On Thu, 14 Jun 2001 00:19:49 -0400, Anonymous <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
somehow managed to type:
>If the two source code trees are just about
>the same, why bother making a netscape 6.1?
>
>Wouldn't it make more sense to just concentrate
>all the effort on mozilla?
Netscape 6 contains a number of things that are important to Netscape. For
example, the AOL IM client (keep the parent company happy), a bunch of
bookmark placements and a way to get more users to Netcenter (revenue), a
spell-checking component that they couldn't open-source (extra features).
In addition, Netscape is in the unfortunate position where their most
tangible asset is their brand. The brand is based on them being a "web
browser company", and as we've seen over the last few years, a web browser
company without a web browser starts looking less and less relevant. Which
means that even if they do intend to diversify into other things, they
seem to need to keep their own branded browser so that the Netscape brand
continues to mean something. (Hence the huge PR damage done recently by
our favourite Microsoft shills, ZDNet.)
The existance of the Netscape browser does not take programmers away from
Mozilla. It's the absolute opposite - the Netscape browser is the _reason_
that AOL/TW is paying a large number of people to donate code to the
Mozilla project. The time they take to maintain the Netscape-branded
branch is the price paid for having them here at all.
Charles Miller
