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Mitchell Baker:

January 22, 1998 -- the Beginning of Mozilla

Anyone remember this?

NETSCAPE ANNOUNCES PLANS TO MAKE NEXT-GENERATION COMMUNICATOR SOURCE CODE AVAILABLE FREE ON THE NET

BOLD MOVE TO HARNESS CREATIVE POWER OF THOUSANDS OF INTERNET DEVELOPERS; COMPANY MAKES NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR AND COMMUNICATOR 4.0 IMMEDIATELY FREE FOR ALL USERS, SEEDING MARKET FOR ENTERPRISE AND NETCENTER BUSINESSES

...

I remember.

And I remember what a shock this was at the time. Prior to this, the software world had been divided into the proprietary software world and the free software world. There was not a whole lot of intermingling between the two. The internet was not as ubiquitous as it is today. And the advertiser paid trade magazines were the main source of information for IT workers.

And Free Software, in the RMS sense, was not even talked about in the respectable magazines. The whole proprietary software world behaved as if Free Software did not exist. When an article on C++ compilers were published, it wouldn't mention GCC. When an article on editors were published, it wouldn't mention Emacs.

IT shops often were built completely on proprietary software systems that were expensive and restrictive. I remember having to put a dongle on the parallel port of my 66MHz Pentium server running NT 3.5 just to use a scanning software package that cost thousands of dollars to license.

Then the term Open Source was coined, and a PR campaign was launched with Eric Raymond and Tim O'Reilly as the leading figures. ESR's The Cathedral & The Bazaar was an eye-opener for a lot of people.

The Netscape announcement was one that made Free Software and Open Source mainstream. I believe prior to this, when a software company gets crashed by Microsoft or anybody else, they just roll over and die.

The ten years since the announcement has seen Free and Open Source Software being adopted in a lot more places, and a lot more bit vendor proprietary software being released as Open Source. And the world is better place.

Here's my prediction for the next ten years: By 2018, most of the business computer will be running an open source operating system.