So the Thunderbird Council arranged to collect donations from our users, with the Mozilla Foundation as fiscal sponsor. In parallel, Thunderbird worked to develop a revenue stream, which would be needed regardless of an eventual home.

Many meetings and conversations were held with organizations such as TDF and SFC to determine their suitability as potential homes, or models to build on. Over the past year, the Council has thoroughly discussed the needs of a future Thunderbird team, and focused on investigating the non-Mozilla organizations as a potential future home.

Since then the Thunderbird Council, the governing body for the Thunderbird project, has worked to determine the most appropriate long term financial and organizational home, using the Phipps report as a starting point. An independent “Thunderbird Foundation” alternative was not recommended as a first step but the report said it “may become appropriate in the future for Thunderbird to separate from its new host and become a full independent entity”. The Phipps report saw three viable choices for the Thunderbird Project’s future home: the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), The Document Foundation (TDF) and a new deal at the Mozilla Foundation. To investigate potential new homes for Thunderbird, Mozilla commissioned a report from Simon Phipps, former president of the OSI. Mozilla Foundation will serve as a fiscal sponsor for Thunderbird donations during this time. This includes working with organizations that want to invest in Thunderbird, several of which have stepped forward already. We are going to assist the Thunderbird community. We are going to disentangle the technical infrastructure. I’ve seen some characterize this as Mozilla “dropping” Thunderbird. In late 2015 Mitchell Baker started a discussion on the future of Thunderbird, and later blogged about the outcome of that, including this quote: The Mozilla Foundation has agreed to serve as the legal and fiscal home for the Thunderbird project, but Thunderbird will migrate off Mozilla Corporation infrastructure, separating the operational aspects of the project. The investigations on Thunderbird’s future home have concluded.

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