Hello people 👋
This year I took the decision of starting giving back to the community in the form of a monetary donation, a small amount to start. I will start doing a monthly donation to open-source software or foundation which give me value in someway.
This month I chose Thunderbird. For the ones who don’t know, this software, is an email client, calendar application, and even a messaging client by Mozilla foundation.
Later last year, I migrate from Spark into Thunderbird due to some major changes on the software. Another reason is that I intend to migrate into Linux somewhere this year, so I need an alternative that works on the new OS. My goal when migrate into Linux is trying to take advantage of free and open-source software, but eventually if it’s not possible I will choose for a non-free application.
Back to Thunderbird; it is a fantastic software shipped by an equally awesome team of contributors. For the ones who don’t know how it is built, it shares the same engine as Firefox; that gives advantage but also some problems for the developers. For example, being built over Firefox allows developers to take advantage of all the features already implement on Firefox, but on the other hand Thunderbirds has fewer developers compared to Firefox. This difference in huge and end up introducing numerous breaking changes that the Thunderbird contributors can’t keep up to fix them.
To mitigate that, Thunderbird took the approach to migrate into a yearly release schedule to avoid constantly fixing the breaking changes. That is the reason behind the major jumps on the release number, as it’s possible to see on Wikipedia.
If you want to know more about how you can help keeping Thunderbird alive, read this blog article.