initial staffer, and I expect you'll
hear from them soon (they mostly haven't yet started).
5) I'd like to find a place to coordinate community involvement while
not detracting from the nominal dev focus of this mailing list. For
example, we'll need to figure out how we want to tackle icons in Tb3,
figure out what equivalent of "spread firefox" makes sense, etc. In
general, it feels as though having just one mailing list for both dev
and non-dev discussions feels odd -- but if I'm the only one feeling
that, then ignore me.
Hope this helps.
More news later, same bat channel.
--david (http://ascher.ca/blog/2008/02/19/mozilla-messaging/)
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2008-02-19-faq.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is what I got from the mailing list. (Unfortunately I do not have the questions, but that doesn't really matter.)
I'm traveling this week, so my bandwidth is limited, but I'll try to
address as much as I can.
Thanks for all the feedback, it's really useful.
1) Agreed, it's taken too long. Starting a random company doesn't take
that much time, but starting a mozilla company takes longer. In part
because of the legal infrastructure and processes required to make a
subsidiary of a non-profit, in part because part of this launch was to
identify the right people to start (both board and staff). I'm
confident we'll be able to move faster now.
2) Figuring out the appropriate communication channels is a huge
challenge. This list is a great way to reach the inner core of people
who have been involved in Tb development so far. However, I believe
it's a lousy way to reach people who might want to become involved, but
currently aren't. And I see a significant part of my job as to grow the
number of people who want to become part of the community. So I have,
probably excessively, targeted my communications to those people,
primarily through my blog and its syndication on planet.mozilla.org.
Something which could help would be a Planet Thunderbird, which would
allow people who care about Thunderbird to get most of the info they
need, without having to drink at the planet mozilla firehose. Then it
would be easy to do things like post summaries of IRC conversations, so
that people who weren't around there would still get the key information.
3) You're absolutely right, there has been little in the way of what I'd
think of as an "operating project". There are a few wonderful folks who
are pushing ahead on bugs that they care about, but there's been little
coordination. That's simply been because of a lack of people with
enough time to do it. So I've focused on recruiting full-timers, and
now I think we can re-start the project following the conventional
model, including status calls, minutes on the wiki, etc.
4) I'm surprised you didn't know I was hiring -- again, it's something
I've blogged about a lot and it felt like everyone knew. Sorry about
it. Next week I'll introduce the initial staffer, and I expect you'll
hear from them soon (they mostly haven't yet started).
5) I'd like to find a place to coordinate community involvement while
not detracting from the nominal dev focus of this mailing list. For
example, we'll need to figure out how we want to tackle icons in Tb3,
figure out what equivalent of "spread firefox" makes sense, etc. In
general, it feels as though having just one mailing list for both dev
and non-dev discussions feels odd -- but if I'm the only one feeling
that, then ignore me.
Hope this helps.
More news later, same bat channel.
--david (http://ascher.ca/blog/2008/02/19/mozilla-messaging/)