Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 23:28:08 -0800 (PST) From: Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: Open Systems Networking <opsys@mail.webspan.net>, marcs@znep.com, imp@village.org, chat@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Mike Shaver: Netscape gives away source code for Communicator Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980122225758.22800A-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> In-Reply-To: <199801230645.XAA23724@usr08.primenet.com>
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On Fri, 23 Jan 1998, Terry Lambert wrote: > The JAVA license (the original, not the current one) "built on the heritage > of the GPL" while maintaining control in the hands of the licensor. > > I think they are idiots if they give up control of the browser/server > interface. HTTP standard is pretty much out of their hands already (and never really was there). SSL, of course, was added by them, and more compatible version of encrypted HTTP and MD5 authentication rejected, but that was done in significantly less barbaric way than other things by the same people at the same time. > I expect them to retain editorial control on the "official releases". > This is, in fact, only slightly more restricted than GPL, wherein the > GPL code is maintained by a central repository. Cygnus proved that > there is room for one (and *only* one) editorial source per GPL style > product. Emacs - XEmacs - Mule (ok, last one is now going to merge with every of first two). And while not the most stable thing in the world, pgcc exists, as a separate gcc branch. > I think that the JAVA license take advantage of this while > recognizing that fact (though I think Sun screwed up bigtime when they > changed the license terms to try an capitolize on the JAVA licensees). > If you had control of the protocol clients used to talk to servers, and > you were a server vendor, would you give up control of one end of the > protocol? IMHO there is no control. Netscape long ago made a server-push extension for HTTP protocol. Netscape never really used that, never made it into any standard, and while server-push being useful for a lot of things, lack of servers that support it without eating a lot of resources made it near-to-unknown for most of people except for server-updating images. Do a lot of people here know that "multipart/x-mixed-replace" server push works on HTML documents and allows server-initiated update of them in browser? Of course, HTML is completely different story -- everybody remembers ugly creations of tags war, and now it's shifted to J*scripts/stylesheets war, but that's significantly less dangerous than proprietary extensions to protocols, randomly being added by competing vendors. -- Alex
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