Netscape Communications Corporation

Netscape Communications Corporation was the publisher of the Netscape web browsers as well as many other internet and intranet client and server software products.

Open sourcing

January 1998 was also the month that Netscape started the open source Mozilla project. Knowing that Internet Explorer had become by far the dominant web browser in the marketplace, Netscape publicly released the source code of Netscape Communicator 4.0 in the hopes that it would become a popular open source project. It placed this code under the Netscape Public License, which was similar to the GNU General Public License but allowed Netscape to continue to publish proprietary work containing the publicly-released code. However, after having released the Communicator 4.0 code this way, Netscape proceeded to work on Communicator 4.5 which was focused on improving email and enterprise functionality. It eventually became clear that the Communicator 4.0 browser was too difficult to develop on and open source development was halted on this codebase. Instead, the open source development shifted to a next generation browser which was based on the Gecko layout engine. This browser had a much more modular architecture than Communicator 4.0 and was therefore easier to develop with a large number of programmers. It also included an XML user interface language named XUL that allowed single development of a user interface that ran on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.

Related Topics:
Open source - Mozilla - Source code - Netscape Public License - GNU General Public License - Gecko - Layout engine - XUL

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The United States Department of Justice filed an antitrust case against Microsoft in May 1998. Netscape was not a plaintiff in the case, though its executives were subpoenaed and it contributed much material to the case, including the entire contents of the 'Bad Attitude' internal discussion forum. [httppe acquired Newhoo for the sum of $1 million, renamed it the Open Directory Project, and released its database under an open content license.

Related Topics:
United States Department of Justice - Antitrust case - Open Directory Project - Open content

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