[pchelpers] News: Future Eudora Versions Based on Mozilla Thunderbird

Eudora goes open source! Read all about it here:

http://www.mozillazine.org/
Thursday October 12th, 2006
Future Eudora Versions Based on Mozilla Thunderbird

The Mozilla Foundation and Qualcomm have announced that future versions
of the Eudora mail client will be based on Mozilla Thunderbird. The
first Thunderbird-based release of Eudora is expected to be made
available in the first half of 2007 and will be both free and
open-source. According to the press release, it will retain "Eudora's
uniquely rich feature set and productivity enhancements". Thunderbird
and Eudora will remain separate products, though they may benefit from
common improvements in the future.

The mission to migrate Eudora to a Thunderbird-based application will be
known as the Penelope project. A rough roadmap has been produced,
envisaging three initial releases: 0.1, 0.5 and 1.0. Each release will
progressively reimplement more Eudora features, with 1.0 being a
suitable replacement for most current users. Qualcomm has assigned six
employees to the Penelope project, including original Eudora developer
Steve Dorner, who started working on the program in 1988, three years
before it was purchased by Qualcomm.

The Eudora FAQ on the Thunderbird announcement makes it clear that
Qualcomm sees an open-source Eudora as an exit strategy with which it
can gracefully leave the email client business. Today, Qualcomm focuses
on wireless technology (the company invented the CDMA standard used by
some mobile phone networks) and Eudora is somewhat of an anomaly in its
product lineup. A final commercial version of Eudora, 7.1 for Windows
and 6.2.4 for Mac OS X, has been released at a reduced price. Qualcomm
will stop selling this edition once the Thunderbird-based product
reaches maturity.




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