Good points, Paul.
In the spirit of open source, I'm not sure that the license is a big issue.
I didn't take your point of view when I read it, but I shall return to it
for further thinking. If Mozilla could somehow take control of whatever we
do to the source code, then there could be problems. AOL, imho, is aiming to
be the next Microsoft, complete with all the misbehavior we have already
seen. Their latest rendition of their software does funky things to your
computer, just like IE does. My wife must exit AOL in order to boot Eudora
on her Mac just to prevent a system crash. BTW: watch IE when it first
boots. Watch carefully and, on occasion, you will see it go off to some web
site at microsoft.com. God knows what for; I don't.
The main point I wish to reiterate about Mozilla is that it appears to want
to do W3C right. All the standards, per the standards. It includes, or is
headed for including some really nifty script editors. I suspect we are
heading for the ability to *edit in place* our web pages (given proper
authentication, of course). Mozilla might enable that, eventually.
Elegance is nice. Cross-platform is even nicer. I'm not sure the masses are
ready for Squeak, even though it is arguably a great software platform. I
love Lisp, but most people hurl chunks when they start counting parens.
There may be evolving a new class of software, based on tagged methods. XML
looks like it may be fostering software for the masses. Eric has talked
about this, XUL is beginning to show the power (Mozilla uses XUL to allow
you to design the look and feel of your browser), and I and others have
experimented with using tags to represent methods (e.g. <while>, <if>, ...).
From: Paul Fernhout <pdfernhout@kurtz-fernhout.com>
> Jack-
>
> Mozilla does sound like a great platform.
>
> One issue is the license. If you aren't careful, the code you develop
> becomes Netscape's property under their license. I think this can be
> avoided if you put the code in separate files (but review the license
> before counting on this).
>
> I liked the email client idea discussed earlier in part because of the
> peer-to-peer nature. Using Mozilla might fit into this.
>
> My biggest concern is that Mozilla was designed as I understand it in
> the typical huge fashion -- with megabytes of source and so forth. This
> is probably because it is mostly in C/C++. A system written in Squeak
> Smalltalk (or Java or Python or Lisp) might be much more elegant and
> smaller and easier to understand and modify and bootstrap. Still,
> Mozilla-related work might have a big audience.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Need technology solutions for your business? Respond.com can help.
Just tell us your IT needs. We'll bring the right providers to you
http://click.egroups.com/1/6324/5/_/444287/_/962981910/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Community email addresses:
Post message: unrev-II@onelist.com
Subscribe: unrev-II-subscribe@onelist.com
Unsubscribe: unrev-II-unsubscribe@onelist.com
List owner: unrev-II-owner@onelist.com
Shortcut URL to this page:
http://www.onelist.com/community/unrev-II
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jul 07 2000 - 08:07:05 PDT