In our weekly open developer confcall, that happens on every Wednesday we had a visitor today: David Ascher, the new CEO of MailCo or whatever it will be named.
We talked about a lot of things with David:
- Lightning/Sunbird release strategy
- Major obstacles to extension developers in Thunderbird and how those can be overcome
- David asked for suggestions for people who he might hire to work on Thunderbird
- Things that MailCo can do to support major extensions like Lightning (e.g. build support)
- The future of Thunderbird (e.g. Thunderbird 3 plans)
- and some minor stuff
We won’t disclose all details of the discussion (like the future of Thunderbird discussion), because David will speak about that once he has sketched out a roadmap. But we’re now more positive about Thunderbird’s future and Lightning’s role in it, than we were a few days ago, when we heard that David Bienvenu and Scott MacGregor are leaving the Mozilla Corporation.
More info will be posted later on this blog as Clint has taken some pretty detailed meeting notes, that he will post here in a short while. Let’s end this post with saying that David is really a great guy to talk to and we were very happy to discuss our views with him. Thanks David!
I have updated the page with the meeting log.
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Calendar:Status_Meetings:2007-10-10#Meeting_Log
David Ascher talks about LibMAPI. Did he mean the OpenChange Project (http://www.openchange.org/)?
An Lightning provider for Openchange seems quite promising! Wish I could help developing it… but I can’t.
Surely adding Openchange support to Lightning is only half the equation. Won’t we need a TB component for the mail too? The TB, Lightning/SB & Openchange devs need to get together on this one.