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Redmondology and Mozilla
[L]ast week's deal also calls into question AOL's ongoing commitment to Mozilla, a very capable set of applications that includes a browser, a mail reader, and an Internet Relay Chat client. Mozilla must have been a useful arrow in a negotiator's quiver for the last few months, with Microsoft fretting about the theoretical possibility that it would be embedded in the next version of AOL's client software. But now that negotiations are over and AOL has the ongoing right to use IE royalty-free for seven years, the company has a reduced incentive to spend as much developer effort on the project now.
This would make a difference for Web developers. AOL's commitment to Mozilla, the descendant of the venerable Netscape browser, and it decision to release it under a modified open-source license, has been a driving force toward creating Web sites that comply with the World Wide Web Consortium's standards. It's kept developers honest, spurring them to avoid sloppy Microsoft-specific coding that might make sites render properly only with IE.
Mozilla was a big honkin' bargaining chip for AOL in its negotiations with Microsoft, but it's a lot more than that: it's become the "air supply" for an entire industry of open source developers. A return to the sloppy days of IE-specific sites isn't the issue. Killing the only significant competitor in the "browser market" is much more important. Without Mozilla, longhaired freaks running Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, etc. will revisit the bad old days of 1999 and before, when open source browsers on non-Microsoft platforms were laughably unusable.
It's almost poetic how Microsoft killed Netscape Navigator when it was fighting against an overly arrogant startup. Navigator goes open source, and Microsoft may very well be on the way to killing it a second time.
On the other hand, the Mosaic/Navigator/Mozilla codebase has a habit of dying every few years or so. Microsoft has only succeeded in killing it once. Perhaps we need a better name for this browser, like Sabertooth or Aslan or something.
I pour myself a cup of strong coffee. :-)
-- Jarkko Hietaniemi
new name (Score:3, Funny)
There's always the name Phoenix. :-)
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IANAOSL (Score:2, Interesting)
Does the MPL prevent people from taking the Mozilla codebase and pushing it forward independent of AOL? I don't think so.
I think that the Mozilla codebase has reached a critical mass where it no longer requires AOL/TW support. Of course, there are a lot of good AOL programmers and organizers who do good work here, but it's now in the best interests of a lot of other organizations that Mozilla continues to move forward. IBM, HP, RedHat come to mind immediatel
Re:IANAOSL (Score:4, Informative)
Mozilla without AOL most likely would have withered on the vine, possibly creating such a great need that a new browser project would have filled the void. Then again, browsers are possibly the first or second most complex piece of software that open source developers have attempted to write, and doomed to failure without monetary support of some kind.
True, but that's a concession that some open source projects are simply too large to proceed without corporate support. That's not bad per se, but it does mean that Mozilla becomes a hot potato that's passed between corporations, and necessarily becomes endangered if no one is able/interested to keep it on life support any longer.That property makes it fundementally different than Perl, Apache and Linux, and something Mozilla's opponents can target much more easily.
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Parent
Re:IANAOSL (Score:2, Insightful)
Huh? Take a look at the primary Apache contributors. Sun, HP, Redhat, IBM, Covalent... IBM supposedly committed a Billion$ to testing and development of Linux.
Now, how is Mozilla fundamentally different?
Re:IANAOSL (Score:3, Insightful)
Compare that to Mozilla, which started life as a Netscape-owned project (witness the "we can use your source code" and "we can re-release this as commercial software" clauses in the MPL), and has morphed into an AOLTW project. Netscape/A
Re:IANAOSL (Score:0)
Sun, IBM and HP contribute significant patches to Mozilla to make sure it works well on their platforms.
In any case, the baseline is there, many people can and do build it independently. I don't think Mozilla would die if AOL/TW stopped supporting it.
There are alternatives (Score:2)
Anybody wishing to build a browser is now perfectly capable as most of the hard bits (and more than enough to provide a betetr browser than inept exploder) are available.
Even without corporate support for mozilla it is very successful and could easily rest on its laurels as it is ( unlike IE which has prettty much ceased development ).
There are now 3 browsers worth using - none of them is IE : Opera, Safari and Mozilla all p
@JAPH = qw(Hacker Perl Another Just);
print reverse @JAPH;