Computer History Museum (CHM), the world’s leading institution exploring the history of computing and its impact on the human experience, today announced the public release and long-term preservation of the Eudora source code, one of the early successful email clients, as part of its Center for Software History’s Historical Source Code. The release comes after a five-year negotiation with Qualcomm.
The source code for both the Mac and Windows versions are released, and there’s a post on Medium with more details about this latest work by the Computer History Museum.
I’ve never used Eudora in any serious manner, so I don’t have the kind of connection with it that some others have. Still, I am always happy when ‘dead’ software’s source code is released as open source, so that it effectively never dies.
Blast from the past. Eudora was a mainstay back in the early days of computing. I probably still have a copy on my Mac SE in basement. It was rock solid.
Same. Used Eudora for years, until HTML mail (unfortunately) became common.
It would be fun to subject that to modern security analysis and count the ways to pwn.
I’m really hoping for old linux versions of wordperfect to be freed, that was my gateway to running linux mostly full time.
I’m guessing that’s not very likely to happen…
A good thing but five years of negotiations doesn’t bode well for open sourcing other dead proprietary software
The source code of two other email clients (both of which I bought licenses for) were released but they did not flourish afterwards: Ishmail and Mulberry.
Come to think of it, I also paid for Eudora…
These days I use Gmail (I have a free Apps account) or Evolution on Linux desktops.