Talk:Thunderbird/FundingAppeal2014
Suggestions for themes of the appeal
The suggestions seem to mainly focus on somebody who either has never used a third party email client or is a big fan of Mozilla. My impression is that webmail, Outlook and the email client bundled with the operating system are the main competition on the desktop. Many competitors have either died (Eudora) or become niche players. While all of the points made are good, it doesn't seem to really explain why an existing free alternative is not good enough.
It also seems to ignore some potential pushback. In the back of a viewers mind they may be thinking: "but I thought you were dead!" , "why should I give you money if Mozilla decided you weren't worth funding anymore?", and "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" (i.e. why is it going to work any better this time) .
I've been following the mailpile blog. Their donate page starts off with: "Because you see the need for a modern, fast web-mail client with user-friendly encryption & privacy features created by (and for) a community of passionate people". Ignore the potential confusion about them implementing a email client using a self hosted webmail implementation. As I read that I walk away with the impression that our appeal is basically asking for money to maintain the status quo. That is a tough pitch. Especially if end-to-end encryption starts catching on as a easy to use standard feature. Our S/MIME support and the Enigmail add-on are way too hard for most people to use. Yahoo and Google are working together to support end-to-end encryption. Maybe that is not the right area to worry about, but we need to aggressively counter any impression that we are just a legacy email client that is falling on hard times.
Donors could get some sort of preferential treatment in support
By who? Both Mozilla support and MozillaZine are community based.
Donors could be added to some sort of group that could influence Thunderbird governance
There needs to be some limits on this to avoid several businesses turning Thunderbird into a enterprise-centric email client. Otherwise it is betraying normal users who contribute money in good faith.
I didn't notice anything about supporting the add-on community. The current policy seems to be that we expect add-on authors to be pro-active and keep updating their add-ons as they discover and deal with changes in Thunderbird. The burden seems to be wholly on them. However, that is not the way most act. One of the biggest differentiators we have is a large collection of free add-ons and the user community developing/supporting them. But this plan only targets Thunderbird developers.
How useful the add-on collection is seems to depend very heavily on a few authors. Paolo Kaosmos will probably disappear some day. Rod Whiteley and Frank DiLecee (Ausdilecce) already did. The plan should do something different to help the add-on community thrive.
