Brett_Tabke - 10:33 pm on Oct 21, 2002 (gmt 0)

Netscape Free? A counter opinion:

I do not believe mozilla and IE are free. They are - in a word - slaveware.

Look at how many people are still using the inferior and obsolete Netscape v4. Why? It's slaveware. Netscape locked people into use a product via many means. The email client, the composer, the what's related search, and other proprietary elements all contributed to locking in users to that product far longer than legitimate.

That same philosophy has carried over to Mozilla. The proprietary source code viewer, the composer, the email client and the other litany of proprietary aspects again are locking in users.

You have to ask why? After all, the browser has been vaulted as open source. Isn't it suppose to be a browser for and by the users and exemplary of all things good? Not so fast.

The open source aspects of Netscape have been widely over sold and trumped up. Why did Netscape chairman Jim Barksdale opened up the software source code in the first place? Was it to better the product, reward the internet community? No, it was the last act of a sinking ship in an attempt to screw Microsoft. This was not an act out over love for open source and the movement - it was an act of spite. It was not an act intended to give us a better product, but a simple scorched earth policy.

If you'd been in Barkdales office the day he made the decision, you could almost here the echoes of that famous Gates and Case phone call [pub.umich.edu] when Gates asked the direct question: This is your lucky day, how much do I have to pay you to screw Netscape?

How well has open source worked out four and one half years later [wp.netscape.com]? We finally have a stable, but in perpetual beta state program. It has it's oddball interface with proprietary formatted files that only a hand full in the world can work on that dissuades user changes at every turn.

Where are all the easily modified aspects that are inherent in other open source projects? The source code is so large, complicated and oddball that there a few programmers in the world that can compile it - let alone those understand the system enough to modify it. Four and a half years later and we have two or three other products based upon the source code. With all the complications, I can't help but think that this in not open source software but rather Obfuscationware.

Where are the archives of thousands of skin changes, side panels, or toolbars to rival Winamp and other open format programs? With an open source program or open source system, those extras and upgrades should flow like water from every graphics designer on the web.

The program was not designed to be modified by the general public or programming community like other open source software. It was designed to give Netscape plausible deniably, to milk the open source community for all the free labor it could in an effort to screw microsoft. At the same time, it was designed with all these proprietary or oddball file formats to keep the power in Netscape/AOL's hands. Like NN4, it was designed to lock people in for years to come.