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Mulberry Creators File for Bankruptcy
kRemit writes "Isamet/Cyrusoft International, the producer of the much-beloved email app Mulberry, has announced on its website that it has filed for liquidation under Title 11, Chapter 7. On a sidenote, Mulberry-mastermind Cyrus Daboo doesn't think it will be possible to release the source, because of third party implications and the overall complexity of the program. Also, there's already plenty of open source mail apps around. Goodbye, it was great while it lasted."
And this is right after the new thunderbird 1.0.7 announcement. I never personally used Mulberry myself but it warms me to see opensource thriving so well in areas where everybody needs the applications (as opposed to extremely niche apps).
What the hell are you talking about? You can't [b]pay[/b] to bankrupt someone.
Bankruptcy is what a person / company declares for itself when it no longer has enough money to pay what it owes to other people.
Unless you're saying that other companies with more money bankrupted Cyrusoft by producing better products and taking away their customers, in which case...that's the way it should be.
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I mean, there exist many fast IMAP clients. Certainly Pine is fast, some (e.g. myself) find it very convenient, and it should be easy to recompile for OS X. It is not free software though.
More seriously, today's software market is such that selling a small app for money is not likely to be profitable. Too many people will write email clients, editors, OS kernels ... and give them away at no cost ("free as in beer"). Most of that software is actually Free Software (TM), but that's beside the point here. This is not dissimilar from the period in the 80s and early 90s when anytime someone would start selling a nice utility Microsoft would bundle similar functionality into DOS or Windows (anyone remember SideKick?). Today that means taht if your piece of software does something not too complicated, and many people would like to have this functionality, then someone will develop a free alternative. When it comes to web-browsing or e-mail reading, you have to content with massive efforts like the , which is even worse.
This is not to say there's room for commercial software today -- but it's in a different market. Since the cost of distributing software is now about zero, and the cost of writing it is effectively small (in the sense that many projects find many people are willing to donate their effots), to charge for software it must embody something more -- some kind of expensive research or expertise that is difficult to duplicate in a community project.
For example, GCC is a great cross-platform compiler, but if you need a good optimizing compiler you will pay for the real thing: 's ICC, or Sun's compilers. In a different field, there is little competition for AutoCAD.
If anyone actually wants the program's source, now is the time to start raising money or pledges to buy it. If you move quickly, you can get enough money in the pot to discourage any competeing bids from other companies.
Also, an effort that was collecting money would likely stop the code from simply being lost forever in the chaos, as people would track it as a potential asset. The source code to Dragon Naturally Speaking was almost lost under similar circumstances, and I believe this is what happened to the source code to Word Perfect 5.1 ( WP 5.1 was the last all-assembly, ultra fast version. Subsequent versions got more featureful and slow. )
I would send someone a check for $10 for this fund, just on general principle, provided the code was to be GPL'd and not BSD'd -- I'm not paying to open up the source just so it can be locked up again.
I was an early adopter of Mulberry, first on Mac, later on Linux. I really am sad to hear that the Cyrusoft folks couldn't make a go of it. Over the years, I got to know Cyrus and some of other people there; they were all nice folks, and the company was a pleasure to work with. That being said, this news really isn't that surprising, for two reasons.
One is that while each new release brought more features, it also brought more complexity. It got to the point where I was never quite sure I understood how to configure it any more (to be fair, the same is true of most mail clients these days, including Pine).
To a certain extent, some of the complexity was difficult to get away from, because IMAP itself is very complex. IMHO, one of the worse design decisions in IMAP was to not standardize how mailboxes are named. This means different servers export different sets of names, and this non-uniformity is visible to the user. It's especially annoying when you're using one client to connect to multiple servers. One of Mulberry's failings was to expose all of the underlying complexity to the user.
The second reason is that it's really hard to sell something into a market dominated by free software. They got squeezed in both directions. On the one hand, they had to compete with the Outlook jaugernaut, but people who rejected Outlook also had plenty of other choices for free.
I'll speak up here in defense of Mulberry. I've been using it since '99, and for all its flaws I still love it. The organization I work for has it deployed for about 500 users.
It's a bit of a two headed beast. On one hand it's an incredibly feature rich and customizable client, built using IMAP from the ground up. It supports POP3 and local mailboxes, but both are add ons to the IMAP core. It doesn't have the greatest GUI in the world, but it's simple, fast and powerful. The GUI is very close on Win/Mac/*nix which makes it very easy to support.
