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Eudora to partner with Mozilla and go open source

Leader: Qualcomm announced today that its partnership with the Mozilla Foundation means that Eudora is being set free into the open source wilderness. Will it survive?

Qualcomm, makers of the mail client Eudora for both Windows and Mac OS X, announced today that they have partnered with the Mozilla Foundation to make Eudora open source. The new Eudora will be based on the Thunderbird platform, but will retain its "uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements." When completed, the open source Eudora will be free to the public.

In addition to the open source announcement, Qualcomm also released its final commercial versions of Eudora—Eudora 7.1 for Windows and Eudora 6.2.4 for Mac OS X. They will be available at a discounted price of $19.95 each with a six-month support agreement from date of purchase. Those who have already purchased copies of Eudora need not worry, however, as Qualcomm promises to honor those tech support agreements in their entirety. The company states that once the open source version of Eudora is released in the first half of 2007, it will cease selling commercial versions in stores.

Steve Dorner, vice president of technology for QUALCOMM's Eudora Group and original founder of the software in 1988, said, "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," adding that he's excited for the software to be back in the open source community.

A statement on the Eudora FAQ says that Qualcomm decided to exit the e-mail client business because it is "not in alignment with the core business or strategic goals." Translation: It's not making us money anymore. Eudora used to be quite popular back in its heyday, especially among the Mac community. Since then however, Qualcomm has moved onto bigger and better things and has not made many notable updates to the software in quite some time, forcing users to switch over to more current and widely-used e-mail clients. These days, Eudora users tend to be as few and far between as those still stuck using Lotus Notes, maybe even less. This move could breathe new life into Eudora, with a plethora of new, open source developers ready to start tweaking away. Will that be enough to save it, or has Eudora already missed the boat?