Microsoft has settled a long-standing suit with AOL Time Warner. Declan McCullagh writes up some of the implications of this settlement, specifically AOLTW's agreement to continue to embed IE and possibly use Microsoft's media software in the future:
[L]ast week's deal also calls into question AOL's ongoing commitment to Mozilla, a very capable set of applications that includes a browser, a mail reader, and an Internet Relay Chat client. Mozilla must have been a useful arrow in a negotiator's quiver for the last few months, with Microsoft fretting about the theoretical possibility that it would be embedded in the next version of AOL's client software. But now that negotiations are over and AOL has the ongoing right to use IE royalty-free for seven years, the company has a reduced incentive to spend as much developer effort on the project now.Mozilla was a big honkin' bargaining chip for AOL in its negotiations with Microsoft, but it's a lot more than that: it's become the "air supply" for an entire industry of open source developers. A return to the sloppy days of IE-specific sites isn't the issue. Killing the only significant competitor in the "browser market" is much more important. Without Mozilla, longhaired freaks running Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, etc. will revisit the bad old days of 1999 and before, when open source browsers on non-Microsoft platforms were laughably unusable.This would make a difference for Web developers. AOL's commitment to Mozilla, the descendant of the venerable Netscape browser, and it decision to release it under a modified open-source license, has been a driving force toward creating Web sites that comply with the World Wide Web Consortium's standards. It's kept developers honest, spurring them to avoid sloppy Microsoft-specific coding that might make sites render properly only with IE.
It's almost poetic how Microsoft killed Netscape Navigator when it was fighting against an overly arrogant startup. Navigator goes open source, and Microsoft may very well be on the way to killing it a second time.
On the other hand, the Mosaic/Navigator/Mozilla codebase has a habit of dying every few years or so. Microsoft has only succeeded in killing it once. Perhaps we need a better name for this browser, like Sabertooth or Aslan or something.
There's always the name Phoenix.
Does the MPL prevent people from taking the Mozilla codebase and pushing it forward independent of AOL? I don't think so.
I think that the Mozilla codebase has reached a critical mass where it no longer requires AOL/TW support. Of course, there are a lot of good AOL programmers and organizers who do good work here, but it's now in the best interests of a lot of other organizations that Mozilla continues to move forward. IBM, HP, RedHat come to mind immediately in this regard.
Re:IANAOSL
ziggy on 2003-06-03T20:38:38
True, but it's also of a scale and complexity that having a corporate backer certainly helps, both in terms of committing resources and getting features implemented quickly.I think that the Mozilla codebase has reached a critical mass where it no longer requires AOL/TW support.Mozilla without AOL most likely would have withered on the vine, possibly creating such a great need that a new browser project would have filled the void. Then again, browsers are possibly the first or second most complex piece of software that open source developers have attempted to write, and doomed to failure without monetary support of some kind.
True, but that's a concession that some open source projects are simply too large to proceed without corporate support. That's not bad per se, but it does mean that Mozilla becomes a hot potato that's passed between corporations, and necessarily becomes endangered if no one is able/interested to keep it on life support any longer.[B]ut it's now in the best interests of a lot of other organizations that Mozilla continues to move forward.That property makes it fundementally different than Perl, Apache and Linux, and something Mozilla's opponents can target much more easily.
Re:IANAOSL
jordan on 2003-06-03T20:47:01
- That property makes it fundementally different than Perl, Apache and Linux, and something Mozilla's opponents can target much more easily.
Huh? Take a look at the primary Apache contributors. Sun, HP, Redhat, IBM, Covalent... IBM supposedly committed a Billion$ to testing and development of Linux.
Now, how is Mozilla fundamentally different?
Re:IANAOSL
ziggy on 2003-06-03T20:57:22
Linux, Perl and Apache all started out as a volunteer projects. They would have continued happily along without any corporate support. Furthermore, no single corporate supporter is dominant. Corporate support has helped mature the code base, not create it from scratch.Compare that to Mozilla, which started life as a Netscape-owned project (witness the "we can use your source code" and "we can re-release this as commercial software" clauses in the MPL), and has morphed into an AOLTW project. Netscape/AOL have always been the dominant corporate backer of Mozilla, and all other corporate support has been in the fringes. (I can't even think of another corporate Mozilla supporter at the moment.)
Re:IANAOSL
jordan on 2003-06-03T21:06:28
You might have an argument there, except that the Mozilla Project basically threw it out and rewrote it from scratch, which is why they say it took so long.
Sun, IBM and HP contribute significant patches to Mozilla to make sure it works well on their platforms.
In any case, the baseline is there, many people can and do build it independently. I don't think Mozilla would die if AOL/TW stopped supporting it.
Anybody wishing to build a browser is now perfectly capable as most of the hard bits (and more than enough to provide a betetr browser than inept exploder) are available.
Even without corporate support for mozilla it is very successful and could easily rest on its laurels as it is ( unlike IE which has prettty much ceased development ).
There are now 3 browsers worth using - none of them is IE : Opera, Safari and Mozilla all provide a great web browser, without huge security holes, annoying behaviour all while providing cool and useful features that IE lacks.
