Eudora is going open source

Eudora was the first e-mail program I ever used and I've always loved it. Now it's going open source, so who knows what will become of it. I hate when this shit happens, you become so used to something, and then, poof it's gone.

And I'm not saying that it is going to disappear, but they have a sweet deal right now where you can buy an unsponsorship version for $19.95 until the end of the year. (I think it used to be about $49.) After that they won't be selling it anymore. So I just burned my copy to disc and hopefully the program will carry on.

I really should check out Thunderbird, but I hate change.

Cheers,
Michael

really? wow!.... i'll have to get it!

it was the same with me. eudora was the first email program i used and it's been the only one i've ever used. it's great.

change sucks :( :bullcrap:

I've used Eudora since version 3 and it's still my fav (though I've heard the new Thunderbird is pretty good).

I'm not worried about the open source conversion. I read that the open source project will be managed by the Mozilla team, and if you think about it, Eudora is loved and used by a lot of programmer/geeky types, so I'm sure there will be a large family of people to continue to support and update it.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually becomes a more robust and stable application over time. I swear it seems like some of the code hasn't changed since the early 90s, and so maybe now there will be some incentive to rewrite and clean up some of the weaker points of the software.

I don't get the whole open-source thing. How does anyone profit from it? And if they don't profit, why do they do it?

It's an entirely different mindset. The people in the open source community are part of a community, probably not unlike GWW. They help each other out and I think a lot of them enjoy the challenges presented by a given programming problem, or like being able to say that they created this-or-that commonly used program or tool. It's probably not that different from the advice and help that people freely give each other here.

The other thing is that coders who are talented but have no "resume" skills can contribute to open source projects and use that as a springboard to get paying jobs. Years ago, Netscape hired a brilliant programmer who wrote much of the code for the first open-source Mozilla browser. He was in some little town like Buffalo Breath, MI, was 15 when he started writing the code, and he got hired by Netscape as soon as he turned 18 on the strength of the work he'd done. So it can provide opportunities for people that might not otherwise have the chance to meet people and make connections.

Many of the stuff in open source was originally developed for use in house somewhere, and the company paid its programmers to develop it, then donated it to open source so others could use it... the cool thing about open source tools is the way the license works. Anyone is free to use open source tools, but if you add or change something in the code, you have to contribute the add-on or changes to open source and can't copyright it. So there's an incentive to continue and grow open source.

There are also projects like MySQL, which are free for users the size of most of our businesses, but must be licensed (and it ain't super cheap) for big companies. The licensing fees pay for developers who maintain and update the code (in addition to the open source coders who donate their time), and users can also buy support from MySQL. Red Hat has the same deal; you can get CentOS for free, or you can get Red Hat Enterprise 4, which is exactly the same thing, but with support, better documentation, etc.

Something like 65% of mail and web servers worldwide run open source software (Linux, Apache, Sendmail, etc) and in general, studies have shown that open source code is less buggy and when an exploit is found, it's patched faster than code from Micro$oft. It's an unusual model, but it seems to work. That's why Micro$oft has been working hard to pay for bogus studies showing that it doesn't... they are scared.

Thanks Chip! That was very informative.

I believe the open-source community also came out of the dislike for Microsoft's tactics of owning and buying up everything in site. A good product would come along and as soon as it made a name for itself Microsoft would buy it, and then, often a great little product would get all chewed up in the Microsoft machine, paling in its former brilliance.

Open-source communities were a sort of resistance to rampant consumerism. Even Linux, which I believe is/was open-source, was started as an alternative to Windows. Someone wanted to create an operating system that actually worked and wasn't full of bugs.

Open-source, to a large degree, halted or slowed down the complete globalization of technology into the hands of a few companies. Just like the Internet gave Joe Q Public a say in the world through publishing his own website, open source code gave the small tech guys a fighting chance and gave them a say in how technology developed into the future.

Michael