One-year-old public domain web browsers

What does this mean?

[kgoeres]

According to the technical standards provided by one of our clients, we must develop a site that will work on "one-year-old public domain web browsers"

Where can I find information or stats that explain what the one-year-old public domain web browers are, so that we can make sure and target our development efforts to these standards.

Thanks for your help!

[hutcheson]

Sounds like a shrouded reference to Mozilla (A.K.A. Netscape 6). If you code to the published HTML4.2, CSS 1, and Javascript 1.3 standards, you'll have no problems. (Oh, except that you'll find LOTS of bugs in the Infernal Exploder rendering engine.)

[kgoeres]

So they're talking about Netscape 6? Do you know of any stats on this? I'm not a programmer...so everything else you said was over my head. LOL Thanks!

[choster]

Why not ask to clarify the provision?

They could be 1) conflating "publicly available" and "public domain" and intend to mean any major browsers released to the general public in the last year, as opposed to specialized browsing software that might be used internally within organizations. Or they could be 2) conflating public domain and open source. I agree with hutcheson that they probably mean Mozilla (and derivative browsers like Netscape 6 or Phoenix), but there is a legal distinction between public domain and open source.

Something in the public domain is totally unrestricted; copyright is not reserved, so it can be modified, decompiled, repackaged, etc. It is a subset of the much broader classification of "open source" software, which includes anything whose source code public and freely redistributable-- but which might have restrictions on distribution, or commercialization, or use, or publication of modifications, and so on.

Mozilla, for example, is not technically public domain, even though it is open source; it is released under the terms of the Mozilla Public License. Other common open source licenses include Berkeley (BSD), GNU General Public License (GPL), and the Perl Artistic License.