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<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><tt>On 18/11/2013 21:49, Kent James
wrote:</tt><br>
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<pre wrap="">(This is a resend after earlier copies seemed to fail)
As many of you know, I am a firm believer that Thunderbird needs sources
of income to ensure its future.
I would like to propose that for Thunderbird 31, we add a donation user
interface and mechanism that requests an annual donation of $10 from
users. This should be something that appears prominently once after the
upgrade, and users have a choice to act/postpone/or ignore (until next
major release).</pre>
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<tt>I am definitely for this, and would further propose a yearly
repetition (or whenever majorVer changes, whatever comes first). </tt><br>
<tt><tt><br>
One tricky point: Also, these donations should probably (or at
least initially) be framed in a way to not weaken the non-profit
status of mozilla.org projects - I would like some more opinions
on this. My understanding is that if Tb was openly "for-profit"
Mozilla would have a problem with hosting it. In any case, hold
on to the brand name (Thunderbird).<br>
<br>
</tt>We definitely should point out these points to our users</tt><tt>:<br>
</tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt>1) Mozilla doesn't support Thunderbird with full-time
development effort</tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt>2) However Mozilla still is interested in hosting and
helping with security issues</tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt>3) Most [all?] major innovation, and a lot of the bugfixes
[show count of fixes since </tt><tt>last major Version] have been
made by contributors</tt><tt><br>
<br>
4) point out that Thunderbird is one of the few mail clients that
supports a persistent tabbed interface (remembers tabs) plus
Addons support, and in this respect is on par with Firefox.<br>
<br>
5) Show the users that more innovation is necessary, and planned.
E.g. [point to 3 examples.<br>
<br>
Obviously also offer one-time donation (with >10$ values).
Details to be discussed.</tt><tt><br>
</tt><tt><br>
</tt>
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<pre wrap="">My own recent experience with ExQuilla is that there are plenty of users
who are quite happy to pay $10 per year for email functionality. I
believe that we could design a tasteful donation mechanism to capture
this willingness from users that would be acceptable to the vast
majority of users, and generate substantial income. I would guess that
Thunderbird would earn several hundred thousand dollars per year this way.</pre>
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<tt>IMO a subscription service would be a great move. I would hope
we could piggyback Addons subscriptions at a later stage. </tt><tt><br>
</tt><br>
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<pre wrap="">The question will arise, what do we need income for? That deserves a
separate thread, but here are some quick comments on that.</pre>
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<tt>1) I think Lightning development should benefit from the money
taken in as it is now part of the mail client(?). Other core
Addons that are bundled during installation (CompactHeader?)
possibly could as well.<br>
</tt>
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<pre wrap="">1) I don't think that we can assume that Mozilla will continue to
subsidize Thunderbird for the foreseeable future, as the nature of
Thunderbird does not mesh with their core mission of making everything
an HTML app. Thunderbird operations takes substantial funds to support.
2) There are many ways that we could provide more substantial support to
core contributors that are short of providing income for living. That
would include providing equipment, or travel expenses to conferences.
3) I believe that the major Thunderbird contributors should get together
at least annually for an event that is part work and part play.</pre>
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<tt>+1 !</tt><br>
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<pre wrap="">4) Certain important but non-development functions are difficult to
support with volunteers. There might be a role for contractors in some
of those areas, if there was income available.
5) I of course am not opposed to finding mechanisms for core developers
to earn a living at their Thunderbird work, should the project learn to
develop enough income that such a mechanism was ever possible. But we
are far from that now.</pre>
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<tt>+1, but I agree early days.</tt><br>
<br>
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