"Joseph N." wrote:
>...
> If the code is freely available, what keeps someone from developing
> an alternative browser based on the same code? It's my understanding
> that the rights to the code are spread out over so many people that
> copyright law does not really control the issue.
Various distributors (including Netscape, IBM, and Beonex) release their
own slightly-modified versions of Mozilla. In some cases this may
involve making modifications to a stable release of the Mozilla trunk;
in other cases, such as Netscape, it involves maintaining a branch which
is constantly synchronized with the Mozilla trunk (except for the
Netscape-specific bits).
In theory, nothing is stopping Mozilla from being forked completely --
for some group of developers to take the current code and start working
on it independently. Microsoft could start developing Active Mozilla++
tomorrow if they wanted to (which of course they don't, yet).
In practice, the barriers to exit are the same as for any open source
project. It costs money and effort to maintain the infrastructure
required to keep the project going at a decent rate -- FTP servers,
Bugzilla, Bonsai, Tinderbox, the Web site, the mailing lists and so on.
Netscape provides most of these for Mozilla currently.
So as with any open source project, a fork will only happen if the cost
of the poor management or decision-making (or whatever), which leads
people to want a fork, is more than than the cost of setting up
alternative infrastructure. Because the Mozilla project is so huge, the
infrastructure costs are much larger, so a fork is much less likely.
That's why small examples of widely disagreed-with decision-making (see
<http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49844> for an example) are
greeted with such fury -- the affected people know they are powerless to
do anything, because a fork is so unlikely.
--
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing
<http://mozilla.org/>
