Eudora goes open source… and won’t survive

Qualcomm announced that it’s discontinuing development of Eudora, and will release the code as open source software in the first half of 2007.

While I like Eudora (it’s my favorite Windows e-mail client, and I’ve been a paid-up customer for many years), the synergies between Eudora and the rest of Qualcomm’s product line is zero. So, while the company has done a yeoman’s job keeping the software up to date, it was only a matter of time before someone said, “Enough, already.”

Will the open source community embrace Eudora? Frankly, I have my doubts. There are plenty of open source e-mail clients, with the best known being Mozilla’s Thunderbird, which is already as good as Eudora in most ways, and better in some ways. Thunderbird has clean source code, a dedicated community and no corporate baggage.

Another popular project is Evolution, which I’ve not used. It’s the e-mail software bundled with Ubuntu Linux.

I think this move is the death knell of Eudora. It’s a shame. But most platforms already come with decent POP3/IMAP4 e-mail clients (like Apple Mail or Outlook Express), there are other open source products around, and Eudora’s a bit dated, feature-wise.

Qualcomm gets praise for releasing the source code, instead of just letting the software die. But I don’t think that it’s going to live for long.