Re: Re: Viability of Linux companies

[Sudhakar Chandra <thaths@xxxxxxxxx>]

Saurabh Garg proclaimed:
> Lets admit it, Netscape is a loser on the browser front. It had 
> everything to make it big in the browser war, but fumbled badly. 
> Had it been half as much popular as IE, it wouldnt have gone 
> open-source. 

I'm sorry to pick and choose one bit of your long post and go off in a
tangent.  What I have to say does not, in any way, reflect on the
general drift of your arguments.  I'm just trying to set historical
facts straight.

Netscape had plans to free its browser quite a while before its
marketshare dipped below the 50% mark.  Prevailing market considerations
and pure economics was the reason why Netscape could not go ahead with
it.  Even if it had not opened the sources ("libre"), it would have
atleast made the browser available for free ("gratis").  There was a
paper circulating inside Netscape much before the Free Source
announcement (Jan 1998).

Thaths

-- 
thaths at aunet dot org                     http://www.aunet.org/thaths/