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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."
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.
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.