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Hi 
How do people here feel about approaching the Thunderbird people to bring
them into the LibreOffice project a bit more? Perhaps they could become
the official default email client?
As most of you know - many organisations, particularly OpenSource ones,
have departments/sections/sub-groups that focus on supporting external
projects that are used within their own project. For example Ubuntu,
Redhat, openSuSE, Mageia, Fedora (and so on) each have people able to help
their users deal with most issues to do with Thunderbird, LibreOffice and
many other apps. Typically such people can handle quite a lot of issues
but sometimes seek help from 'upstream' (such as to here if it's a
LibreOffice issue) or/and invite the user to take their issue upstream
themselves. Many of such people stay within one OS and help with many apps
within that OS but some support the same app in many different OSes. There
are even generic forums, such as "LinuxQuestions.org" that handle a lot of
different OSes.
This mailing list has helped quite a few people with "off topic" issues,
such as helping with other apps or choosing a good "gateway" distro (such
as Mint, Ubuntu etc) for people who want to break free of Windows or even
helping with quite detailed "off topic" issues in very geeky Gnu&Linux OSes
(such as Slackware). Also there's a good chance that some people from
Thunderbird might start offering weeu's support through our support
systems, such as this mailing list - if we were welcoming and supportive.
How would people here feel about this mailing list offering support to
Thunderbird users, particularly ones who use LibreOffice as their Office
Suite?
Another option might be for "The Document Foundation" to fully take on the
whole of the Thunderbird project, and bring in all of their infrastructure
and maybe kinda merge parts together where it's easy enough to do so.
Personally i prefer this sort of approach The Mozilla Foundation chose to
split TB away from their web-browser (a good linuxy thing to do) so they
could be more independent and therefore be used by people who use a wide
range of other web-browsers - also helping those few Firefox users who were
using something else to benefit more from a more streamlined Firefox. A
few years ago Mozilla decided to drop almost all it's support for TBeaving
it all to just volunteers. The TB volunteers have done a fantastic job but
it would be great to give them a new home so they can "spread their wings"
a lot more.
To me it seems that either way, or something similar would greatly benefit
both (or even all 3!) separate projects.
It at long last would solve the main perceived 'blocker' that many people
seem to struggle with when trying to move away from MS Office = that LO
doesn't have a drop-in replacement for Outlook.
Although Outlook includes calendar functionality (and a lot more) it seems
that the most frequent problem that people ask about is just about emails.
On this mailing list it's even been suggested the TDF create a new email
client, but i think most of us already use TB anyway and it's probably
better to just use something that has a good, well-proven track-record
rather than try to cobble something together from scratch.
Some of us inevitably try to point out that there are many other choices of
email client to suit particular niche-markets - such as Claws (for a much
smaller foot-print and thus faster on lower-spec machines) or Evolution
(for a totally complete "drop in replacement" for Outlook in terms of
look&feel (but has limited support and is not cross-platform, and can't
even cope outside the Gnome DE so it limits which versions of Gnu&Linux it
can be used on)) and some really fancy ones with more project-management
functionality.
Such alternatives would still be available and supported but by having TB
as our default it would dissolve one more perceived 'blocker' . People
would no longer be forced into doing a tonne more research into which email
client to choose, and TB would be the perfect one for the vast majority of
them.
Microsoft and Apple seem to be successful largely because they remove
people's options and give them "Freedom FROM choice". The tech industry
seems to value that above almost anything else. As soon as there are
choices they start grumbling about "fragmentation", and that it's difficult
to choose "which is best" because different use-cases may have different
requirements and therefore may need make slightly different choices. In
every other industry monopolies are seen as bad - choice and diversity are
applauded as being "good competition" allowing "market forces" to help
drive innovation, efficiency and all that sort of thing.
In the Gnu&Linux world we fight hard to make sure there is "Freedom OF
choice", but a lot of people struggle when given options - they just want
to settle with what they are given and then grumble about it!
Giving people a default and then allowing them to easily replace it as been
hugely successful for "gateway distros" and i think it would probably be
great for us too. How do other people here feel?
Also, just out of curiosity, do we happen to already have people here who
help other people with Thunderbird issues in another forum or support
network? We probably do already have some with some level of expertise on
this mailing list, or at least people who can quickly learn how to resolve
the most frequently asked issues.
Many regards from
Tom
