As a closed-source company, Apple can add features into software “simply” by licensing technology bits, thereby using cash (or proxies for cash) to resolve intellectual property issues (the inclusion of PDF features throughout the OS is a good example of that). Thunderbird’s licensing model means that sometimes we’ll need to work hard to resolve licensing issues, or even reimplement features at times.
David Ascher, leader of the new Thunderbird company code-named MailCo in his blog post Mail.app as competition or inspiration?.
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