Qualcomm announced today that future versions of the venerable email program Eudora, which the company has sold for many years, will be an open-source collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation. Steve Dorner, vice president of technology for Qualcomm's Eudora group and the software's original developer, says he'll lead a group that will "build an open-source mailer with Eudora features on top of Thunderbird."

First created in 1988, Eudora was a popular Macintosh email client in the early days of the Internet, and it still enjoys broad use, especially at academic institutions and among Mac net veterans who refuse to give up its power-user capabilities in favor of newer software. In 1992, Qualcomm (otherwise known for developing wireless phone technologies) acquired the software from the University of Illinois while hiring Steve Dorner, and has continued to develop Mac OS and Windows versions.

"I was getting really tired of maintaining Eudora's elderly code base, as well as working on extremely boring things like HTML rendering," Dorner told TidBITS. He looks forward to "using Thunderbird as a base," allowing him to focus on "the things that make up the core productivity parts of the Eudora experience." The company picked the cross-platform Thunderbird product because, he says, "it has strengths where Eudora has weaknesses, and will complement us quite nicely. Mozilla is also happy to have us developing for their platform, and has made it very clear to us that they welcome our effort." He hopes "that improvements [will] flow freely between the two mailers."

Qualcomm plans to release the first freeware, open-source version of Eudora in the first half of 2007. In the meantime, the company is releasing final commercial versions today (7.1 for Windows and 6.2.4 for Mac OS), which will continue to be available, now for $20, providing support for six months. Existing support contracts and site licenses will be honored until the end of the current terms, and paid and sponsored-mode versions of the current software will continue to work "in perpetuity."

Steve Dorner admits he doesn't know which parts of Eudora are most useful to its proponents, and asks users to speak up and offer input "on what our priorities should be." Users who wish to weigh in, or developers who'd like to pitch in for the open-source effort, should visit the Eudora developer page.