Now, that doesn't sound like a good email client for the masses, but the other side of Mulberry is the centralized IMSP preferences and the Admin toolkit.
An IMSP server for preferences and addressbooks allows users to have consistency between locations (home, offices, a co-worker's computer, labs) for all their settings and addressbooks. Sorta like a webmail solution, but much FASTER. IMSP options are inherited on the server, so you set up _your_ defaults for new users that make sense. You can also lock specific options to keep users from getting in trouble, or creating security problems.
The Admin Toolkit is what lets you take a copy of the Mulberry Application and customize it for your user base. Prevent creation of local mailboxes if you want, or keep users from saving their passwords so they actually remember what they are. Set attachment size limits or warnings, prevent the use of custom headers, or whatever.
I'm really not sure what we're going to do now that Cyrusoft/ISAMET is gone. Any other option is going to have a big support impact on out helpdesk.
-d
I'm a data packrat and a voracious reader, and subscribe to tons of mailing lists for all the open source daemons I use. I don't know of any other mail client (including Thunderbird) that can manage this load as effectively, while allowing me to keep the mail in folders on the server so that I can view it from both home and office.
I initially switched from Evolution to Mulberry because I wanted a system that allowed me to preserve my filtering rules when changing mail clients. The result was my use of procmail server-side to do all my filtering, and IMAP to allow any client from anywhere to access it. But when researching IMAP-capable clients, Mulberry stood out as the most capable. Only Mulberry can quickly check dozens of folders for new mail without subscribing to all of them. (It's also important to use a fast IMAP server. Dovecot is serving that purpose pretty well for my small server with a handful of clients.)
I've considered using Thunderbird, but so far I've been unable to get it to check all unsubscribed folders for new mail, even after setting the undocumented mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new to true. And it lacks Mulberry's novel separation of the concepts of identity and account.
Some have critized Mulberry's appearance on Linux, as if that was a show-stopper. For me, it's sufficient that it run at all on Linux, as I switch between Win32 and Linux platforms. I don't need it to fit some desktop theme for it to be useful. Eye candy is a nice-to-have, but not essential.
It's good that we have a standard protocol that all mail clients can use to access all mail servers. It's good that the protocol is open and unencumbered. It's a shame, though, that the protocol we standardized on was IMAP.
:)
IMAP is an ugly, convoluted mess. And as I tend to rant about often, overly complex protocols encourage buggy implementations. "Keep it simple, stupid." If something like POP4 had become the standard, there would be a better selection of quality, non-troublesome email clients out there.
Although, with an increasing number of richly functional webmail systems out there now, perhaps the email fat client will become less relevant anyway. Of course, email clients will never go away entirely: you still need text-based access (pine and elm), and non-interactive clients such as Fetchmail...
Oh hell, I'll just come out and say it... anything is better than Outlook.
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I know a bit about this. In former times I went on an annual IMAP pilgrimage, looking for a client that didn't suck the proverbial donkey balls, for Mac (and Linux, though that was hopeless in those days).
Mulberry was hella not it, although I tried out every new version as part of my quest.
Somebody said it was fast--that's true, if you happened to be connected directly to your mail server on a local gigabit ethernet link. Otherwise, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Mail.app, and Eudora were all faster (in their respective times). Plus a bunch of others.
In fact, the only true claim to fame Mulberry ever had was the undisputed title for the Worst Software Interface Of Any Mail Client (Or Perhaps Any Type Of Application) Ever. Even after the "interface overhaul" they did with those unpaid college students! (Not that I blame them: your average college kid was SURE to know more about human-computer interaction than Cyrusoft apparently ever did...)
Mulberry did have FEATURES though, which is why your average thinking user hated it even more. You always wanted to believe, because you wanted the 89,734 features it had--more than any other client ever, 'm pretty sure--but after a week (or maybe a day) of seeing the whole app modally lock up for ten minutes while checking mail, the disjointed and otherworldly user interface, the crashes, and the general 80's-ness of it, you went back to Thunderbird, Mail, or Outlook or whatever.
Goodbye Mulberry, and my condolences to the 9 poor slobs who will actually miss you. Software that sucks that bad shouldn't really take so long to die.