September 18, 2007

Mozilla invests $3 in Thunderbird e-mail client

by Jan Harris

Mozilla invests $3 in Thunderbird e-mail client
Mozilla Corporation has spun off its Thunderbird e-mail client into a separate company and invested $3 million to get the business off the ground and expand its programming staff.

Mozilla has dubbed the new organisation MailCo for the time being. It will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and its CEO will be David Ascher, currently chief technology officer at ActiveState.

The move marks the end of discussions which began in July, when Mozilla’s chief executive, Mitchell Baker, decided that the Mozilla Foundation should divest Thunderbird, as Firefox was its main priority.

Other options under discussion were creating a new non-profit organisation focused on Thunderbird and releasing Thunderbird as a community-only project.

These options have now been rejected in favour of creating a subsidiary company which will focus on developing communications software based on the current Thunderbird product, its code base and its brand.

Thunderbird’s main competitors are Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook, IBM’s Lotus Notes, and Web-based e-mail services including Google’s Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

The new structure for Thunderbird echoes the Mozilla Foundation’s decision in 2005, to set up a separate company to run elements of the Firefox Web browser operation.

Questions? Discuss this in our Internet Business forums for help and advice

Story link: Mozilla invests $3 in Thunderbird e-mail client

Add to Bookmarks: