Eudora Email Client Code Finally Open-Sourced

I may be a little behind the time catching up with this announcement as it was made on 23rd May on most websites, but on the 22nd the code to the much loved Eudora email client was finally open-sourced by the Computer History Museum under a BSD licence after five years of discussion with former owner Qualcomm, minus the bits owned by other IP copyright holders. You can read more about the history here and get the code further down on that page.

Personally I found that this was one of the best email programs ever written in regards to functionality and looks. It had only one major flaw, which was that it was never compiled for Linux and thus not available on this platform.  Hopefully somebody will be able to do this now and derive an implementation for Linux and BSD from the necessary update to the very old code base for classic Mac, which would also have to be brought into the modern era. As reported by The Register ¨the C source code for the Mac client consists of 69.9MB of code in 1,433 files, while the C++ source for the Windows version consists of 8,651 files weighing in at 458MB.¨

Of course we already have a choice on Linux, from Thunderbird and SeaMonkey Mail and News to Claws, Sylpheed, Kmail, Evolution and others. However, some strike me as extremely heavy and buggy (not naming names), while others are more or less tied to a particular desktop environment and tool set libraries, or quite frankly either convoluted and/or missing important functionality or just a modern, clean look.  It seems to me alternative operating systems and Mac's would benefit from another choice in email clients, even if many these days are using web mail because it's just easier and desktop agnostic. I for one would be happy to pay or help fund a project like this. What about you?

More over at The Register.