Thursday, 6th January, 2005

Free (as in beer)

Well Mike, in answer to your question last night...

Netscape, as we all know, used to be the darling on the dotcom world. It's origins lay in the now long-forgotten mists of NCSA Mosaic, one of the earliest web browsers (the first of which was WorldWideWeb, written by Tim Berners Lee, natch). I remember playing with it a bit years ago — and being flummoxed by the sheer configurability of it. You could change every aspect of what the browser displayed — every bit of markup, every header, every tag.

Anyway. Netscape was doing just fine thankyouverymuch, until everyone's favourite bad-guy turned up and muscled in on the party.

(If this was a pantomime, Microsoft would have a top hat and a big twirly moustache, and all the kids would be shouting at Netcape "He's behind you!". Netscape, incidently, would be played by a woman pretendin to be a boy, in tiny hotpants...)

This is where it gets complicated Microsoft played nasty, used its monopoly (alegedly) by integrating Internet Explorer into the Operating System, and [snips a long story short] winds up the most dominant web browser on the planet.

Then, realising defeat, Netscape did something rather strange. It was convinced (by Richard Stallman I seem to recall — I may be wrong ) to release the source code under the GPL License. The core of Netscape was known as Mozilla (according to wikipedia.org, a contraction of Mosaic-killer), and now the Mozilla Foundation continues to maintain the code.

AOL bought Netscape itself, and was responsible for Mozilla until 2003, when it dumped it and announced that it would be using Internet Explorer (boo! hiss!).

But the most interesting thing to come out of all of this, is one of the experimental branches of the source code — a project which started off as something called Raptor, then became Mozilla Phoenix, then Mozilla Firebird, and finally Firefox.

Which is now a vast number of people's (myself included) browser of choice

So, I guess you could say, in answer to the question "What happened to Netscape?", that it got reborn, and now no-one in their right mind wouldn't use it.

Some references: (cos sometimes I get things wrong)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webbrowser#Briefhistory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

It does amaze me, whenever I check my usage stats, just how many people are still using Internet Explorer It's nasty, buggy, unsecure, and doesn't play ball — making up it's own rules for things that make my life as a web designer much more difficult than it should be

...

Sorry for the potted history but there was a point to that...

See, I'm a great fan of the Open Source community I'm not always that excited about the visual nature of the outcomes of it (honestly, most distros of Linux look awful, and the GIMP is a nasty, clumsy thing) but the underlying principle of it I love. It reminds me of when I was a little boy girl and I was playing with Apricots and BBC Micros and Apple ][s that my dad used to bring home to experiment with.

I hate how 'businessey' Windows is — and I hate the fact that where I work seems intent on forcing us all to use it. I (and a couple of colleagues) should form an Apple Resistance Group (Our headquarters could have "ARGH!" written on them )

(Wags may like to point out here that Apple is not Open Source, I would agree, but at least they've embraced the Open Source community )

This is going somewhere, I promise...

So last night, I was lying in bed, exploring that other great Open Source resource, Wikipedia, and a thought occured to me to jump to another free site...

Kath's and mine little car journeys recently have been dominated by story tapes (CDs actually) — it's something that she's got me into, normally I just listen to music in the car (or think about things) — and our preffered genre seems to be detective novels. I mentioned a few weeks ago that we had been listening to some Sherlock Holmes stories, and over the New Year festivities, we listened to some more.

Now, I've always been a fan of Holmes. I love the way in which Conan Doyle writes — the peculiarities of Victorian England. I love the atmopshere in the books, the way the characters talk to each other, and I especially love the intricacies of the problems and solutions.

The last one we listened to last Saturday, was The Case of the Final Problem, during which (as any Holmes fan will tell you) Holmes and Moriaty plunge to their deaths in the Rickenbach Falls.

The thing is though, that after Conan Doyle had written that episode (with the intention of closing the book on Holmes — I believe he'd become rather weary of writing about the detective) there was such an outcry from the public that he was forced to reincarnate Holmes and write more stories.

Now, I was keen to read all that — I've read it before, but I wanted to read it again — but even though I have a couple of Sherlock Holmes books lying around here somewhere, I knew I didn't have the one I wanted: The Case of the Empty House Plus it was 11pm, and Waterstones was probably shut...

Open Source to the rescue: Enter The Gutenberg Project fanfare

Project Gutenberg is the oldest producer of free electronic books (eBooks or etexts) on the Internet. Our collection of more than 13.000 eBooks was produced by hundreds of volunteers. Most of the Project Gutenberg eBooks are older literary works that are in the public domain in the United States. All may be freely downloaded and read, and redistributed for non-commercial use

I came across it before, when I was searching for something once. Basically, you can go there, and download any one (or more) of thousands of books, in text format.

I did a quick search for Sherlock Holmes, and sure enough: there's loads of Conan Doyle's work there

My tip for the day then, is go there, pick a book, download it and either read it on your computer, or (if you have no scruples about killing trees) print one out and share it with friends. It's all legit — the books are all out of copyright — and it's all free.

Not free as in free speech, free as in free beer. Which is the other way around to normal, but who's complaining?

NRT writes:

Re: people still using IE (mainly due to apathy, I think), last May I added a little script to my blog home page, so that IE users see a nagging message to switch browser, though the content itself should be browser-independent. I'm told it's convinced a few visitors. Try it; visit http://www.ministry-of-information.co.uk/blog/ in Firefox and in IE. Feel free to borrow the code. It's the first jS bit in the 'main body' section.

I like it Although you could probably achieve the same effect using the IE Box Model Hack in CSS (I tried to leave a comment BTW — I don't think it worked )

Tenormin Spunk writes:

As we say out in the wild west, Bill Gates needs killin'"

I heard microsoft paid a wopping 100,000$ in corporate taxes last year. That's what I heard.

Geena writes:

For a great "listen", try Middlesex! It's awesome!

Geena writes:

Do you know where I can get a free version of "Farewell to Arms"? Gutenberg doesn't have it.