Enter the (Komodo) Dragon

On Open Enterprise blog.

Thunderbird Spreads its Wings

I was muttering darkly about Thunderbird's future, and the worrying attitude the Mozilla Foundation seemed to be taking to this key program. Happily, they have got their brains in gear again, and come up with the following wizard plan:

Mozilla today announced a new initiative to stimulate innovation in Internet mail and communications. Mozilla plans to develop Internet communications software based on the Thunderbird product, code and brand. The new initiative also aims to nurture a robust developer ecosystem in order to drive improvements through open source and community innovation, in the tradition of the Firefox web browser.

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Mozilla will provide US$3 million seed funding to establish this new company.

Millions of people around the world rely on Thunderbird as their primary mail application. Nothing will change for current Thunderbird users. Mozilla will continue to provide Thunderbird users with regular security and stability updates as it establishes its new initiative, and remains committed to the needs of Thunderbird users.

Enter the Open Komodo Dragon

I've always been struck by how little known the company ActiveState is, given that it's worked with many open source languages such as JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl. Now it's opening up its multi-platform, multi-language IDE:

With the Open Komodo Project, the focus is on dynamic languages and the open web. Open Komodo is developed on top of many open source technologies including Mozilla, Python, and Scintilla. The primary development technologies used include XUL, JavaScript, Python, and C/C++. The Open Komodo platform will be entirely open source and licensed under the same terms as Firefox: Mozilla Public License (MPL), GNU General Public License (GPL), and GNU Lesser Public License (LGPL).

The Open Komodo Project aims to create a full-featured web development tool for client-side web development integrated with Firefox, Mozilla's free, open source web browser, and based on the award-winning Komodo IDE. This new tool, codenamed Komodo Snapdragon, will be developed in collaboration with the open source community.

Sounds good, particularly the integration with Firefox.