In a very disappointing announcement, Scott MacGregor has announced that Thunderbird is going to leave Mozilla in favour of a different set up. Thunderbird is the spin off from Mozilla Mail, as part of the Mozilla Suite.

The Mozilla Suite is being developed by a community group still, and is known as Seamonkey. Firefox was itself born from the Mozilla Suite.

Scott says that this has come about because of Mozilla’s mission statement, to create an open web, and that a mail client has no place in this. Thunderbird has unfortunately been the outcast, always in the shadow of Firefox, despite being a great, simple mail client. It has got to pick up its game though for Microsoft is already working on the next version of Outlook Express/Windows Mail, known as Windows Live Mail, which is admittedly quite nice.

I cannot see how this can benefit the email client, and surely an open source community as large as Mozilla’s can work on two projects? Apache has managed it (and works on many projects at once), however it seems to be the only one that I can think of at the top of my head.