[COMP] Re: MS, DOJ, fun fun fun.
- To: <computers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 10:45:01 -0700
----- Original Message -----
#From: "John Madden" <weez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <computers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2000 11:13 PM
Subject: [COMP] MS, DOJ, fun fun fun.
> IE was a ripoff
> of Netscape (who basically reinvented what Mosaic had done first),
Two quick points here, correct me if I'm wrong:
* Andreesen was hired from NCSA and was one of the core
coders for Mosaic. Netscape was written from scratch
with Andreesen at the helm.
* Microsoft didn't hire anyone from NCSA and simply took
the Mosaic code. They extended it without sharing
any of their new source code.
You can see this by clicking Help ... About Internet Explorer
in IE. They have to credit NCSA for the core code, even to
this day. I don't think Netscape has to do this, since Netscape
was written from scratch.
It plainly says in there that IE was based on something done
by someone else. Not only did they rip off Netscape and use
their access to the windows operating system source code to
thwart the competition (think "Active Desktop" here), they
even took the core code from NCSA so that major big-time jobs
like the HTML rendering engine were already done before they
started.
This is why I wonder about the FreeBSD license. There is
nothing stopping Microsoft from implementing tons of code
under that license. They are free to take it and improve
it without sharing their improvements with anyone. Then
again, anyone else can do the same thing, so I guess it
isn't all that bad. GPL is more idealistic though, and I
think this might be the preferred way to release things into
the "community".
--
Mark
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