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<div id="newHeaderAG1" style="font-size: x-small; padding:1em;
background-color:rgba(220,220,240,0.4); border-radius:3px;"> <b>Subject:</b>Re:
Addon transition support (was: Inclusion of the community in
decisions)<br>
<b>From:</b>Mihovil Stanić <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:mihovil@miho.im"><mihovil@miho.im></a><br>
<b>To:</b><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Tb-Planning@mozilla.org">Tb-Planning@mozilla.org</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:tb-planning@mozilla.org"><tb-planning@mozilla.org></a> <br>
<b>Sent: </b>Friday, 25/9/2020 06:47<br>
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<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:7afce748-df05-bbfe-33fc-999a82fb76a7@miho.im">
<br>
25.09.2020 u 4:42, Dirk Steinmetz (rsjtdrjgfuzkfg) piše:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">I do consider fully-featured add-ons the
most important selling point of
<br>
thunderbird, so abandoning that would imho require a discussion
here,
<br>
and probably a council decision afterwards... did I mention that
I miss
<br>
some clear structure on what is decided where? :P
<br>
<br>
That being said, discussions to flesh out the arguments and/or
identify
<br>
alternatives to reach similar goals can and should happen
elsewhere.
<br>
I'll gladly follow you to matrix or the add-on list for that.
<br>
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
I support this, but did we have any kind of discussion about
allowing developers to easily monetize their add-ons?
<br>
Something like App store / Play store where Thunderbird would
allow developers to monetize their work if they want, for some
kind of small fee (not 30% like Apple).
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<p>++1 this a thousand times. To develop our own monetization
strategies is highly expensive in term of resources and locks out
a lot of good people who want to get into this market. And it also
signals to users that everything must be "free as in beer" for
perpetuity. Us few people who ask for money are regularly abused
by users who imagine that software is written by the sky fairies
who also magically have unlimited funds to do this. Having a
proper "market place" and some way to ask for money from the atn
(and also the firefox Add-ons store) would set a strong signal and
encourage developers to increase their efforts.</p>
<p>I don't think socialism is a good model for highly complex
systems like software. And before you say "but you can get
donations" that only scales well if you have >100,000 users,
which again locks out the entry level. It takes hard work to even
crack 20,000 users, even with an extension that has 95% 5star
ratings. Marketing is another problem. <br>
</p>
<p>I think this is also a problem for Thunderbird itself, it kind of
lives on it's old user base (from the Netscape days) and word of
mouth. I would wish for a proper marketing campaign and doubling
the active users of Thunderbird within the next 2 years. I have a
friend who is YouTuber and he offered to make some videos about my
Add-ons AND Thunderbird, it would be cool to have a Thunderbird
video platform where we could share these. As a community mail
client, Thunderbird should have a more prominent platform on
social media - and I think that is a full time job, it's not
something that Ryan could cover in his spare time.</p>
<p>Axel<br>
</p>
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