Netscape -- Giant Killer or Flash in the Pan? Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Netscape -- Giant Killer or Flash in the Pan?

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To: Mark Marcellus who wrote (2979)	5/2/1998 7:09:00 PM
From: Bearded One	Read Replies (1) of 4903

I've been following the newsgroups associated with the source code release. A few observations: 1) Most of the contributions seem to be in the form of bugfixes. This is very interesting. Normally, a company releases a beta or alpha version to testers. The testers then run the program until something bad happens. Then they relay the information back to the company, which tries to duplicate the bug, find the cause, and then fix it. Now, the testers run the program until something bad happens, then they find the cause and fix it. This saves a couple of very time consuming steps-- trying to duplicate a bug that occurred on some tester's machine out in Peoria can be very difficult. So far Netscape has released two new versions of the source code. I attribute this to the speed of bugfixing enabled by the open-source mode. 2) I don't think that multiple versions of clients will be as problematic as people think. For one thing, Netscape will be pushing out versions which could become standards. For another thing, the claim of multiple versions being problematic rests on an implicit assumption that there will be many different ways for the same html-code to be rendered. I think Darwin can take care of this one-- those versions which cannot read the web properly will not propagate. 3) Viruses are much less of a problem in open-source code programs-- after all, you can search source code for a virus much more easily than object Viruses tend to spread through the passing of byte-code rather than source code. Viruses tend to be inserted at a byte-code level rather than source code level as well. Trojan horses are another matter, I guess. An angry worker can mess up his company by messing with the source code used internally in the organization. But that's always been true. And remember that people can always use whatever Netscape distributes in compiled form. Just my 2 cents.

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