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by sillywalk 482 days ago
From both the Rational Wiki, and from vaguely remembered Slashdot comments from 20+ years ago, I thought that ESR's 'The Art of Unix Programming' was regarded as pretty good.

I'm curious if this is accurate, because it would seem to be out of character.
1 comments
tptacek 482 days ago
It's pretty clearly the best thing he's done. CATB has just not held up at all; it's actively bad, and it has a weirdly outsized reputation. But of someone posted an AoUP link instead, I'd shut up about it.
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hollerith 482 days ago
It did however persuade the Mozilla Organization to open-source their browser, and if they had not open-sourced it, then Firefox would never have been created (being a fork created by outsiders of Mozilla's browser).

At least one of the people in the room when the decision was made has said that CATB was what persuaded the execs.

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BrendanEich 482 days ago
1. Yes, CatB was waved around (not sure that the most ardent wavers actually read it) inside Netscape in late 1997 as a gesture to support the argument for doing mozilla dot org.

It helped get some execs on the bandwagon, but Eric Hahn was the biggest high level executive proponent, and I think he genuinely wanted an escape pod, and possibly thereby a better ending, for Netscape via open source. That's what we who actually founded mozilla dot org then did.

2. Firefox was not a "fork", it started as a new project named "mozilla/browser" built on common code. David Hyatt and Blake Ross created it from the cross-platform toolkit (XPFE, XUL) that we'd all worked on at Netscape (Hyatt was there until jumping to Apple in 2001; Blake was intern out of high school on way to Stanford).

The m/b => Phoenix team were fans of Mike Judge's OFFICE SPACE (1999); we hung out on an IRC channel named #me-in-the-ass and plotted (successfully) how to show up idiot upper management at the Netscape division of AOL, by doing a small, fast, customizable browser, while said management bloated and dithered over the "Netscape 4.5" and doomed 5.0 suite of browser/mail/news/editor/etc.

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hollerith 481 days ago
Do I read your (2) correctly that Firefox (I realize it was not named that originally) began inside Netscape (when it was a division of AOL)?

Was it open-source licensed at the same time the flagship Netscape/Mozilla browser was?

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BrendanEich 481 days ago
Yes, of course -- Hyatt and Blake both worked for Netscape. What misled you into thinking Firefox started as some outside-Netscape project?

All the code was MPL'ed.

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hollerith 481 days ago
>What misled you into thinking Firefox started as some outside-Netscape project?

Something I read many years ago, maybe a comment here on this site. I appreciate the correction.

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tptacek 482 days ago
I have no idea how true that is or isn't, but I can evaluate the document on its own merits, as I was a practitioner in 1997 and am today as well.
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