Just three weeks after Mozilla announced a new subsidiary to develop Internet communication software based on the Thunderbird email client, two of its main developers are leaving the company for undisclosed reasons.

Lead developer Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu have both revealed their departures on blog postings last week. Neither elaborated on why they had decided to leave, but said they would continue to be Thunderbird “freelance” developers.

“I wanted to let the Thunderbird community know that Friday October 12th will be my last day as an employee of the Mozilla Corporation. I plan to continue on, as a volunteer, with my role as a module owner for the Thunderbird project,” MacGregor wrote in a blog post.

Bienvenu posted a similar message on his blog. He will also take a role as “module owner” for Mozilla as well.

David Ascher, chief executive of the Thunderbird company in a blog post confirmed the move and said “They’ve worked on Thunderbird and its predecessors within Mozilla and Netscape for a long time, and I can certainly understand their desire to do something different.”

The resignations could mean temporary setback to Thunderbird as reassigning vacated responsibilities to other developers will take time. At worst, this could delay Thunderbird releases.

At present, Thunderbird is trying to minimize the impact of the loss. To carry things smoothly as possible, Ascher revealed that all existing Mozilla programmers are being offered full time positions. The company also is hiring new staff.

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Entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 9:56 pm under Technology.

Read more entries by Ruben Francia.
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