Eudora, a long time favorite email application’s maker Qualcomm has announced that it will move to an open source development scheme and will base it on Mozilla technologies currently in use in Mozilla’s own Thunderbird email application.

“Using the Mozilla Thunderbird technology platform as a basis for future versions of Eudora will provide some key infrastructure that the existing versions lacked, such as a cross-platform code base and a world-class display engine. Making it open source will bring more developers to bear on Eudora than ever before.”, said Steve Dorner, vice president of technology for QUALCOMM’s Eudora Group on yesterday’s press release.

In fact, Mozilla and Qualcomm have already started a new project, dubbed Penelope, that aims to “join the Eudora® user experience with the Mozilla platform.” Qualcomm will remain a strong supporter of the project. Currently, all six members of the Penelope team remain as Qualcomm employees.

“It’s *not* our intention to compete with Thunderbird; rather, we want to complement it. We are committed to both preserving the Eudora user experience and to maintaining maximum compatibility, for both developers and users, with Thunderbird. It is our goal to build a single development community around Thunderbird and Eudora, so that both mailers advance faster than they previously have.”, states the Goal section of the Penelope project.

I find hard to understand how two products will coexist without competing with each other. Product duplicity is not uncommon within Mozilla though as Firefox/SeaMonkey and Firefox/Camino coexistences exemplify. Though differences exist, they are technical and hard to explain or relevant from a user’s point of view.

Hopefully they will both merge at some point and the most powerful but uncommon features will be available as a “power pack” extension for Thunderbird.