Both Thunderbird Lead Developers Leave the Mozilla Foundation

Thunderbird lead developers Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu have announced via their personal blogs (and by extension through PMO) their intentions to leave the Mozilla Project – specifically, Thunderbird.

This comes as quite a shock as both of them were Mozilla’s full-time paid developers on the project. They both announced that October 12th (Friday) will be their last day as Mozilla Corporation employees.

Its both sad and unfortunate that both will be leaving the Mozilla Project, however, both have been working on the Project (through Netscape) and have expressed a desire to do something different.

The good news is that they will both stay involved as both module owners and volunteers and therefore still be involved with the Mozilla Project as volunteers rather than full-time paid employees.

It will be interesting to see how Thunderbird shifts away from being a mail-centric client to being a “communications-centric client” encompassing all communication protocols, not just E-mail and RSS but others like chat/IRC as well.