SAN DIEGO — October 11, 2006 — QUALCOMM and the Mozilla Foundation today 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. QUALCOMM and Mozilla will each participate in, and continue to foster development communities based around the open source Mozilla project, with a view to enhancing the capabilities and ease of use of both Eudora and Thunderbird.
QUALCOMM also today announced that it has released the final commercial versions of the current Eudora products for Windows and Mac operating systems. The open source version of Eudora is targeted to release during the first half of calendar year 2007. Once the open source version of Eudora is released, QUALCOMM will cease to sell Eudora commercially. In the interim, QUALCOMM will continue commercial sales, at a reduced price of $19.95 and with a six-month period of technical support. Existing technical support commitments will be honored in their entirety.
“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.”
“We’re pleased to welcome Eudora and its millions of users to the world of open source,” said Frank Hecker, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. “This effort should further enrich the Thunderbird technology platform and provide users of both products with an even richer email experience.”
More information about the open source version of Eudora and details for existing customers of the classic version of Eudora can be found at [URL]www.eudora.com/faq[/URL].
More information on all the new features of the classic version of Eudora 7.1 and 6.2.4 can be found at [URL]www.eudora.com/windows[/URL] and [URL]www.eudora.com/mac[/URL].
Eudora was one of the first and most popular email clients available for the Mac, originally developed by Steve Dorner at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988. Qualcomm later acquired the software and released it commercially for Mac and Windows. Dorner is now vice president of technology for Qualcomm’s Eudora group. In recent years Eudora’s popularity has slipped due to its poor Mac OS X integration and weak IMAP support.