[OFFTOPIC] Netscape to give away Communicator source code

[Manoj Kasichainula <ma...@io.com>]

http://home.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html?cp=nws01flh1

-- 
Manoj Kasichainula - manojk at io dot com - http://www.io.com/~manojk/
"If you tell a lie 40 times, it becomes the truth." -- Turkish proverb

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Netscape to give away Communicator source code

[Rodent of Unusual Size <Ke...@Golux.Com>]

Martin Kraemer wrote:
> 
> .....or the digest auth algorithm will ever come to life.

Hey-HEY! :-D

#ken	P-)}

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Netscape to give away Communicator source code

[Marc Slemko <ma...@worldgate.com>]

On Thu, 22 Jan 1998, Martin Kraemer wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 22, 1998 at 01:33:40PM -0700, Marc Slemko wrote:
> > You know, this is probably the only way their moronic 256-8 byte read bug
> > will get fixed.
> 
> .....or the digest auth algorithm will ever come to life.

No, I think digest will come.  It is moving along a bit now and someone
from MS has said they will try to get it implemented in IE. 

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Netscape to give away Communicator source code

[Martin Kraemer <Ma...@mch.sni.de>]

On Thu, Jan 22, 1998 at 01:33:40PM -0700, Marc Slemko wrote:
> You know, this is probably the only way their moronic 256-8 byte read bug
> will get fixed.

.....or the digest auth algorithm will ever come to life.

    Martin
-- 
| S I E M E N S |  <Ma...@mch.sni.de>  |      Siemens Nixdorf
| ------------- |   Voice: +49-89-636-46021     |  Informationssysteme AG
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~My opinions only, of course; pgp key available on request

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Netscape to give away Communicator source code

[Marc Slemko <ma...@worldgate.com>]

You know, this is probably the only way their moronic 256-8 byte read bug
will get fixed.

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Netscape to give away Communicator source code

[Brian Behlendorf <br...@organic.com>]

At 11:12 AM 1/22/98 -0800, sameer wrote:
>	This is as on-topic as it gets, Manoj.
>
>> http://home.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html?cp=nws01flh1
>> 
>> -- 
>> Manoj Kasichainula - manojk at io dot com - http://www.io.com/~manojk/
>> "If you tell a lie 40 times, it becomes the truth." -- Turkish proverb

Completely.

Here's what I wrote for an online news magazine that wanted comments:

======

If this is true (are you sure it's not an early april fool's joke?) this is
an astoundingly bold move.  It looks like they're being sincere about it,
too - and if they make a good committment to fostering a developer
community, in integrating third-party patches and bugfixes and new
features, then the Communicator product will be an amazing piece of
software.  This is not a "slam dunk" - doing collaborative software
requires a lot of skills that typical software engineering does not.  For
example, extremely well documented code; a good architecture; and a
development team with enough humility to admit to being wrong every now and
then.  I'm sure there'll be parts they can't make public, such as the
crypto engine.  

Another really good aspect to this is now the software can be inspected for
security holes even more closely.  We'll probably see a rash of security
announcements, but we should realize that the worst security holes are the
ones the real hackers don't let us know about!

Hopefully they'll also release a set of tools to compile the source code on
the desktop, so the average user will be able to take advantage of the
third-party code, and even experiment with the code on their own.  If they
hold true to their plans to make their 5.0 products based on Java Beans,
then being able to modify the code and plug in new components will be much
easier than it would be with the way things are currently.

I'd like to think it's the success of public source code projects like
Apache, like Linux and FreeBSD and Perl and GCC and Emacs, that helped
convince Netscape of the value of source code availability.  Or maybe it
was the notion that if Netscape were to fail, then there'd be no
proprietary value to the source code for navigator anyways.

One last thing - I hope their java virtual machine is a part of this.  What
the public source code world needs desparately is a good Java VM.  


--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--
specialization is for insects				  brian@organic.com

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Netscape to give away Communicator source code

[Manoj Kasichainula <ma...@io.com>]

On Thu, Jan 22, 1998 at 01:18:36PM -0700, Marc Slemko wrote:
> I would have thought that the current 4.0 code would have bits licensed
> from toher vendors which would not be freely distributable in source, but
> perhaps they worked a deal with them or are replacing those bits.

Well, I've both read a full story on news.com:

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,18358,00.html

and talked to a friend who works there. Supposedly, the commercial
components will probably get stripped out of any source given to the
public. But, when I look at the about: page for Netscape, there isn't
anything I'm particularly dying for. I'm guessing that the commercial
components might be given away as .o files. Encryption will likely get
stripped out too.

While the original press release seemed to say that the license would
be GPL, the news.com article made it seem somewhat more restrictive.

-- 
Manoj Kasichainula - manojk at io dot com - http://www.io.com/~manojk/
"Life is like an analogy." - Aaron Allston

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Netscape to give away Communicator source code

[Marc Slemko <ma...@worldgate.com>]

How many security holes will be found after the release of the source?

I would have thought that the current 4.0 code would have bits licensed
from toher vendors which would not be freely distributable in source, but
perhaps they worked a deal with them or are replacing those bits.

It isn't often you can say this, but I would really have to say that a
move of this type (_if_ it actually goes through as they claim, which is
still a big if) is unprecedented.  We have seen companies release code and
make it freely available for projects of a similar scale, but not really
anything that was current and the same sort of market leader.  Microsoft,
does, of course have a lot to do with this.

So, what are the chances that MS will release IE source? <G>

On Thu, 22 Jan 1998, Manoj Kasichainula wrote:

> http://home.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html?cp=nws01flh1
> 
> -- 
> Manoj Kasichainula - manojk at io dot com - http://www.io.com/~manojk/
> "If you tell a lie 40 times, it becomes the truth." -- Turkish proverb
> 

Re: [OFFTOPIC] Netscape to give away Communicator source code

[ra...@bellglobal.com]

Well, looks to me like Netscape just won the browser war!

Not to sound too self-congratulatory here, but I think we had a lot to do
with this decision.  'We' being all the developers of prominent free 
software on the Net.

-Rasmus