To me, that is an open door invitation to do something better. The Mozilla platform is perfect for delivering a better user experience in this space using a rich client architechture.

Although I don’t think this model really fits with Mozilla, I do think that we can use this strategy without stabbing the Mozilla community in the back. Instead of selling a shrink wrapped product, we’re more like a consulting firm that also builds custom applications to suit the clients. We charge a monthly per user fee that includes remote data management, email, support, and other services. The delivery mechanism is free as in beer, but the real value to a mid-adopter to late-adopter user (most small business users) is what they call “user-friendly” and what we call user experience design. (and with that I’m including training and support)

I think it is really important to learn to view the world from multiple perspectives – and be comfortable with the tensions of that. If you’re a religious man, we have the quote “Be as wise as serpents and innocent as lambs.”

What does that mean here? Mozilla (as with the vast majority of organizations) can be viewed with either lamb-colored glasses, or serpent-colored glasses. We need to do both. They are both an organization that works for the public interest, as well as a power structure that needs to preserve their own prestige and perks for the benefit of the insiders. That’s just reality, not a criticism, it can’t be any other way.

But I think that your “user’s best interest” comment is a little too rosy when you are talking about the money flows. Whenever you start messing with someone’s rice bowl, you can expect to see more of the serpent and less of the lamb. Yet the main challenge of being a society is understanding that people who try to do it alone, following only their self-interest, will be beaten by groups of people who learn to band together in common interest – be that organization a modern NGO, or a marauding army. So I am not suggesting that more moral purity is what we all need, but instead figuring out ways to share the rice bowl so that our overall movement is strengthened.

As I understand it, TB relies mostly on security patches for the core code. So in a typical cycle, FF releases a new version, and a little later TB will release with the same security patch. But there is enough of a delay that it scares the TB people, and so I think that partly played a role in the decision to disable javascript in email HTML. The core TB code in the mail and mailnews directories is separate enough from FF that the vast majority of TB development is unlinked from what happens in FF. That isn’t true for SeaMonkey however, so I think they really struggle to coordinate the timing of their releases with both the TB and FF teams.

But TB of course has a little bit of clout in getting core patches pushed through. I can see how a separate application, that was not considered part of MoCO, would really struggle to get things in that only they needed.

As far as I understand it, the current policy at MoCo (who hire so many of the core people they’re having problems with getting people to do the whole granting commit privileges thing) is that the focus should be Firefox and Firefox only. They might be right – I don’t know, I’m not smart/experienced enough to tell. But the obvious effect is that people doing weird crap they don’t care about suffer.

Basically, getting patches in? Hard. Have a fork? Easy. Firefox has a fork of its own, it’s just the canonical one

Oh, and also, sometimes we’re too dumb to figure out patching things in an upstreamable way. (I’m thinking of one case I’ve done in particular – _I_ wouldn’t want to see it upstream, but I can’t figure out how to make the change cleanly…)

I’ve always wondered though – what happens to Thunderbird when it needs a patch to the core parts of a branch Firefox already released on? Do you get relaxed checkin privileges, or is it security-fixes-only as the policy? Or is it usually synced to Firefox enough to not matter? (i.e. difference between the two is never greater than a few months)

*Sb, though obviously (I hope!) I’m not speaking for my employer / whole organization / guy who sits next to me at work