Thunderbird/Proposal: New Release and Governance Model

From MozillaWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

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.

Proposal

Highlights

Thunderbird and Thunderbird ESR

There are currently two editions of Thunderbird: 'Thunderbird' and 'Thunderbird ESR'. Both will be maintained and based on the same Gecko engine release. Only 'Thunderbird' is affected by the change:

  • A new release of Thunderbird ESR will be available on November 20th, 2012. As defined in the Thunderbird ESR plan (http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/organizations/faq/), it will inherit the then-current Thunderbird feature-set. This release will be updated every six weeks, for the duration of the ESR cycle to ensure the best possible security and stability for organizations.
  • At the same time, Thunderbird will be released with the same feature set as Thunderbird ESR and will be updated every six-weeks for security and stability. However, and contrary to Thunderbird ESR, Thunderbird feature set might evolve over time and solely based on the availability of community contributions.

The proposed plan should therefore have no impact in the way individuals and organizations use the product and obtain updates.

Governance model

Thunderbird will be driven by a lightweight structure, focusing on producing security updates and suited to welcome community contributed innovations:

  • Thunderbird modules owners (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Modules) will remain in charge of their module and will allow community contributions innovation on their own merits. Module ownership is open to any contributor and can evolve over time.
  • A Release Drivers team will produce the Thunderbird updates every six weeks and work with module owners on the planning and integration of the community contributed innovations.

  • Mozilla will continue to provide paid staff, logistics and infrastructure for the release drivers team to produce updates and new releases with the same level of quality than today. Support will continue to be provided by the Thunderbird community and Mozilla will continue to provide the required infrastructure.

Timeline and getting involved

We are looking forward to getting your questions and comments on this plan. We would like to refine it throughout the summer so we can discuss the final details at the beginning of September 2012. If you want to be involved in this discussion, please use the tb-planning mailing list (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/tb-planning) as a discussion forum.

Details

Warning signWarning: This document is work in progress.

For the sake of practicality and during the discussion period,

  • Feel free to document the below sections with topics you want to be addressed.
  • Among the needed information, we need to document the questions we have and questions regarding Mozilla participation in this section.
  • Etherpad is probably more practical to jot ideas down than the Wiki. Therefore, it might be useful to create one for each of the below sections to allow contributors to collaborate towards identifying the needs and their solutions.

Each section below addresses one aspect of maintaining and building Thunderbird. They reflect the discussions that have taken place with volunteers and Mozilla employees during the summer of 2012.

AMO

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-amo

Governance

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-governance

Modules

The current Module wikis are: Thunderbird, MailNews Core

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-modules

Release Drivers

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-release-drivers

Releases

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-releases

Localization

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-localization

Quality Assurance

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-qa

Roadmap

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-roadmap

Papercuts

Papercuts are those issues which aren't complicated to fix but cause a fairly persistent annoyance in operation. As a means for driving forward Tb's development we want a significant number of developers to commit to fixing five papercuts in a single year.

The Wiki is here.

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-papercuts

Lightning

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-lightning

Services

Services needed for Thunderbird: ISPDB, Account provisionner
Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-services

Support

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-support

Web sites

Link to etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/tb-web


Engagement

Link to Etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/QNUuZdC0pU

Retrieved from "https://wiki.allizom.org/index.php?title=Thunderbird/Proposal:_New_Release_and_Governance_Model&oldid=459652"