Re: Roll your own

Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Thu, 22 Jan 1998 18:54:05 -0500 (EST)


Daniel Veillard writes:
> I read that as "we will try to be as near as possible to the GPL"
> however NS uses a lot of codes which is not GPLable like the Sun
> Java implementation, and probably some of the original Mosaic code
> covered by the NCSA Copyright ...

There is *probably* no NCSA mosaic code in the product --- they did a
deliberate from-scratch rewrite in an attempt to avoid having NCSA
come after them for royalties. It didn't work --- NCSA (actually
UIUC, I think) sued anyway, and though the Netscape folks thought the
suit was groundless, they gave the university a hefty chunk of stock
anyway to make the lawyers go away. (You may still be able to find
the press coverage of the lawsuit lying around in some deep archives).

rst