To Free or Not to Free the Code in Question
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Part VIII - Browser Wars opening closed 1994-1997 "In 1994 Novell (who had acquired the UNIX systems business of AT&T/USL) decided to get out of that business. Rather than sell the business as a single entity, Novell transferred the rights to the UNIX trademark and the specification (that subsequently became the Single UNIX Specification) to The Open Group (at the time X/Open Company). Subsequently, it sold the source code and the product implementation (UNIXWARE) to SCO [1995]. The Open Group also owns the trademark UNIXWARE, transferred to them from SCO more recently." [What is UNIX ® ? The Open Group unix.org]. |
Mosaic/Netscape/Mozilla 1994-98 $0 made open "Developed as a proprietary offshoot of Mosaic, the web browser created by Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois, Mozilla was proof, yet again, that when it came to building new programs, most programmers preferred to borrow on older, modifiable programs. ..Netscape, the Mountain View, California startup then nearing the end game of its three-year battle with Microsoft for control of the web-browser market" [Sam Williams Open Source "Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software" Chapter 11, O'Reilly 2002]. The Debian Free Software Guidelines Bruce Perens 1997 / OSD Debian GNU/Linux distribution is renowned for - slowly and securely - doing the comprehensive OS platform porting, true to UNIX tradition. The initially x86-only Linux kernel gained in this respect: "Linux-2.2 will also support a lot more architectures out of the box (2.0 was intel and alpha only, 2.2 will add Sparc, m68k, PowerPC, MIPS etc)." [The Pragmatist of Free Software: Linus Torvalds Interview hotwired Hiroo Yamagata Aug97 GPL]. Draft 26Jul05 - to be cont'd..] |