"NETSCAPE'S FREEWARE MOVE A RETURN TO INTERNET ROOTS," SAYS TIM O'REILLY (fwd)

[Danny Yee]

Forwarded message:
> From: Ellen Elias <elias@ora.com>
> To: danny@staff.cs.su.oz.au
> Subject: "NETSCAPE'S FREEWARE MOVE A RETURN TO INTERNET ROOTS," SAYS TIM O'REILLY
 
> NETSCAPE'S FREEWARE MOVE A RETURN TO INTERNET ROOTS 
> O'Reilly & Associates President Responds to News of Freely Available
> Source Code
> 
> January 23, 1998, Sebastopol, CA-- The Internet freeware community is
> fired up about yesterday's news that Netscape will be making its new
> Communicator Source Code freely available on the Internet.
> 
> Noted Internet pioneer Tim O'Reilly, President/CEO of the company most
> widely known for championing the cause of freeware, made the following
> comments on Netscape's decision:
> 
> "Freeware is the lifeblood of the Internet.  All of the truly
> significant Internet technologies were originally developed by
> distributed communities of developers who freely shared their source
> code and built on each other's work.
> 
> "A few years ago, when the great Internet gold rush started, companies
> such as Netscape and Microsoft tried to assert ownership of Internet
> standards, only to find vitality and innovation slipping away, as they
> lost touch with the developer community that had originally created
> those standards.
> 
> "It's no accident that despite all the ink spilled over the war between
> Netscape and Microsoft, the dominant web server software is still the
> freeware Apache server, and that for all the hype about Java, it is
> still the freeware Perl language that activates the majority of web
> sites.
> 
> "Netscape's decision shows that it recognizes the enormous power of the
> freeware development model, and that it has the courage to look for new
> ways to harness what has quietly become the most successful software
> development paradigm.  After spending three years trying to act like
> Microsoft, Netscape is returning to its roots and starting to act like
> a real Internet company again."
> 
> Netscape reportedly attributed its decision in part to developer Eric
> Raymond's groundbreaking paper on the freeware development model, The
> Cathedral and the Bazaar, which was one of the keynote addresses at
> O'Reilly's Perl Conference last summer.  For the complete text of the
> paper, see http://www.ccil.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html
> 
> More information about O'Reilly & Associates is available at 
> http://www.oreilly.com/. Information about Perl is available at
> http://www.perl.com/.