Eudora goes open-source

Qualcomm and the Mozilla Foundation today announced it will end commercial development of its Eudora email client and announced that future versions of Eudora will be based upon the same technology platform as the open-source Mozilla Thunderbird email program. Future versions of Eudora will be free and open source, while retaining Eudora's "uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements," the company said. The open-source version of Eudora is expected to be released in the first half of calendar year 2007 and once released, the company will cease to sell Eudora commercially. In the interim, Qualcomm said it will continue commercial sales at a reduced price of $20 (including a six-month period of technical support); however, existing technical support commitments will be honored in their entirety. Eudora 6.2.4 for Mac OS X features a new Mail.app import to easily import mail from Apple's bundled email client and features updated spamWatch definitions

"I'm excited for Eudora to be returning to the open source community," said Steve Dorner, vice president of technology for Qualcomm's Eudora Group. "Using the Mozilla Thunderbird technology platform as a basis for future versions of Eudora will provide some key infrastructure that the existing versions lacked, such as a cross-platform code base and a world-class display engine. Making it open source will bring more developers to bear on Eudora than ever before."

by MacNN Staff