Keith, I posted this before, but in case you were wondering where Reggie got the highly original opinions expressed in 16655 and 16657, check out infoworld.com
"It's an interesting move on their part. We're glad that Netscape is following our lead," said Dave Fester, group product manager for Internet Explorer. Fester said that Microsoft expected that Communicator would become free, but was caught by surprise on the source-code announcement.
"By offering complete source code, who will support it? How easy will it be to modify?" Fester said. "It's going to be difficult to get your hands around it in the short term." Microsoft has since August 1996 offered an Explorer "control" free to developers, and that it forms the core for the clients used by both AOL and CompuServe, Fester said. The ActiveX control is a separate code component that provides the browser functionality. Developers can use it to bring those functions to their products, as with Quicken '98 from Intuit, he said.
Now, there's always this confusion about source, code, and "technology". Anyway, all of Reggie's thoughts are original, they just happen to be highly congruent with the pronouncements of the Microspinmeisters. Purely coincidence, of course.
Cheers, Dan. |
