The Mozilla Foundation is thinking about creating a separate organization to take control of its Thunderbird e-mail application, allowing it to concentrate on development of the Firefox Web browser.

In a blog posting Wednesday, Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, called for a new structure to allow “the Thunderbird community to determine its own destiny” and asked the open-source community for input.

Baker said Mozilla’s Thunderbird effort “is dwarfed” by the energy it spends on the Firebox browser and the ecosystem around it.

“Mozilla doesn’t focus on Thunderbird as much as we do … on Firefox and we don’t expect this to change in the foreseeable future,” she wrote. A separate organization focused on the maintenance and further development of the e-mail client, she added, would be able to move independently and thus deepen the user community.

Wow. It makes sense though. If development of Thunderbird is suffering because of the focus on Firefox, it only makes sense to separate from Mozilla and let it fly.

As a Thunderbird user I think it’s a good idea.

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