[GNU-linux-libre] Spicebird/Thunderbird - fully free enough ?

[A.J. Venter]

Hi all,
Based on a news report I went to look at spicebird, a program I had
previously ignored as it was under a EULA - but it has since been
trilicensed under the MPL, GPL and LGPL (apparently to comply with the
GPL requirements from SamePlace which it uses extensively).
http://www.spicebird.com/spicebird/license

Thus it's own licensing is good - however it also supports thunderbird
extensions - and presumably, like it's parent is not doing anything to
filter out non-free extensions from the list.
All our distro's have been actively involved in ensuring a fully-free
web-browser is available through projects like icecat, but I haven't
seen much happening in terms of the mail client side. Kongoni's
default is kmail/kontact where this is not an issue as there is no
extension marketplace, but the most popular desktop mail app remains
thunderbird (and presumably in the enterprise space spin-offs like
Spicebird).
So - has there been any work done to try and provide a trademark-safe
version of thunderbird that doesn't recomend non-free
extensions/themes ? Like we have firefox in IceCat and it's Ilk ? I
haven't found any (but it may just not have made the news as much
because frankly, it's a smaller issue than web-browsers, there's a lot
more variety in the mail space) - if there isn't... shouldn't we be
doing something about that - or do we settle for recommending (and
ourselves only shipping) projects like kmail and such over projects
like thunderbird ?

Ciao
A.J.

-- 
A.J. Venter
Founder and lead developer, Kongoni GNU/Linux
www.kongoni.co.za
www.silentcoder.co.za - Blog