Netscape & the GPL Cont.

The response to Slashdot's first editorial has been pretty feisty. I recieved email from an engineer at Netscape (who requested anonymity) in response to the editorial. He raises a number of very important issues that relate to this controversial idea. He admitted that the idea of releasing the Netscape Source Code has been discussed internally. Follow allong and I'll discuss a few more issues that haven't been hit on yet.

The most interesting comment made was that while making the source to Mozilla free is controversial, so was making the binary freely available to FTP 3 years ago, so it's not impossible. Other important things include

The encryption code in Netscape classifies it as "Munitions" and is therefore illegal to export. Pluggable Crypto is also illegal to export, so that won't help matters.

The code is messy. I'm sure you coders out there understand that netscape is now at version 4.0. And apparently the hacks have caused the quality of the code to deteriorate. Add to that the fact that it is cross platform, and the lack of nice threads has apparently made things messy.

Comments would have to be "sanitized". This brought a smile to my face.

The legal issues raised by this. Specifically MS and the browser integration issue. If Mozilla was free, that strengthens MS's arguements that they can give away their own browser.

But despite all these problems, our anonymous friend said "I still think we should release it, warts and all." and frankly I couldn't agree more.