Speaking of soap operas, there's one soap opera in the technology world that has been going on for so long that nobody really seems to know why it was ever started, whatever all the different moves have been over the years, or whoever lost or won which battle. Just like a true soap opera, you can just jump right in the middle of it and feel like you've always been part of the regular audience. The SCO saga is such a case.
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Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-11-11
Member since:2006-02-05
Member since:2006-05-28
Member since:2007-01-18
Wasn't Mozilla a spin off of Netscape or something like that?
Sadly IE, until version 8, hasn't done very well (from a technical point of view) at making a really good quality browser that supports generally accepted standards laid out by the W3C. Of course that hasn't hurt it's ability to dominate the market, but it's made designing a compliant website a lot hard. Thanks for the innovation Microsoft. We could've done it without you. 
Member since:2007-08-11
Sort of...but I dont think Mozilla and Netscape were ever 2 separate entities competing with each other.
Netscape basically opened their source code and I'm not sure of the exact link between netscape and the mozilla foundation but they were linked. So its more like mozilla is the successor of netscape, rather than one company COPYing another company's product.
in the case of IE, microsoft basically licensed someone else's code (spyglass Inc's Mosaic, then the most popular browser) and modified it to make Internet Explorer. I'm not sure how much (if any) of that original code still exists in IE however so its probably fair to say that both IE and Mozilla in their current forms are original products.
As for Linux being a copy of unix...its been public knowledge that linux was created to duplicate many UNIX API's etc (or POSIX) so that UNIX apps could run under it. There was no copying of code as such.
I believe the whole case has nothing to do with Linux or SCO and everything to do with how much SCO execs made from messing with the stock market. What we are seeing now is just people doing what they need to do to avoid being found out...just an opinion...
Member since:2006-08-17
Yes, as I understand Netscape released the source and the mozilla project started.
If I remember correctly, around the beginning of mozilla 1.5, major changes were made that broke how many sites with tables, etc.. looked. Then those issues were fixed in 1.7 just in time for Firefox 1.0 release.
Edited 2008-05-03 01:57 UTC
Member since:2007-02-17
No. You have the wrong idea here.
"Copying" in a legal sense (ie in order to violate copyright) requires that there be a direct copy of the lines of code. There are no lines of code from Mosaic in Netscape. There are probably no lines of code left from Netscape in Firefox.
Just because two things perform the same function does not mean they are copies of one another.
Is a diesel engine the same as a gas turbine engine (aka a jet engine)? No? Is either one the same as a petrol engine? No? Are they copies of one another ... of course not. Yet all three of these different engine types burn hydrocarbon fuels and produce rotary motion.
Edited 2008-05-01 23:53 UTC
Member since:2006-01-06
Actually, Firfox *is* Netscape, at least it's based on Netscape's source code.
IE *is* Mosaic "Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign." (From IE6 About... box), although IE7 apparently no longer contains any Mosaic code, it is still highly likely to have design/structure features inherited from Mosaic.
Netscape did copy Mosaic to an extent, but Mosaic was far from the first graphic web browser (WorldWideWeb, ViolaWWW and Erwise all pre-dated it).
Member since:2005-06-29
wrong...
'The Mosaic Netscape web browser utilized some NCSA Mosaic code with NCSA's permission, as noted in the application's "About" dialog box. '
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communications_Corporation#Ea...
Member since:
2006-04-10
No, Firefox is copying Netscape, and both Netscape and IE are copying Mosaic, however, only one of them had to use Mosaic code to do it. The other line was innovative enough to implement it on their own.