Mozilla Creates New Internet Mail and Communications Company

Mozilla has announced a new initiative to overhaul email and internet communications in general. The new company, MailCo, will be given $3 million in startup capital from Mozilla to start with the Thunderbird code and work from there. MailCo will be led by David Ascher of ActiveState fame and, according to him, will be a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit.

Before anyone hates

[porkThreeWays]

Before anyone even brings this up, the reason they usually do for-profit instead of not-for-profit is there is a crapload more bureaucracy associated with a not-for-profit and they'll end up spending a lot of money dealing with it.

Re:MS Exchange

[bsod_vista]

You mean like this [zimbra.com] or this [open-xchange.com] or even this [sun.com]?

Re:$3 Million is not enough

[dascritch]

And gazillions of lines of code from Mozilla, from Eudora, perhaps from MiliMail etc.... That's a lot of leverage !

For-profit, not new or necessarily bad for Mozilla

[dreemernj]

FireFox is maintained by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, which is owned by the Mozilla Foundation. With version 2, Thunderbird was licensed by Mozilla Corporation as well (Thunderbird 1.5 was still Mozilla Foundation).

For-profit is working for them for FireFox, they probably just figured they'd try to do a similar child company for Thunderbird.

Someone mentioned the decreased headaches of being for-profit versus legally being a non-profit, and that could very well be the case. FireFox is doing well. It seems like they know what they are doing. I am always sceptical, it's in my nature, but this doesn't seem to be a red flag. It was a red flag for me when FireFox was moved into for-profit hands, but nothing bad has happened because of it.