Qualcomm Ends Eudora Development

Mark Anbinder:

Qualcomm announced today that future versions of the venerable email program Eudora, which the company has sold for many years, will be an open-source collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation. Steve Dorner, vice president of technology for Qualcomm’s Eudora group and the software’s original developer, says he’ll lead a group that will “build an open-source mailer with Eudora features on top of Thunderbird.”

Contrary to some preliminary reports, Qualcomm isn’t releasing the existing version of Eudora as open source — they’re abandoning the existing version, and supposedly creating a new Eudora-inspired Thunderbird off-shoot.

We’ll see how that goes. It wasn’t long ago that Qualcomm was talking about a vaporware version of Eudora re-written using Cocoa, which was originally set for release at the end of 2005. A real shame — I’d been silently hoping that the Cocoa rewrite would eventually ship and wouldn’t suck.

★ Wednesday, 11 October 2006