Thunderbird Loses Two Key Developers

By Greg McNevin

October 11, 2007: The open source community was dealt a blow this week, with the two only paid Mozilla’s Thunderbird developers hanging up their spurs.

Announcing their October 13 departures from the open source email client project in short, sharp passages on their respective blogs, Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu wished the foundation all the best for the future and indicated that they would both continue working on the project in a volunteer capacity.

“I plan to continue on, as a volunteer, with my role as a module owner for the Thunderbird project,” wrote McGregor in a blog post last Friday, a sentence echoed almost word for word on Bienvenu’s blog.

McGregor kicked off the Thunderbird project at the start of 2003, his departure coupled with the loss of Bienvenu marks quite a blow for the email client, plus it has created somewhat of a controversy surrounding the reasons for the two’s decision, especially considering the client has just been spun off from Mozilla Co and turned into a separate entity called (temporarily) Mail Co.

This move has been seen by some industry commentators as enabling a greater focus on the email client, which some say has been lagging in development of late, while others claim this looks like Mozilla actively disassociating itself from the client.

Either way, the loss of the two lead developers could definitely put a dent in the projects immediate future. Mozilla is already on the hunt for full time replacements and is otherwise beefing up staffing levels at Mail Co, so perhaps the mail client’s wings have not been clipped just yet.

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