Hey all,
Ryan Sipes, the Thunderbird Product Manager here. I want to just add my own thoughts here and how Thunderbird sees this relationship, and hopefully that will help some of you feel more at ease and add more fuel to the fire for those who are excited.
I’m a longtime K-9 user. In fact, I don’t really remember a time when I had a smartphone and wasn’t using it (although I’m sure very, very early on a time might have existed). I have an attachment to the K-9 name and its history, and have loved it and continue to love it.
When Cketti and I started talking, I wanted to see how we could best collaborate so that Thunderbird and K-9 users would be happy. But looking at the project and some of the blockers it had, I thought it was pretty clear that a lot of them came down to resources and the time commitments of the people working on K-9. So over time I found myself thinking, “how can we provide resources to the K-9 Mail project and remove the barriers preventing it from getting better?”
One thing I’ll share is that Thunderbird is governed by its community, who approves our budget and top level goals. The K-9 community is now a part of that governance structure and can help set our direction as well. We are in a separate legal entity from Firefox and do not benefit from their revenue, our revenue comes from our users in the form of donations - and donations have been very, very good for us the last few years. As a result our focus is purely on trying to please our users, that’s it. The great donations allow us to invest in the development of K-9 as we are doing.
I say that to make this point: Everyone on the Thunderbird side just wants to see K-9 improve, full stop. No one has voiced any other desired outcomes for K-9 from our end. We want to ensure this project has multiple developers working on it full time producing the best email experience on Android. The name K-9 may live on in some form, as I know it is sentimental to many of you here (perhaps it can live on as a branch that is slightly different than Thunderbird on Android). But ultimately, our focus is the same as K-9’s: privacy, powerful tools and customization, and a focus on open standards and everything being open source. That’s why this works.
I hope with time, all of you see that we are here to help improve a project that you love and that we are making a large commitment to K-9 and this community. I’m looking forward to talking to each of you and understanding what your wants, needs and concerns are. Feel free to DM me here or email me at: ryan@thunderbird.net (I may not reply immediately, but I’ll try to answer everything that comes in).