:53:00
the people who read my paper would naturally enough
:53:02
find a reference to Eric's paper
and read that as well.
:53:06
[ And who was involved in
making that happen at Netscape? ]
:53:10
Primarily the person who made the
actual decision was Jim Barksdale.
:53:15
And this turned out to be important later.
:53:18
That our big win, the big score
:53:21
that gave us mainstream
visibility and credibility with investors
:53:26
came not because of bottom up evangelism
from a bunch of engineers,
:53:30
but because one strategist at the top
:53:34
saw the potential power of this method and
:53:37
then essentially imposed that vision
on everyone underneath him.
:53:42
When I completed the paper,
I first gave a copy to Mark Andreessen,
:53:46
who was co-founder of Netscape and
was at the time one of,
:53:50
on the senior management team at Netscape.
:53:53
Mark then gave a copy of the paper to several
other people within Netscape management,
:53:57
including Jim Barksdale.
:54:00
I'm not sure exactly when Jim and
the other senior managers
:54:04
made the actual decision,
:54:07
I believe it was in early January sometime.
:54:10
Netscape actually announced that it was gonna
release the source code on Jan 22nd,
:54:16
the same time it was going to give
Communicator away for free.
:54:21
When Netscape decided to release the source code,
:54:24
people sort of got a wake up notice and said
:54:27
"Hey, maybe there is something to this idea
of releasing source code
:54:31
and doing development with people
outside your company."
:54:36
So Netscape's decision brought a lot of
public attention to the idea of Free Software,
:54:42
what became known as Open Source,
:54:45
and brought a lot of attention to
the Linux operating system,
:54:48
which was one of the most prominent examples of
Open Source software at that time.
:54:59
This is our first office, Mountain View, California.