Comment by notpushkin
Comment by notpushkin 4 days ago
Thunderbird is de jure still a Mozilla project (through a subsidiary, MZLA).
And no, severing all ties wouldn’t work – not unless you find a viable financial model. Selling access for builds (Ardour-style) might work, but I’m not too sure.
My understanding is Thunderbird is self funded from donations.
> not unless you find a viable financial model
First reduce expenses by several magnitudes. There is no reason browser should need more than a github project, build QA servers, and 10 paid core developers. But you would need much better codebase for that!!!
As for income, donations come to mind. You can still sell default search, just not to google.
20 years ago browser companies had income from selling their rendering engine for embedded use. They also did consulting...