NOTE: This letter has been sent. Please do not contact me about it anymore; I'm drowning in emails to that effect. If you're interested in helping out with SeaMonkey, I suggest you visit . NOTE: This is NOT a petition. If you sign this, you're implying that you're going to be organizing this project. -Boris ------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Staff, We, the undersigned, are somewhat concerned about the current uncertainty regarding the future of SeaMonkey. Given that you had a meeting planned to discuss this and that there has been no public announcement after the meeting, we can only assume that you did not reach a final decision on the issue. With that assumption in mind, here is the situation as we see it. Our primary concern in the short term is with being able to ship a SeaMonkey front end on top of a Gecko 1.8 back end; in the slightly longer term we are interested in having SeaMonkey using XPToolkit and XULRunner. As far as we can tell, the Mozilla Foundation's primary concerns are: A) Lack of manpower to test releases and handle various other pre-release chores. B) Concern that current Mozilla 1.7.x users will see the new release as an official (that is, sanctioned by the Mozilla Foundation) upgrade to Mozilla 1.7.x. Based on these concerns, we are assuming that the Mozilla Foundation does not in fact plan to have a Mozilla Suite release based on Gecko 1.8. If we are incorrect in this assumption, please let us know. We propose the following steps to address these concerns in a mutually beneficial way: 1) SeaMonkey development proceeds as it can, using whatever resources can be organized for the purpose; the Mozilla Foundation is not involved in this if it doesn't want to be. Development continues to utilize cvs.mozilla.org, bugzilla.mozilla.org and wiki.mozilla.org, however. tinderbox.mozilla.org needs to be sorted out, though it may not be a huge issue, since we want to keep at least some machines (btek, for example) with as few changes as possible. In brief, we propose a development model similar to that which Camino has right now. 2) If there is a written list of tasks that need to happen for a SeaMonkey release, whoever has this list puts it up in the wiki under . If there is no written list, we'd love for one to be created, but understand that there may be no desire to spend time on it. We'll take what we can get here. 3) Any release based on this development effort that the Foundation does not take part in (most likely all of them, given the Foundation's concern (A) above) is not branded as the "Mozilla Suite". If the Foundation is willing to grant us the right to use the SeaMonkey trademark for this purpose, we propose to call these releases "SeaMonkey Suite" and keep the current version numbering. We feel that combining this with a clear statement that these builds are not endorsed by the Mozilla Foundation should sufficiently allay the Foundation's concern (B), while allowing the Mozilla Foundation to have a future Mozilla Suite release if desired, using the then-current Gecko version number. This leaves the issue of whether these releases can be hosted on ftp.mozilla.org (in a seamonkey/ directory, not the mozilla/ directory) without giving the impression that the Foundation endorses them. If the Foundation feels that they absolutely cannot, we will attempt to work something out to address this concern. Sincerely, Christian Biesinger Carsten Book Robert Kaiser Felix Miata Kostas Michalopoulos Neil Rashbrook Chris Thomas Alexander J. Vincent Justin Wood Boris Zbarsky