Stuart Ballard wrote:
> Frank Hecker wrote:
> > Garth Wallace wrote:
> > > Doesn't "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" cover the decision
> > > to make Moz open source?
> >
> > Not really; it just discusses the aftermath of the decision.
>
> Is this a new version of CatB? I thought that esr's article *inspired*
> the release of the code, and hence would have certainly pre-dated it.
No disrespect intended to ESR or CATB, but I think it's misleading to
credit CATB as having "inspired" the release of Communicator source
code, if by that you mean that CATB was the primary factor in getting
Netscape to think about releasing source. There were several developers,
including Jamie Zawinski, urging release of Communicator source code for
quite some time before CATB was written or even conceived, and Eric Hahn
(Netscape's CTO at that time) had already been pushing the same idea at
the senior management level to Andreessen and others. I also wrote stuff
in support of source code release, and didn't know about CATB until I
had finished about 90% of that work.
In my opinion CATB's importance in the context of Netscape's decision
was mainly that it provided independent validation of ideas that were
already being actively discussed and promoted within Netscape. If you've
ever tried to promote a proposal within your organization, then you may
have discovered that it is somewhat easier to do this if you can point
to someone outside the organization who's saying the same thing.
Anyway, after the actual Netscape announcement Eric Hahn sent a nice
note to ESR thanking him for his contribution to the whole question of
releasing source, and ESR updated CATB to add an epilogue mentioning
this and related topics. But CATB itself doesn't discuss the actual
details of Netscape's internal decision-making process, and ESR himself
was not involved in that process or aware of those details.
Frank
--
Frank Hecker work: http://www.collab.net/
[EMAIL PROTECTED] home: http://www.hecker.org/
