If you’re one of the rare species still wanting Thunderbird in Ubuntu as described in Jorge Castro’s recent post, you can help. I am more worried about Jorge’s other comments, following his logic Ubuntu and free software are only less and less relevant by the day – not a trend I am observing.

Considering Canonical decided to include Thunderbird in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS – which will keep it around for 5 years, Thunderbird is not going away anytime soon. This essentially puts forward software that is considered irrelevant by its employees (dogfood anyone?) and demonstrates improvisation and miscommunication between Mozilla and Canonical. Many are still waiting for an official statement from Mozilla. I’d love to hear a more formal position than Jorge’s on the subject from Canonical too.

I appreciate the cloud, closed web-services and Google Apps may be all the rage (and the money) but for the rest of us, here are a few links to gather forces and continue. Remember this is not a user-centric or technical issue. The issue at hand are the business deals between Mozilla, Google, and Canonical. If anything, the recent Mozilla announcement will help Thunderbird get a better chance at surviving such forces.

• The Rumbling Edge – Tracking developments in Mozilla Thunderbird builds (so you know how Thunderbird has innovated)
• Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines (so you know how to contribute)
• tb-planning mailing list – Thunderbird planning (moderated)
• tb-enterprise mailing list – Discussion of deployment and configuration of Thunderbird in enterprise environments
• SOGo – an important piece in this puzzle if you like having a web interface, but keeping control of your data