Two months ago, Mozilla was in talks about branching Thunberbird into a separate new subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation, with a goal of improving the development of the popular email software. As a result, Mozilla has decided to go with idea and branch-off Thunderbird into a separate company called MailCo which will start off with a seed capital of $3 million provided by Mozilla Foundation.
MailCo will work on evolving Thunderbird and other internet communication technologies including RSS, SMS, VoIP and instant messaging. The new subsidiary will be lead by David Ascher, who is well known as one of the directors of Python Foundation as well an active member in the open source community.
It’s unclear how MailCo will remain afloat and make profits. It’s a well known fact that Mozilla makes lots of money by partnering with search engine and other web content companies; however there is no such search box in Thunberbird!
In a short run, nothing much is going to change about Thunberbird. Let’s hope that the new subsidiary maintains good development of Thunberbird.
[Via: Mozilla Links, CyberNet]
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