: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,
:51:00
which was the first place that I gave that paper.
:51:04
And one of the people who heard it was
Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly and Associates.
:51:09
And uh, he thought it was pretty intriguing
:51:12
and he asked me to give it at
his first PERL conference, which was uh..
:51:17
later that year, in Fall of 97.
:51:21
And apparently what happened, I was told later,
:51:23
although I had no idea that this was happening at the time,
:51:27
uh is that some people from Netscape actually
heard the paper at the PERL conference
:51:34
and took those ideas back to Netscape and
they kind of lit a fire there.
:51:39
The role of my paper was essentially
to make the internal case at Netscape, uh
:51:44
to make the business case for
why Netscape should release its source code.
:51:49
The paper was called
"Netscape Source Code As Netscape Product".
:51:54
uh.. a strange title,
essentially what the title meant was that