Beonex Communicator

» see beonex.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2000 I was on a 56k modem in Turkey and my browser question was Netscape or Internet Explorer, with Mozilla builds arriving later as the interesting third answer. Beonex Communicator was a fourth answer that almost nobody was asked, and it came from one German developer with a specific complaint about the other three.

Ben Bucksch was a Mozilla contributor who thought the suite shipped with the wrong defaults. Commercial browsers were tuned for whatever the vendor's business needed, and his position was that a browser handling your mail and your passwords should be tuned for the person using it. Beonex Communicator was that argument compiled, released as version 0.6 on 14 November 2000.

It was not a fork of the Mozilla Application Suite. Bucksch kept it as a separate branch tracking upstream, which meant he inherited every improvement Mozilla made and also every decision Mozilla made without asking him. That arrangement is the whole story of what happened next.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was actually for ~

The roadmap named Kerberos and OpenPGP, with LDAP directory lookup behind them. Enterprise authentication and real mail encryption were present in the suite as add-ons or not at all, and a security-minded build wanted both as first-class features rather than afterthoughts. The business model was the standard open source one of the period, where the software is free and the money comes from support and customization, sold through an entity called Beonex Business Services.

The final release was 0.8.2-stable on 21 March 2003, and the version number is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Three and a half years of releases and the project never crossed into production status, so the security features that justified its existence were being promised to people who were running a preview build.

~ the unraveling ~

On 2 March 2004 Bucksch announced there would be no new releases while he waited for the Mozilla Foundation to settle its policy direction. The Foundation had been created the previous summer and was busy moving its weight from the suite to Firefox and Thunderbird, which meant the codebase Beonex tracked was being quietly demoted. By mid-2004 every one of the security goals was marked failed.

What killed it was not a competitor. A single maintainer had bet four years on a branch of somebody else's tree, and when that tree got repotted there was no version of the project that survived the move.

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