A developer was hired, someone else to keep the infrastructure running, and a Community Manager (me). At some point, a Thunderbird donation form was set up and donations were high enough to hire 3 people. Surviving With A Skeleton Crewīy the time I joined in 2017, Thunderbird lived in the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation and was governed by the Thunderbird Council, an elected group of contributors to the project. A few attempts were made to make the project sustainable (Mozilla Messaging, for example) but they ultimately didn’t work. So, whomever managed the incredibly large project had to simply eat the cost of developing, maintaining, fixing, and distributing the software. One of the biggest issues for Thunderbird throughout its life is that, while it was a well-loved product with over 20 million users, it never had any substantial revenue that could adequately cover its development. The reasons behind that move were sound and made sense given the state of the project at the time. That’s when Thunderbird began to transition from a project that was funded and developed by the Mozilla Corporation, to a community run project. To tell the story correctly, we must go back to 2012. So today, I thought I’d sit down and write that. I’ve seen multiple people online share accounts of “the Thunderbird story,” and each time I’ve thought “that’s really great, but they missed some important parts.” It’s not their fault, we’ve simply never shared the whole story. A lot has happened in that time and Thunderbird is in a much different place than it was when I started. It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but looking at the calendar I see that it has been six years this month. I have been working on Thunderbird for my day job since November of 2017. Hi, my name is Ryan Sipes and I run MZLA Technologies Corporation, the subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that develops Thunderbird. Ryan Sipes, Product and Business Development Manager
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