This is the first of hopefully many Slashdot.org Editorials. In addition to just reporting the news, the Slashdot Team really wishes to try to put out new ideas, or share other information that our readers may find helpful, interesting, or entertaining.

Well the doomsayers are out preaching that Netscape may be dying. They apparently lost millions of dollars in Q4, and according to this article at inforworld they may be backing down out of the Browser market, and focus more on the commercial side. Thanks to Amos Shapira for that one. The issue may be with the death of Netscape, where do we turn? Opera? Mneomonic? Gzilla? It may get interesting.

Perhaps the solution to Netscape's problem is more obvious then they may realize. If they GPLd their code and gave it out to the world, we would have a slew of powerful browsers developed by the same programmers that have brought us all those other great GPL apps. That would jump start the free browser universe and maybe people would focus on a single browser instead of dividing their time amongst so many other free browser projects. And since it is free, people may choose it instead of MS. Just a thought...

Netscape is expected to report a large q4 loss, in the range of 80 million or so. Many analysts had expected Netscape to actually clear a profit from q4, with some estimates as high as 14 cents per share. Does this spell for more troubled times ahead?

Probably not. Netscape says that most of the loss comes from a series of one-time charges, and is not indicative of a growing problem within the preimer browser company. However, with its' shrinking grasp on the browser market, it would seem that perhaps Marc isn't sleeping quite as well.