CardBook postulates to become a Thunderbird featured addon.
R Kent James
kent at caspia.com
Tue Apr 11 00:42:55 UTC 2017
On 4/8/2017 2:10 AM, Philippe VIGNEAU wrote:
> hi folks
>
> The development of CardBook goes on, and I think that it is now
> eligible to become a Thunderbird featured addon
Yes, that would be great, it is an excellent addon.
The current issue is that nobody is managing featured addons for
Thunderbird. We were contacted about that, I believe a couple of years
ago, but did not get anyone willing to take it on. So that feature is
dormant. It would be great if someone would agree to take on the task of
reviewing and selecting featured addons for Thunderbird.
> About the future of Thunderbird, whatever would be the path to the new
> Thunderbird, I'm ready and open to work to make CardBook the new
> Thunderbird addressbook.
Perhaps you are asking if, prior to the switchover to Thunderbird++,
Thunderbird should switch to Cardbook for a year or two.
Cardbook is not a demo of Thunderbird++ technologies, but a proposal for
an alternate address book with the current version of Thunderbird. Let's
make sure we keep those issues separate.
I hope everyone understands that Thunderbird++ is a rewrite without
XPCOM and XUL. Cardbook, in spite of being an excellent addon, is not at
all focused on the issue of migrating away from Gecko. So while it could
be a candidate for replacing or supplementing the existing address book,
it would need to be rewritten (as does the rest of Thunderbird) to a
future technology without XUL or XPCOM. BenB is proposing that we do NOT
rewrite existing XUL/XPCOM code to port to a new approach, but rather
start from scratch. That is up for debate still, but Cardbook uses the
old technologies and would need to be rewritten (along with the rest of
Thunderbird) for Thunderbird++.
As a coincidence, in my Monroe class today we installed a local
Sabre/dav carddav server and your addon (Cardbook) as one of various
demos of address book UIs and backends.
However, I had to give them a cautionary speech about the licensing
issues. Any product released by Thunderbird would likely be MPL
licensed. Anything released through the Caspia project would likely be
Apache or MIT licensed. There are serious license compatibility issues,
as we have discussed earlier, between your GPL code and future code.
"ready and open to work (together)" can only start when Cardbook is
relicensed as MPL or weaker. You've said you are willing to do that, and
I would encourage you to urgently pursue relicensing away from GPL if
you hope for your addon to be available for use (either in part or in
whole) as part of the Thunderbird core.
That being said, we (Caspia) would love to figure out a way to work with
you. But also as I said to you earlier, the goals of your project and
ours are very, very different and may not be compatible. What we are
attempting is closer to Mark Banner's "define an experiment which is
limited in scope and goals" initially, trying to model a possible larger
Thunderbird rewrite using contact management as a base. We will be
looking at small experiments initially, seeing how we would port those
to Electon/NodeJS, or Myk Melzez's qbrt, or as a "pure" web app possibly
with a process or server to implement needed features missing from the
web (like non-http tcp/ip access). We're looking several years ahead,
while you are trying to fix the present. Both are needed. Let's keep
talking.
:rkent
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