This week, David Boswell over at the O'Reilly Network made an excellent argument for the continued proliferation of Mozilla-based browsers such as Chimera, Netscape, and of course Mozilla.
Truly, if you look at the number of Mozilla-based and related products being produced at mozdev.org, you'll see just how powerful the notion of Open Source can be. There are several search, bookmark, interface, mail, and even IM, MUD and weblog tools at play there.
But with rumors swirling here and there of an iBrowse product forthcoming from Apple (a browser that will be based upon Chimera), I sense a subtle but pervasive movement afoot in the industry, where Open Source projects act like AAA ball players, strutting their stuff in hopes of some day being called up to "the show."
I guess that in the case of Netscape 7, however, the ballplayer needs to be sent back to the minors for a retune and a divestiture of some serious baggage. Still, I welcome this sort of activity. When a software company buys a piece of software, it quite often severs that application from its base of developers, like a tree being pulled from the soil and replanted. More often than not, the application has to undergo a sort of painful rebirth.
But sometimes, as was the case with PGP, when a company buys a project that's based upon Open Source, the Open Source community comes along for the ride. This lets the company place substantial energy behind the software, lifting it beyond a mere "project." And it lets the development community continue to nurture and benefit from the software. Truly the best of both worlds.
Of course, whether or not we actually need another browser is a matter open to debate.
Posted by Brad Shimmin at 9:36:39 PM
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