Following Mozilla's decision to spin-off the Thunderbird email software into a separate company, the only two paid Thunderbird programmers have both quit to do something else, reports ComputerWorld.
Vast sums are poured into Firefox, but very little seems to get to Thunderbird or the calendar project, Sunbird. And now it seems two people working on a small project require too much management time and organisation for the mighty Mozilla Corporation to handle. Yeah, right.
Since Firefox is basically funded, promoted and distributed by Google, the cynic in me suspects that Google just doesn't care about the other stuff. After all, it already has its own Gmail product (which will probably hit the desktop via Gears), and a Google Calendar.
Of course, these are all open source programs, so in theory, "the community" can do all the work. In reality, the big open source projects are supported by giant multinational corporations such as IBM, Sun and Google. Whether they have a realistic future without them is open to doubt.
Having plugged Thunderbird rather often, I'll be crossing my fingers while watching what happens. There's always Eudora, of course, which I still have installed. And the Slashdot discussion of the news mentions Claws.
And for the strange people who think it's actually worth paying for professionally written software, there's The Bat!
