Alcune letture utili per capire cosa sta succedendo in questi giorni.

Il post di Mitchell Baker Thunderbird: Stability and Community Innovation

We’ve asked the question about Thunderbird and ongoing innovation a number of times.  We’ve tried for years to build Thunderbird as a highly innovative offering, where it plays a role in moving modern Internet messaging to a more open, innovative space, and where there is a growing, more active contributor base.  To date, we haven’t achieved this.  The exception to this statement is the Mozilla localization communities, which contributes immense effort into localizing Thunderbird into many languages.  However, the dedicated efforts of these groups have not been supported by an active contributor base in other areas. This puts great stress on a number of our localization communities.

Il post di Asa Dotzler

If Mozilla had infinite resources and focus, I’d want them to keep investing heavily in Thunderbird — even if I was the only Thunderbird user on the planet (I did say if Mozilla has infinite resources.) But I have first hand experience with resourcing and focus trade-offs across Mozilla projects and products and so I understand the shift to a sustaining mode rather than an innovation mode for Thunderbird and I think it’s the the right thing to do.

[…]

If you’re like me, and you just aren’t ready, for what ever reason, to move your messaging to a Web application, I encourage you to get on testing builds and call out regressions when they happen and if you’ve got the skills to do it, make some patches and help keep Thunderbird moving forward.

Cosa aggiungere? La decisione non giunge certo inaspettata visti gli insuccessi degli ultimi anni: l’uscita di scena di personaggi chiave, la nascita e la morte di Mozilla Messaging, il ruolo incolore di David Asher, gli appelli dell’ultimo periodo.

Personalmente continuerò ad utilizzare Thunderbird senza fasciarmi la testa (“running around with your heads chopped off”), non fosse altro per un corposo archivio di 9 anni di posta elettronica, più avanti valuterò obiettivamente i risultati di questo sviluppo “community-driven” e le alternative disponibili.

Forse, considerato il tempo libero che ho nell’ultimo periodo, sarebbe stato più corretto scrivere “prima o poi” invece di prossimamente 😉

Quello sulla destra è il Canon EF 40mm f/2.8 STM (“pancake lens” per le ridotte dimensioni), spero di riuscire a fare qualche prova nel prossimo fine settimana.