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UNIX: Difference between revisions
→The Open Source Movement: added missing words
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (→The Open Source Movement: added note about SeaMonkey.) |
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (→The Open Source Movement: added missing words) |
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Inspired by the success of Linux and the BSDs, and no doubt knowing that the company itself was in bad shape, Netscape decided to release the sources to the latest version of Navigator (which had been renamed "Communicator" by then) under a free license. Out of the meetings for this came a term called "open source", which attempted to provide the gist of the free software movement's goals without having to go into licensing details, making it easier for people not up on their legalese to understand what was going on. This was a controversial move, with GNU partisans saying it didn't go far enough, while others argued that the word "free" was too easily misunderstood and indicated that the software was worthless. Either way, the term stuck, and "open source" now indicates any software license that conforms to the Open Source Definition, a set of rules based on the Debian Free Software Guidelines (Debian being a highly influential and somewhat conservative distribution of Linux).
As for Netscape, most of the company migrated to mozilla.org, a non-profit founded to handle the development of a new browser based on the Communicator code. After a few false starts (including a decision to rewrite most of the client from scratch, a move that rankled some of the Netscape veterans), the new browser was in usable shape by 2003. A slimmed-down version without the built-in mail/news reader or the Web page editor was developed alongside it, and eventually became Mozilla Firefox, and a slimmed-down version consisting of just a mail/news reader eventually became Mozilla Thunderbird. In the other direction, a fully-featured clone of the Netscape Communicator product suite (including browser, mail/news client, and HTML authoring, among other functions) was released under the name Mozilla SeaMonkey.
== UNIX today ==
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