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Computer History Museum Makes Eudora Email Client Source Code Available To the Public (medium.com)
Computer History Museum (CHM), an institution which explores the history of computing and its impact on the human experience, announced on Tuesday the public release and long-term preservation of the Eudora source code, one of the early successful email clients, as part of its Center for Software History's Historical Source Code. The release comes after a five-year negotiation with Qualcomm. From the press release: The first version of Eudora was created in the 1980s by Steve Dorner who was working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It took Dorner over a year to create the first version of Eudora, which had 50,000 lines of C code and ran only on the Apple Macintosh. In 1991, Qualcomm licensed Eudora from the University of Illinois and distributed it free of charge. Qualcomm later released Eudora as a consumer product in 1993, and it quickly gained popularity. Available both for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, in its heyday Eudora had tens of millions of users. After 15 years, in 2006, Qualcomm decided that Eudora was no longer consistent with their other major project lines, and they stopped development. The discussion with Qualcomm for the release of the Eudora source code by the company's museum took five years. Len Shustek, the chairman of the board of trustees of the Computer History Museum, writes: Eventually many email clients were written for personal computers, but few became as successful as Eudora. Available both for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, in its heyday Eudora had tens of millions of happy users. Eudora was elegant, fast, feature-rich, and could cope with mail repositories containing hundreds of thousands of messages. In my opinion it was the finest email client ever written, and it has yet to be surpassed. I still use it today, but, alas, the last version of Eudora was released in 2006. It may not be long for this world. With thanks to Qualcomm, we are pleased to release the Eudora source code for its historical interest, and with the faint hope that it might be resuscitated. I will muse more about that later.
So, Qualcomm had the copyright to a piece of software that hasn't been remotely relevant to anyone this century, and has been out of development for 12 years. There's nothing about that piece of software that could REMOTELY be interesting as IP. Sure, the implementation itself (like all source code) may be under copyright, but there's no way there's any commercial value, trade secrets, or anything else in there that's relevant enough to protect at this point.
And yet they hold out for FIVE FLIPPIN' YEARS before they'll consent to the release of the source code? It sounds from TFA like they considered just granting a release to allow the museum to see and publish the code, but retain all copyrights (though they do get some points for eventually deciding to assign all the IP over to the museum, which allowed the museum to release the code under BSD).
But still. Five years. For a dead piece of software with no practical relevance.
And people wonder why technologists get so up in arms about bad software patents (which is pretty much all software patents). Large corporations are so trained to hold on to every remotely relevant piece of IP for the litigation battlefield that a common sense decision like this takes FIVE YEARS. IP is well beyond the point of common sense. Or the original point of the patent system of encouraging innovation by requiring disclosure of novel methods. IP is ammunition, and by god everything's a gunfight.