“Netscape’s unorthodox strategy in its browser war against
Microsoft Corp. seems to be working.
That’s the upshot of Netscape Communications Corp.’s year-old
‘open source’ program, under which most of the source code — the
raw programming data — for its Communicator application was
released to the public.”
“‘The benefit is to increase [Communicator’s] functionality and
lower investment in Netscape’s own resources,’ said Michael
Sullivan-Trainor, an analyst at International Data Corp. ‘It’s also
a way to generate a level of commitment and interest. When you
combine that with the new distribution channel to users through
America Online, it’s pretty impressive.’
The first fruit of Netscape’s open source effort will be the
Gecko browser engine, which provides the same functionality as the
current engine in Communicator at one sixth of the size.
Netscape released the source code for Gecko in December, and
largely because of positive response from developers, has decided
to build the next release of Communicator around the engine.”
(First beta scheduled for July – Ed.)