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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gerald Walls who wrote (32405)	11/6/1999 8:00:00 PM
From: Bob Drzyzgula	Respond to of 74651

Actually, my memory is unclear whether or not Netscape had already released the source when AOL bought them. Netscape released the source before AOL bought them. The open source community went into a paroxysm of fear and loathing at the time, quite convinced that AOL-the-pariah would ruin the one thing that (they believed) demonstrated the inevitability and superiority of the open-source development model. AOL insisted (quite believably) that they didn't want the browser anywhere near as much as NetCenter, which was and is a thriving portal; given their agreements with MS and the fact that Netscape was at the time nowhere near as customizable as IE, there wasn't much short-term benefit to owning it. They have not killed off the Mozilla project, they can't really (the horse is kind of already out of the barn). They could pull their staff off of working on it, but it isn't clear that this would be in their best interest; there are actually some very high-powered developers in that effort, who are doing work central to some of the most important new Internet technologies such as XML and LDAP. If they canceled funding for Mozilla a good share of those developers -- some of the very ones they would most benefit by keeping -- would undoubtedly bolt. Down the road, Mozilla (which, despite the disappointing development schedule is actually functional today and extremely small and fast as browsing engines go) could in fact form the basis of a powerful new user interface. IE is ahead of Mozilla in several ways right now, but most of them involve proprietary extensions (duh). Mozilla will likely be the only truly standards-compliant, high-function XML browser available when it is finally released. FWIW. --Bob