GPL-style availability of NetScape 5.0 sourcecodes announced

[Jon S. Jaques]

At 08:49 AM 1/23/98 -0500, Jonathan Eunice wrote:
>John Duksta (john_duksta at INS.COM) wrote:
>>Quote:
>>My Interpretation:
>>We're losing money, so instead of paying our own programmers to make
>>enhancements to Netscape, we'll release the code to the Net and let
>>people on the Net write our software for free.
>
>Right you are!   But I take that as a positive. )B Isn't it pretty savvy
>for the "harness the network" company to change its development mode
>in order to "harness the network"?   

Absolutely! Communicator v4.x is hugely satturated with bugs... It would
appear that they are having a REALLY hard time coming up with stable
upgrades to the clients, so how on earth can they expect to have decent
servers???

>Like Linux and gnu projects, if you don't want to contribute time and
>energy, no one will fault you for staying home.  The people of Netscape 
>Communications Corp. simply joins LT and RMS in inviting you, should you 
>desire and be able, to contribute to their brainchild and greater glory.  

And we can hopefully expect faster development cycles, with more stable
implementations of features. I host some Netscape servers, and half of the
features I'd never use just 'cause the dedicated clients that these
features rely upon don't 'cut the mustard.'

Maybe now they can concentrate on the servers themselves. LDAP is a
wonderful thing, and I'd prefer to have that running alongside my
Enterprise server as opposed to other solutions. 

>I don't see it RMS-style as some sort of noble undertaking or religious
>calling, but it's an interesting hobby that'll keep you off the streets 
>and out of trouble.

:-D

-- Jon S. Jaques     --    The Grove Hill Pages --
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