Eudora to go open source. No more ad free?????

[jlockley]

Does this mean that only the sponsored version will be available? Not clear from the web site.


Eudora® email moves to open source development and delivers final commercial version -- Eudora 7.1 for Windows and 6.2.4 for Mac OSX.

The open source version of Eudora® is targeted to be released during the first half of calendar year 2007 and will be free of charge. Once the open source version of Eudora is released, QUALCOMM will cease to sell Eudora commercially. Until then, the current commercial versions are available for the reduced price of $19.95 with a six-month period of technical support. All prior technical support commitments continue to be honored.
More about Windows Eudora...
More about Mac Eudora...
What's included for $19.95?
Product plan FAQ...

 

[TonyGroves]

Open Source means that (among other things) the source code is published and anybody is free to make and distribute derivative versions at no cost. So, including ads in the program would be a waste of time; very soon somebody would produce an ad-free version.

Apparently the new Eudora is going to be derived from Mozilla Thunderbird, which is of course ad-free and free-of-charge.

 

[jlockley]

I understand open source, but I was wondering if, if Qualcom is stopping sales, they intend all future versions to run ad free or just to continue to offer the version with ads. It would be stupid, I assume, to upgrade now.

 

[jlockley]

I did upgrade. According to Qualcomm customer service, Eudora will indeed at some point merge with Thunderbird and, I assume, integrated with Firefox. Nice thought.