Mozilla Sunbird is a free and open source

Free and open source software

Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...

, cross-platform

Cross-platform

In computing, cross-platform, or multi-platform, is an attribute conferred to computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented and inter-operate on multiple computer platforms...

 calendar application

Calendaring software

Calendaring software is software that minimally provides users with an electronic version of a calendar. Additionally, the software may provide an appointment book, address book, and/or contact list. These tools are an extension of many of the features provided by time management software such as...

 that was developed by the Mozilla Foundation

Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...

, Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

 and many volunteers. Mozilla Sunbird was described as "... a cross platform standalone calendar application based on Mozilla's XUL

XUL

In computer programming, XUL , the XML User Interface Language, is an XML user interface markup language developed by the Mozilla project. XUL operates in Mozilla cross-platform applications such as Firefox...

 user interface language." Announced in July 2003, Sunbird is a standalone version of the Mozilla Calendar Project

Mozilla Calendar Project

The Mozilla Calendar Project is the name for the Mozilla project that led to the development of Sunbird calendar application and the Lightning integrated calendar...

.

It was developed as a standalone version of the Lightning

Lightning (software)

The Lightning project, announced on December 22, 2004, and in development by the Mozilla Foundation, produces an extension that adds calendar and scheduling functionality to the Mozilla Thunderbird mail and newsgroup client and SeaMonkey internet suite...

 calendar and scheduling extension for Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...

. Development of Sunbird was ended with release 1.0 beta 1 to focus on development of Mozilla Lightning

Lightning (software)

The Lightning project, announced on December 22, 2004, and in development by the Mozilla Foundation, produces an extension that adds calendar and scheduling functionality to the Mozilla Thunderbird mail and newsgroup client and SeaMonkey internet suite...

.

Sun contributions

Sun Microsystems contributed significantly to the Lightning extension project to provide users with an alternative free and open source choice to Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...

 by combining OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software...

 and Thunderbird/Lightning. Sun's key focus areas in addition to general bug fixing were calendar views, team/collaboration features and support for the Sun Java System Calendar Server

Sun Java Calendar Server

The Sun Java System Calendar Server is Sun's calendar server. The currently available version is 6.3 which is now part of the Sun Java Communications Suite....

. Since both projects share the same code base, any contribution to one of them is a direct contribution to the other.

Trademark issues and Iceowl

Although released under a MPL

Mozilla Public License

The Mozilla Public License is a free and open source software license. Version 1.0 was developed by Mitchell Baker when she worked as a lawyer at Netscape Communications Corporation and version 1.1 at the Mozilla Foundation...

, MPL/GPL

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

/LGPL tri-license, Mozilla Sunbird suffers from trademark restrictions that prevent the distribution of modified versions with the Mozilla branding.

As a result the Debian

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

 project created Iceowl, a virtually identical version sans the branding restrictions.

Release history

Key:
Old Version	Current Version	Future Version

Gecko Gecko (layout engine) Gecko is a free and open source layout engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation , as well as in many other open source software projects....  version	Sunbird version	Release date	Significant changes
1.8	0.2	February 4, 2005
1.9	0.3	October 11, 2006	Calendar storage moved from flat .ICS files to SQLite SQLite SQLite is an ACID-compliant embedded relational database management system contained in a relatively small C programming library. The source code for SQLite is in the public domain and implements most of the SQL standard...
	0.3.1	February 19, 2007	Timezones updated for DST change
1.8.1	0.5	June 27, 2007	Moved to Gecko Gecko (layout engine) Gecko is a free and open source layout engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation , as well as in many other open source software projects....  1.8.1 for added stability and includes support for Google Calendar Google Calendar Google Calendar is a free time-management web application offered by Google. It became available on April 13, 2006, and exited the beta stage in July 2009...  via an extension.
	0.7	October 25, 2007	Cleaner user interface and additional functionality
	0.8	April 4, 2008	International timezones Time zone A time zone is a region on Earth that has a uniform standard time for legal, commercial, and social purposes. In order for the same clock time to always correspond to the same portion of the day as the Earth rotates , different places on the Earth need to have different clock times... , experimental offline support and task mode
	0.9	September 23, 2008	Events spanning days now have a visual indicator indicating them as connected events. When reloading a remote calendar a progress indicator is now shown. The so-called "minimonth" (small calendar month in the upper left) has been given a visual overhaul. The calendar views (day, week, multiweek, month) have been given a visual overhaul. CalDAV CalDAV Calendaring Extensions to WebDAV, or CalDAV, is an Internet standard allowing a client to access scheduling information on a remote server. It extends WebDAV specification and uses iCalendar format for the data. The protocol is defined by RFC 4791...  support and interoperability with various CalDAV servers has been improved.
1.9.1	1.0b1	April 2, 2010	Multiple alarms can be defined for one event. CalDAV support is improved.

See also

• Lightning
  Lightning (software)
  The Lightning project, announced on December 22, 2004, and in development by the Mozilla Foundation, produces an extension that adds calendar and scheduling functionality to the Mozilla Thunderbird mail and newsgroup client and SeaMonkey internet suite...
  
   for Mozilla Thunderbird
  Mozilla Thunderbird
  Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
  
   and SeaMonkey
  SeaMonkey
  SeaMonkey is a free and open source cross-platform Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code...
  
  
• List of personal information managers
• List of applications with iCalendar support

External links

• MozillaWiki
• The Sunbird development blog
• The Rumbling Edge: Sunbird release changelogs
• Portable version
  • Sunbird Portable by PortableApps.com
    PortableApps.com
    PortableApps.com is a site offering portable software for Windows.The site was founded by John T. Haller and includes contributions from over 100 people, including developers, designers and translators.-History:...