Proposal to start a new implementation of Thunderbird based on web technologies
R Kent James
kent at caspia.com
Tue Apr 11 03:26:59 UTC 2017
On 4/10/2017 7:57 PM, Joshua Cranmer 🐧 wrote:
> It matters much less to me who is being paid to do what as long as we
> agree that those acts deserve paid developers.
You can look at Nylas N1, with its exciting mix of hot technologies
(Node on Electron, React) which tend to attract volunteers, and see that
the vast majority of commits are from paid developers
(https://github.com/nylas/nylas-mail/graphs/contributors top 4 are Nylas
staff). So I think that we can agree that the hope that there are armies
of qualified, volunteer programmers just waiting to work on Thunderbird
or related projects is so 20th Century (and unlikely). While we have
some amazing volunteers that have kept the project alive, yet email is
serious business and it is not reasonable to believe we will have a
serious product done mostly by volunteers (and I say that as someone
actively recruiting about 10 volunteer students to work on aspects of this).
The problem is, I have had a very, very hard time getting anyone to
seriously discuss the question of how to fund this. I have been
disappointed that my suggestions to the Council to devote some resources
to financial development are not received well. Elsewhere, I have
suggested a coop model but got very little traction with that. Yes we
have donations, really more than we expected, but keeping the existing
product alive for 2-3 years is going to take most of those resources.
We cannot compete technologically if we do not have a business model
that can compete with models such as the Postbox paid user, or the Nylas
paid server services. What is the plan here?
:rkent
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