Early this morning on BetaNews, a program called Eudora 8.00 beta was put up for downloading. The site shows a picture of what the program looks like. It is Thunderbird that has been rebadged as Eudora, and the asking price is $50 as shareware.

This begs the question whether Qualcomm has lost all sense of the real world, as it states on the eponymous website that Eudora is no longer available, having ended much earlier this year. At that time, it was reported that the software was being turned over to the Mozilla Foundation to be reworked by them with the best of Eudora and the best of Thunderbird - as open source software.

Someone apparently has changed their mind, as the download does come from www. eudora.com.

It is amazing that this is being offered, as the company must be expecting the ‘always catch a few’ principle to work here. But who would pay for something that offers no more than what is already available for the price of downloading? Perhaps that patent infringement battle with Broadcom has taken more of a toll than anyone thought.

I would advise a wait and see attitude - who knows what nasty things might be in the download.

I have since checked on the Mozilla.org site to see this:

====================================================
EUDORA VERSION 8.0
====================================================

Eudora is a mail and news application based on the open source Thunderbird
client from Mozilla.  It’s *not* our intention to compete with Thunderbird;
rather, we want to complement it.

We are committed to both preserving the Eudora user experience and to
maintaining maximum compatibility, for both developers and users, with
Thunderbird.  It is our goal to build a single development community around
Thunderbird and Eudora, so that both mailers advance faster than they
previously have.

Whereas “Eudora” is a branded version of Thunderbird with some extra
features added by the Eudora developers, “Penelope” is an extension (also
called an “add-on”) that can be used with either Eudora or Thunderbird.
The Eudora installer includes the corresponding version of Penelope along
with it so there is no need to install Penelope if you are installing
Eudora.  Most features in Penelope can be accessed when used with
Thunderbird, but there are a few that require Eudora in order to work
correctly and it’s not something that gets tested.

Sometimes in documentation there is a need to differentiate the older
versions of Eudora made by Qualcomm from current Thunderbird-based versions
of Eudora.  This will normally be done by labeling the older versions of
Eudora as “original Eudora” or “Classic Eudora”.

The main web page for Eudora/Penelope can be found at
<http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope>.

We encourage people to help the progress of Penelope, whether you know how
to write code or not.  This was one of the main drivers to our decision to
go open source with Eudora.  More details can be found here:
<http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope#Get_Involved>.

———————-
MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS
———————-

The following are the system requirements for each platform.

Windows
——-

Operating Systems
- Windows 98
- Windows 98 SE
- Windows ME
- Windows NT 4.0
- Windows 2000
- Windows XP (Recommended)
- Windows Vista

Minimum Hardware
- Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
- 64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
- 52 MB hard drive space

Mac
—

Operating Systems
- Mac OS X 10.2.x and later

Minimum Hardware
- Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 or PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
- 128 MB RAM (Recommended: 256 MB RAM or greater)
- 200 MB hard drive space

 

Still no mention of the word shareware, or $50 -  so who knows what is going on.

Tags: eudora, end-of-life statement, qualcomm, thunderbird, mozilla foundation, broadcom patent infringement suit