:48:04
The reason Netscape is important is
:48:07
that they were the first large company
to participate in open source.
:48:13
We had Cygnus providing support,
:48:15
but we didn't really have much business.
:48:18
And Netscape went open source essentially
as a way to fight Microsoft,
:48:22
which was giving away Internet Explorer,
:48:27
but not letting anyone else have the source code,
not letting companies collaborate.
:48:33
Working as part of the sales force, I got a bit of,
:48:35
I got a good idea of.. of why people bought our software
:48:38
and what it took to make our software successful
in the marketplace against competitive products.
:48:44
However, the problem was,
:48:46
we were seeing, as that, as time went on,
:48:50
our software was uh,
:48:54
being competed against by other
people's software, particularly Microsoft's
:48:59
and as time went on, the price of our software had to drop
:49:03
because other people were giving their software away
:49:06
at no charge or at little charge.
:49:10
Now the real problem was that they feared
:49:12
Microsoft would achieve a monopoly lock on the browser market
:49:16
and they would then use that monopoly lock to
:49:21
pervert actually,
:49:23
the HTTP and HTML standards that the web depends on.
:49:28
And once they had turned those
standards in to lock in devices,
:49:32
they could then use that control
to drive Netscape out of the server market,
:49:38
which was where it was making its real money.
:49:40
My concern was that as time went on,
:49:46
Netscape's business would be threatened,
:49:48
by the fact that we didn't have enough people
to do what we needed to do as a company
:49:53
in order to keep our software viable in the marketplace.
:49:58
The Netscape release happened in early 1998.