Fully agree with Cory Doctorow on his article on Mozilla Thunderbird. It’s important to have a good email client, and this is definitely one of the best so far.
It’s not really new that the Mozilla Foundation thinks they have more important things to do than to keep working on Thunderbird, but Cory got new information from here, and they got it from there (in fact this comes from the usenet newsgroups, but who in the world (except me and some other outliers) is reading these?).
I’m using Debian, which uses a rebranded version of Mozilla’s Thunderbird which they call Icedove. And Debian have their own Wiki page about its future, and as you can see, it’s still maintained, until now “upstream” is mostly Mozilla. And while this might change in the future, well, it’s still an open source project, and the Wikipedia page linked to above calls Icedove a “fork” of Thunderbird already, tho this mostly had to be done because of Mozilla’s restrictive branding (and update) policies.
I’m not much of a developer (not enough time to care for everything in life), but I still hope that I – and Cory – are not the only ones who care for a good and solid email client. There are others of course, but I always liked Icedove (and also Enigmail). I’ll follow this on the Debian maintainers’ newsgroups and mailing lists, and probably come back to it when there’s more information from Mozilla. Just that some tool might not look promising in an economic way doesn’t mean that it’s not a good and solid product which many people love to have, and looking for shareholder value isn’t always the right path into the future, in fact it’s rather short-sighted in most cases. Working where I am (a former IT giant which today is a mere shadow of what it once was, and could have been), I know what I’m writing about…
Thanks for reading.