Mozilla and the Open Source Browser Bonanza

Even if you don't remember the birth of Mozilla 15 years ago, you are certainly benefitting from its consequences. For, back then, the company that invented the Web as a mass medium, Netscape, was in its death throes, and looked likely to take Web browser choice with it.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Mozilla's Brendan Eich on the Birth of Firefox

A couple of weeks ago I posted the first part of an interview with Brendan Eich, who is Mozilla's CTO. That covered the early years of browsers at Netscape, and the origin of Mozilla. Somewhat belatedly, here's the second part of that interview, which picks up the story at the beginning of this millennium, and reveals the complex sequence of events that led to the creation of Mozilla Firefox.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is Phoenix about to Enter GPL Violation HyperSpace?

If ultraportables were last year's big surprise success for GNU/Linux, one of the potentially exciting technologies for this year is the instant-on pre-operating system that loads in seconds when you power up a desktop or portable. DeviceVM’s Splashtop is probably the best known example. These are highly relevant to the free software world, since such instant-on systems are usually based on GNU/Linux, and once people start trying them out, they may simply stay there using the free software apps available, rather than wait minutes for the full glory of Windows Vista to chunder into its vitiated life.

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Java Phoenix

What a difference a year makes.

In 2006, Java was looking distinctly long in the tooth. Widely used, yes, but hardly an exciting technology. Then Sun finally adopts the GNU GPL, and - whoosh. Two clear signs of this have appeared just recently (it takes that long for these things to work their way through the system.)

The first, obviously, is the gPhone, which seems to be using Java extensively (although it's hard to tell how, just now). The other is Red Hat's agreement with Sun:

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced an agreement with Sun Microsystems to advance open source Java software. Red Hat has signed Sun’s broad contributor agreement that covers participation in all Sun-led open source projects by all Red Hat engineers.

In addition, Red Hat has signed Sun’s OpenJDK Community TCK License Agreement. This agreement gives the company access to the test suite that determines whether an implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) platform that is derived from the OpenJDK project complies with the Java SE 6 specification.

Red Hat is the first major software vendor to license the Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK), in support of Java SE compatibility. To help foster innovation and advancement of the Java technology ecosystem, Red Hat will also share its developers' contributions with Sun as part of the OpenJDK community. These agreements pave the way for Red Hat to create a fully compatible, open source Java Development Kit (JDK) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

dmoz RIP?

DMOZ - now called the Open Directory Project - just doesn't have the respect it deserves. That's partly because it's had more names than even Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix.

It started out as GnuHoo, but RMS took exception to that, and it became NewHoo - which Yahoo promptly took exception to. It managed to avoid the horrible ZURL (shouldn't that be Zurg?), before metamorphosing into the Open Directory Project, also known as dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org) to its friends.

But it's real importance is not as an open Yahoo: it was the direct inspiration for Nupedia - NewHoo, Nupedia - geddit? - which in turn gave rise to the complementary Wikipedia: need I say more?

So it's sad to hear that dmoz is fizzling. It may not serve much purpose at present, but it's had a glorious past. (Via John Battelle's Searchblog.)

Gecko Turns into a K-Meleon

One of the great things about free software is that anyone can build on the work of others. For example, the Gecko engine lies at the heart of plenty of projects, from Firefox down, and it seems that someone else has joined the club.

Called K-Meleon (think about it - it only took my a 20 minutes to get it), it claims to be "an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser for the win32 (Windows) platform". Here are the screenshots.

At the moment it's hard to tell what purpose K-Meleon serves, but then the same could have been said about Firefox in the early days. Except that it was called Phoenix then - and note the interesting reference to another browser called, er, K-Meleon on this page. (Via Lxer.)