One of my favorite documentaries, also because it captures so much personal reality and feeling of what it must have been like, it really inspires me.
The lasting influence of Netscape Time
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Re: The lasting influence of Netscape Time
#12Netscape thought that open sourcing their code will save them but it didn't.
I wasn't party to the discussions so I don't know, but I think it's unlikely this was the idea. More likely the open source pivot was a way to preserve the product, which it did, since Firefox still exists.
Re: The lasting influence of Netscape Time
#13its weirdly endearing in the age of LLMs to see a word like company misspelled in a blog post
We have spellchecker for 30+ years, and we still misspell things all the time.
So?
Re: The lasting influence of Netscape Time
#14Jamie Zawinski at the end of the Code Rush doco:
We're at the beginning of an industry and who knows where that industry's going to go? This could all turn into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear. And there's a lot of precedent for that.
While you may say it's not television because we have content creators now, most of the mainstream consumption is on closed platforms owned by companies with the highest valuations ever seen in history.
Side note: It's great to see Jamie's nightclub has become a success as well becoming more of a live music venue which is even more impressive in the face of Live Nation buying every venue in sight.
The DNA Lounge compound consists of five rooms, two stages, four dance floors with independent sound systems, seven full bars, plus our attached full-service pizza restaurant and cafe.
Re: The lasting influence of Netscape Time
#15I remember jwz posting on slashdot about open sourcing the browser. The whole Netscape story is sad.
Re: The lasting influence of Netscape Time
#16Netscape thought that open sourcing their code will save them but it didn't.
I wasn't party to the discussions so I don't know, but I think it's unlikely this was the idea. More likely the open source pivot was a way to preserve the product, which it did, since Firefox still exists.
Didn't they pretty much start from scratch after open sourcing?
Not sure what was left of the older (pre-open source) Netscape code in Firefox 1.0.
Re: The lasting influence of Netscape Time
#17Jamie Zawinski at the end of the Code Rush doco: We're at the beginning of an industry and who knows where that industry's going to go? This could all turn into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear. And there's a lot of precedent for that. While you may say it's not television because we have content creators now, most of the mainstream consumption is…
Sort of amazing that it caused the shift the other way - the internet became centralised, but television (video content) became decentralized
Re: The lasting influence of Netscape Time
#18One of my favorite documentaries, also because it captures so much personal reality and feeling of what it must have been like, it really inspires me.
I'm standing behind the camera in one of the scenes. At the time I didn't realize they were making a movie. I was just trying to get to lunch.
Also, if you're intrigued by fly-on-the-wall documentaries about historical tech efforts, check out: https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/
Re: The lasting influence of Netscape Time
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't party to the discussions so I don't know, but I think it's unlikely this was the idea. More likely the open source pivot was a way to preserve the product, which it did, since Firefox still exists.
Didn't they pretty much start from scratch after open sourcing? Not sure what was left of the older (pre-open source) Netscape code in Firefox 1.0.
Not my product, but I believe I've been in this argument before, and went to check the Firefox source code, and found files that were in the original Netscape code base. So I'm going to say: no it wasn't a from-scratch re-write even for the Firefox fork. The actual 1998 open source event was totally the Netscape code, fwiw, with some stuff removed to comply with commercial licenses, build process decoupled from the corporate network and so on.
Re: The lasting influence of Netscape Time
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't party to the discussions so I don't know, but I think it's unlikely this was the idea. More likely the open source pivot was a way to preserve the product, which it did, since Firefox still exists.
Didn't they pretty much start from scratch after open sourcing? Not sure what was left of the older (pre-open source) Netscape code in Firefox 1.0.
There is absolutely no way it was from scratch. Phoenix and Firefox both had XUL. It was a derivative of Gecko from Mozilla.