Recently, the Mozilla foundation released a news brief stating that there will be a new “wholly owned subsidiary” (per the news brief) known as Mozilla Messaging. This new branch of the Mozilla project will be working on the new features and overhaul of Thunderbird, which will eventually become Thunderbird 3. One of the key focal points is integrating new third-part plugins, as well as the already-in-production Lightning plugin (developed by the Mozilla Calendar Project team).

The only thing about which I’m a little concerned is the continuing development of Mozilla Sunbird, which is the other part of the Calendar Project. Personally, I prefer to have my calendar software separate from my email client (thus, why I use Sunbird instead of the Lightning plugin for Thunderbird). I have never really liked the PIM-style integration of email client and calendar, because I backup my data often, and simply prefer two independent applications (also the reasons why I’ve stayed away from the Evolution-style clients [EDS]). I’m hoping that development will continue on Sunbird even though the emphasis will be on the Lightning plugin for Thunderbird 3.

I’m also hoping that Thunderbird 3 won’t be packaged with the Lightning plugin by default. I assume, however, that since I use Gentoo, there may be a USE flag to enable or disable the packaging of Lightning at build-time of Thunderbird 3. Anywho, enough of this rant, considering the majority of my statements are based on speculation, instead of actual press releases from the Mozilla Foundation.

|:| Zach |:|