This’ll be a little bit short, as I’m in Beijing at 3a trying to fight off jetlag (here’s a tip: when you wake up at 2a, don’t turn on your computer!), but wanted to post something about the Eudora 8 beta release that’s recently gone up on mozilla.org.

A lot of folks, including Ars Technica and TechCrunch, are reporting that it’s “Mozilla reviving Eudora,” and that’s incorrect, and I think a disservice to the Eudora team at Qualcomm, led by Steve Dorner.

What’s come out today is the outcome of work by the Eudora team at Qualcomm to migrate from their venerable code base (I used and loved Eudora myself for maybe 10 years, and still miss some things about it) to an open source framework – in other words, it’s an extension built on top of Thunderbird. It is not a new release of a mail client from Mozilla. It is a community project led by the Qualcomm team.

I think this will be an interesting thing to see unfold – how much people care about differences in the UI layer for e-mail clients, and how much you can really do in XUL on top of Thunderbird’s way of interacting, so I’ll be curious to see how folks respond.

For now, though, just wanted to clear things up. When I first met Steve & Co at Qualcomm last year, I felt very lucky to spend time with them – those few individuals probably had more impact on my work life during school & afterwards than any other development team. I’m blown away that their commitment to their users extends beyond their own code base, and that they’re working hard to make sure that Eudora users have a road ahead based on open source and a new growing community.

Signing off from Beijing…