: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.
:50:03
And uh, I was told later, I had no idea at the time,
:50:09
that it came about as a direct result of
:50:12
the right people having read
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
:50:16
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar",
the paper by Eric Raymond,
:50:20
was a significant influence on
Netscape's decision to release source code.
:50:28
It came as a complete shock to me.
:50:30
I wasn't really ready for the thought
:50:33
that I was changing the world even by accident.
:50:36
However he was not by any means
the only influence on that decision.
:50:41
Uh, and not necessarily the most important one,
:50:44
when all is said and done.
:50:46
As I said, Netscape,
:50:49
Netscape had already been talking about
releasing source code for quite some time before
:50:54
anyone ever heard of Eric's paper.
:50:57
Linux Congress in early 1997,