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."

Comments

Best IMAP client

[akac]

I used to use Mulberry as it was frankly the fastest and best IMAP client ever. Even today Thunderbird, Apple's Mail, and anything else just doesn't compete. Not even close.

Mulberry's biggest failing was its user interface which was too hardcore and too unweildly. I think they greatly improved this in the end, but by then it was too late.

I used Mulberry for many years. Sadly the last time was also several years ago.

"overall complexity of the program" ?

[KlausBreuer]

So?
Cut the third party stuff out, and drop the messy endresult into our lap.
Let's see what we can do with it, even if it's just learning something new!

Much beloved?

[Idaho]

..producer of the much-beloved email app Mulberry..

Much beloved? I've never heard of it. I wonder what's so special about it? No wonder they went bankrupt if you ask me, I'd say the market for mailclients is (a) rather saturated (plus, every OS already includes at least a halfway decent free-as-in-beer client anyway), and (b) more and more people switch to webmail clients, such as gmail and the like.

I first tried it 5 months ago

[subtropolis]

I'd heard very good things about it for a while and decided to check it out. It crashed hard on Fedora. And the interface was... well, pretty sad. But by most accounts, it was, indeed, a very good IMAP client. Except the interface. And the crashing.

Multi-Purpose Explanation

[fm6]

... doesn't think it will be possible to release the source, because of third party implications and the overall complexity of the program...

Which is also why nobody adopted this program. Lots of great features, but they didn't fit together in a useful way. The developers threw in every feature they could acquire or develop — but they never thought through the product as a whole.

I've said it before: an app is more than a collection of features.

Re:Multi-Purpose Explanation

[minkie]

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.

alternatives

[l2718]

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.

Sliced Bread

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

There is this absolutely fantastic car I know of... Well, except for the doors that open backwards, the solid orange windshield glass, the foot pedals located in the trunk and the fact that the steering wheel is square. Other than that, it's the swiftest car since, well, sliced bread!

Re:I'm not too sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in 2000, CMU switched to IMAP and started reccommending Mulberry as the standard mail client. I was pretty surprised by this. CMU had previously used open-source or locally developed software. Some of the locally-developed software was pretty quirky and hard to support, but they had generally been trying to make it open source or switch to open source. (For example they switched from AMS to IMAP, and were working on switching from AFS to CODA.) So I was pretty surprised when they started reccommending a closed source mail client. I remember thinking, "A closed-source, third party app? I wonder how long that's going to last..." Today I got the answer - It lasted about 5 years.

Shortly after they started using Mulberry, they started using some other closed-source third-party service called Blackboard. I wonder how long that's going to last...