An off-topic commenter in the previous post said:
What's your take on the two full-time Thunderbird developers leaving the project? You posted an entry a while back saying how Thunderbird wasn't dead because it had these two developers assigned - looks like they've abandoned a sinking ship no?
Now, obviously this guy's either not really paying attention or he has no idea how the Mozilla open source projects operate.
The two Mozilla employed full-time Thunderbird developers are not "leaving the project." They are leaving Mozilla employment. Both have said in blog posts that they are going to continue in their roles as Thunderbird contributors.
For those out there (at least this one commenter and possibly others) who don't understand what's going on, here's a quick lesson in how the Mozilla open source project works:
There's this thing called the Mozilla project and it has people contributing to it from all over the world for a wide variety of reasons. Some of these people are employed by Mozilla to work on the Mozilla project. Some are employed by other companies to work on the Mozilla project. Some are working on the Mozilla project as part of their education. And some are working on the Mozilla project purely as volunteers.
Just to add a bit here, when I last ran the numbers, there were about 1,000 individuals who had made code contributions to Firefox 2. Mozilla employed about 40 of those individuals. I think about 15 of those not paid by Mozilla were being paid by other companies to work on Mozilla (IBM, Sun, Red Hat, and others.) The remainder were either volunteers or working on Firefox as part of school projects. I didn't run the numbers on Thunderbird, but I thought it might help with the explanation here to give some concrete numbers for one Mozilla project.
Within the Mozilla project, we have Mozilla project roles like code module owner or module peer, for example. These roles are not conveyed on people by their employer nor do these roles even require an employer at all. There are many Mozilla module owners and peers who are employed outside of Mozilla or not employed to work on Mozilla at all. Project roles are earned when a Mozilla contributors establishes a record of good works in the project. Scott MacGregor is not the lead Thunderbird developer (technically, the Module Owner for some Thunderbird module(s) in the Mozilla CVS code repository,) because he was employed by Mozilla. He is what he is for the Thunderbird project because he's earned it over nearly a decade of coding for Mozilla in the employment of at least three different organizations.
And, again, to add a bit more here for concrete examples, before I was paid to work on Mozilla, I volunteered on the Mozilla project for about two years. I had earned reputation and authority then, when my employment was completely unrelated to my Mozilla contributions. When I'm no longer employed to work on Mozilla, if I want to, I can keep working on the Mozilla project and my project credentials and authority will travel with me, that is, they're not bound up with any employment relationship.
So, to cap this part of the discussion, employment at Mozilla and participation in the Mozilla project are not the same thing. The Thunderbird developers have said they are leaving Mozilla employment but not leaving the Thunderbird project.
Guy then goes on to say "You posted an entry a while back saying how Thunderbird wasn't dead because it had these two developers assigned."
Wanna provide a link when putting words in my mouth, Guy?
Scott and David played an active role in creating this new Mozilla email and messaging organization and I was a bit surprised to see them decide to start their own venture rather than move over to this new Mozilla organization, but I certainly didn't ever say anything like "if Scott and David aren't employed by Mozilla to work on Thunderbird then Thunderbird is dead."
I've got a lot of concerns about email and messaging at Mozilla. None of them are new concerns. None of them have anything to do with whether or not Scott and David are employed by Mozilla. I've been working up a blog post on this topic but it's not complete yet and I thought that cutting off the off-topic discussion in the previous post was important enough to warrant a quick reply here.
