On Fri, 11 May 2001 19:39:50 +0800, Jonathan Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
somehow managed to type:
>1.is netscape 6 based on the mozilla project?
>Whats the relationship between ns6 and mozilla
At a point just before Mozilla 0.6, a branch was made from the Mozilla
source, and worked on by Netscape programmers to become Netscape 6.
>and 2.what features does the netscape browser (version 6) have that
>arent available in mozilla or arent available as source code?
Some features of Netscape 6 can not be released as source, and are thus
unique to the commercial browser. The only two I can think of are the
Instant Messenger component, and the spell-check component.
>Specificly, does mozilla include a java runtime as source? What about
>the encryption/security related bits?
When Netscape first released their source-code to the Mozilla project, a
lot of things were not included because Netscape did not solely own the
licence to the code. For example, the original source release did not have
a working mail/news client, because Netscape 4's mail/news used licenced
database technology.
Java was implemented in Netscape 4.x through code Netscape licensed from
Sun. This code could not be released. Now, Java is implemented through the
Open Java Interface, an plugin-like interface to a Java Virtual Machine.
To get Java working you must download Sun's JRE, which is released under a
much more closed licence than Mozilla, but none of the closed Java code
ends up part of Mozilla.
Security _used_ to be implemented as an interface to a closed-source
module, due mainly to the fact that you needed a licence to use the
patented RSA algorithm. With RSA's patent now expired, the security module
(PSM) is now open-source and part of the Mozilla tree.
Charles Miller
