FOSDEM 2009

I spent the weekend sneezing, coughing and drinking beer in Brussels at FOSDEM, in between there were a few sessions that proved interesting and irritating at the same time which is pretty typical for an open source conference.

First off Philipp Kewisch made a valiant attempt to get community support for QA'ing Sunbird only for David Ascher to have to say that Sunbird is canned after this clean up version and that Lightning won't be ready to integrate with Thunderbird 3 for the release. Asking around, it appears that Sun is withdrawing all resources for Sunbird. David Ascher didn't even seem that enthusiastic about Lightning as the calendaring component but I might have read too much into that.

More concerning is that the whole direction of Thunderbird is more about being appealing to the average user than it is to being a complete mail and messaging system. In answer to a question he made it clear he's not interested in trying to solve or even support the kinds of needs that corporate mail have, LDAP, Exchange integration and the rest of it.

They (Mozilla) seem more interested in how messaging is becoming proprietary with the increase in social networking sites doing their own email or messaging interface which forces the receiver of the message back to the particular web site.

Making Thunderbird another Gmail doesn't seem like the way to answer that 'problem' to me.