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the Software View: Set my Netscape free
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Now, dear readers, on with this week's episode of the Software View!
In the classic 1993 movie, the Fugitive, the actor Harrison Ford plays Dr. Richard Kimble, a prison escapee and Chicago surgeon falsely convicted of killing his wife, and Tommy Lee Jones plays the unrelenting bloodhound of a U.S. Marshal, Samuel Gerard. In a climactic scene, Jones' character has cornered Ford atop a dam. To escape certain capture, Ford's character leaps down the face of the dam. You can see the look of sheer awe on Jones' face. That must have been how Microsoft felt when Netscape announced that it would make the source code for Communicator, its Internet browser, freely available.
Netscape's heady days of being an Internet poster child, with an 80 percent browser market share and successful IPO, are long gone. Microsoft roared from a standing stop to nearly 40% share, if you believe their marketing. Also, the benefit of a Windows monopoly allowed Microsoft to give their browser away. Netscape responded by targeting the messaging and groupware markets. But Microsoft and IBM's Lotus Notes are already big, established, and entrenched players in these markets. Netscape was forced to layoff employees. One of the hardest hit areas was client side JavaTM initiatives. How can any company make money when your biggest competitor, Microsoft, gives away both browsers and web server software? Browsers were becoming commodities and Netscape was spending a lot of resources on a product that was giving them little revenue. After announcing revenue losses and layoffs, Netscape was backed into a corner. Something had to be done.
THE BEST THINGS ONLINE ARE FREE
Momma always said, "The best things in life are free." There is a saying on the Internet that "information wants to be free." Well, software wants to be free as well. In a brilliant masterstroke, on January 23, 1998, Netscape announced that it would give away its browser and make the source code to Communicator 5.0 freely available to developers around the world. In one fell swoop, not only could they address the revenue problem, but they could also enlist aid from software developers from around the world. Netscape unleashed, harnessed, and leveraged the energies of software practitioners worldwide. These creative, dedicated, and resourceful volunteer engineers easily outnumber any that Microsoft could ever possibly hope to amass.
The intellectual underpinnings of such a decision come from software consultant Eric S. Raymond, who wrote the paper entitled "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". He posits that there are two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. He makes a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". They may attempt to follow GNU's (GNU's Not Unix!) Copyleft license policy. But GNU could not be applied to some Communicator components, like encryption and support for Sun Microsystems' Java.
Mozilla.org is the group within Netscape chartered to act as a clearing-house for the newly-available Netscape source. They provide a central point of contact and community for those interested in using or improving the source code. Grassroots movements also exist. One grassroots movement I find particularly fascinating is Jazilla, a Java version of the browser.
I believe Netscape will be successful in its bid to survive the browser wars. Here are the reasons why. BIND runs the Internet's DNS (domain name service, or system). BIND is the software that allows us to type site names like www.yahoo.com instead of the machine numbers (204.71.177.97) our browsers really need. BIND is freeware developed originally at Berkeley in the early 1980s. Perl is a utilitarian interpreted language used to implement many operations conducted on the web. Sendmail is the program that acts like a traffic cop in routing and delivering mail on UNIX-based networks. It is the world's most popular MTA (Message Transport Agent) and the de facto Internet mail server. Sendmail, which routes about 80% of the E-mail that courses over the Internet, is also open-source software, initially written by Eric Allman in 1981 and now maintained by sendmail.org, an on-line programmer community that numbers in the thousands. Most web sites on the Internet run on Apache, an open source web server. Finally, an open source operating system called Linux is being installed on millions of computers around the world. The entire legacy and lineage of the Internet depended upon other freely available, open standards: ftp, gopher, http, HTML. By releasing the Communicator source code, Netscape is merely returning to its roots.
Microsoft will never be able to operate in an open source world. The philosophy goes against the entire grain of its DNA. Bill Gates is too addicted to Microsoft's lofty stock prices and obscenely huge profit margins. Netscape co-founder and Vice President Marc Andreessen said it best. "In a battle between an alligator and a bear, the victor is determined by the terrain. Microsoft just moved onto our terrain ..."
Comments in reply to this episode by David R. Graham
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Sincerely,
Mark Kuharich
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