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."

"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!

The death of software.

[Anonymous Coward]

" Also, there's already plenty of open source mail apps around. Goodbye, it was great while it lasted.""

Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the future of "software as a product". Hello to "software as a service". Oh wait! [slashdot.org]

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.

Re:"overall complexity of the program" ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe that's a metric fuckton of work for someone who really doesn't want to put the time into it. Don't just assume that "wanting to opensource something" means "wanting to spend lots of effort to opensource something".

what an asshat

[subtropolis]

Oh, and having the source wouldn't do anyone much good unless they planned on forever keeping it closed lest they find their asses sued.

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 [slashdot.org]: an app is more than a collection of features.

Open sourcing it

[CastrTroy]

I understand the third party implications with open sourcing it, but complexity? They've got to be kidding. There's office suites, entire operating systems, databases, and tons of other stuff that's probably way more complicated then their mail client. I think it's probably just that their code is so bad, that it's shameful for them to release it to the public.

Re:I'm not too sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in 2000, CMU [cmu.edu] 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. [cmu.edu]) 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. [blackboard.com] I wonder how long that's going to last...

Re:I'm not too sad

[typical]

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...

Given that Blackboard is a buggy, slow, ugly piece of shit, I hope not long.