View source for Thunderbird/New Release and Governance Model

{{Warning|This is an out-of-date document stored for historical purposes. It describes the state of Thunderbird in 2012. It is no longer accurate as of 2014 when Thunderbird became a formally organized, community run project, independent of Mozilla. This reorganization was as a result of an October 2014 summit of volunteers held in Toronto. The state of Thunderbird today is described [[Thunderbird:Home#Status|here]].}}

Mozilla is focusing a lot of its efforts towards important web and mobile projects, while Thunderbird remains a pure desktop only email client. We have come to the conclusion that continued innovation on Thunderbird is not a priority for Mozilla and that the most critical needs for the product are on-going security and stability. In fact, it is quite possible that Thunderbird is already pretty much what its users want and there is not a high demand for innovation in this field.

However, we do recognize that there is a very large number of users (more than 20 million) who use Thunderbird and rely on it on a daily basis, sometimes for the most mission critical tasks. Furthermore, Thunderbird is one of the very few truly free and open source multi-platform email application available today and we want to defend these values.

In order to manage these two perspectives, we are proposing to adapt the Thunderbird release and governance model in a way that allows both ongoing security and stability maintenance as well as community driven innovations for the product. We are opening this plan for discussion to individuals and organizations interested in maintaining and advancing Thunderbird in the future. We are looking for your feedback, comments and suggestions to refine and adapt the plan in the best possible way.