Tuesday, 9 October 2007

Thunderbird Developers Leave Mozilla

Three weeks after Mozilla spun off its online email client Thunderbird into a new company, two employees who created the email client have said they are quitting the company.

Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu were the only paid employee in the project that started working on the email client in 2003. "I plan to continue on, as a volunteer, with my role as a module owner for the Thunderbird project," said McGregor. "I wish the Mozilla Corporation and the new Thunderbird Mail Corporation luck in their future endeavours," he added.

Mozilla's CEO Mitchell Baker said, "Two things became clear. We had the team for developing a stand-alone desktop email application. But we didn't have the complete set of people to address both that and the larger issues."

In early September, Mozilla had announced that it was spinning off Thunderbird that would become a whollyowned subsidiary of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. Baker has repeatedly been saying that Mozilla’s first and foremost priority was Firefox and thunderbird would come second.