Thanks for all the mentions again ;-)
It's not real clear why I need to justify Thunderbird. Some years ago, when I first did the port, I was roundly criticized for it by people who had nothing better to do, and weren't interested in understanding development processes. It was also about that time, that many developers abandoned the platform.
I agree that there are excellent email clients for RISC OS, and agree even more that RISC OS has suffered hugely from "Not invented here", where things have been redone from scratch over and over (e.g. web browsers), although TB doesn't really fall into that category.
If anyone actually tries the TB port, you'll find that - as I noted, it is very unpolished, and not really a practical alternative to anything native to RISC OS - although there is at least one person interested in it.
But like most RISC OS development these days, it was done because it was interesting to me, and relatively straightforward given its substantial similarities to the Firefox code (the patches are 95% the same). Beyond that, and as with the game ports (see latest riscos.info news for Xmas games release) there are quite a number of incidental benefits which can help all ports, although some of them are a bit hard to explain to non-developers. Work on TB also helped resolve some specific problems in Firefox - sometimes a different approach can make things more transparent.
As with most RO developments nowadays, and similar discussion on TIB, in lieu of financial compensation, most RO developers will work on exactly what interests them, and no more. They don't have to justify it.
Anyway, apologies for my non-existent German and any mangling done by Google Translate in either direction.
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Peter Naulls,
21. 12. 2009, 18:22
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