Conspiracy theories are the kind of thing you exchange when you’re speaking in private, preferably in person and without a lot of other people around. If you’re smart about security, they are not the kind of thing you send around through e-mail program. A conspiracy theory about an e-mail program? That’s another matter entirely.
Few people probably would have paid much attention to Mozilla’s recent decision to move away from its Thunderbird e-mail product if users hadn’t raised the notion of undue influence from Google.
Compared with Firefox, its fast-rising competitor to Internet Explorer, Thunderbird generates almost no buzz, has managed very little penetration in the enterprise, if anything, and has not significantly advanced the technology behind electronic messaging as a whole. Forget about GMail; even Novell’s Groupwise matters more to most users than Thunderbird.
The conspiracy theory in question is that Google, which is among Mozilla’s largest investors, wanted Thunderbird shut down so as not to get in Gmail’s way. That’s hard to imagine, in part for the lack of momentum mentioned above, but also for a lot of other reasons. Thunderbird was recently updated to version 2.0.0.5. If Google was going to put the squeeze on, why wait until now? If Google threatened to pull its position as default search engine and home page in Firefox — which is why it pays Mozilla an estimated US$52 million annually — wouldn’t that hurt Google as much as Mozilla? What we’re talking about here are allegations of extortion, and that would be a pretty stupid move for a public company of Google’s size. I just don’t buy it.
Let’s believe for a moment that Mozilla is telling the truth. When it was developing Firefox and Thunderbird, it may not have been easy to predict how quickly the former would succeed in what most considered an already entrenched segment of the industry. Since then, Mozilla may have concluded that managing the development and support of a red-shot browser is really a full-time job. Over the last two weeks, for example, Firefox has been stung by a pair of flaws that in some cases could affect users who also browse with IE. The exposure of these vulnerabilities was highly public and, for Mozilla, highly embarrassing. The Thunderbird announcement could be, to some degree, an expression of increased focus.
Instead of gossiping about who swung the axe, Mozilla watchers would do better to respond to the organization’s requests for comments on what it should do with Thunderbird. The options laid out on the table so far include forming a spin-off, releasing it as a developing project or setting up a stand-alone foundation. Your choice will depend on what you think would most benefit the IT industry as a whole (Thunderbird is still new enough that I suspect even its early adopters have alternate e-mail services, so I’m not too worried about the fate of this particular installed base).
As a spin-off, Thunderbird would probably languish without a great deal more financial support. In the wilds of the developer community, it might become a foundation for future open source e-mail clients. I much prefer the idea of a Thunderbird Foundation, especially if it was something that didn’t focus on offering a particular product but perhaps funnelling its technology into a laboratory that explored solutions to problems in e-mail management and storage. Maybe a Thunderbird Foundation that isn’t competing with Gmail could come up with ideas to improve Gmail’s privacy, or map out the long-term integration of e-mail with other messaging platforms like IM, RSS and SMS. Far from the end of Thunderbird, this could be a chance for those behind it to finally spread their wings.
