Re:Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy
by wvenable on Thursday February 08, 2024 @12:37PM
(#39304922)
> I never paid for Netscape and I used every single version of it.
Businesses paid for it. It was free for non-commercial purposes.
Re:Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy
by pmontra on Thursday February 08, 2024 @12:58PM
(#39305197)
My internet connected computers were owned by a business. They were desktops inside my company's building.
However I dug more and I found this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape
> Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998
so either I don't remember well (maybe my company had actually bought some licenses) or nobody was paying no matter what. I remember everybody else and I downloaded Navigator from Netscape's site without having to go through any authorization process.
Re:Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy
by wvenable on Thursday February 08, 2024 @01:05PM
(#39305313)
I always used Navigator/Communicator for free personally but a lot of companies (especially big companies) bought licences. I'm sure many companies did not pay for a license but there was more than enough that did to make Netscape a viable and growing business.
There was a brief time where Netscape Communicator filled the role that Outlook fills now.
Re:Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy
by dekhn on Thursday February 08, 2024 @07:48PM
(#39309936)
That's right, I won't link here but one of jwz's earliest blog posts describes putting Mozilla 0.9 on an FTP server in '94 and hundreds of thousands of people were downloading it. I assume this violated some commercial license and I know my employer (UC) did buy their server product but I don't recall anybody even remotely considering licensing Netscape Navigator itself.
From the Wikipedia page [1]
> The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were identical to the commercial versions; the letter was intended as a reminder to people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online [...]
Maybe the misunderstanding is because (from the same page) the original plan was to have a free version only for academic and non-profit organizations and make everybody else pay. That wouldn't have had a chance even ~30 years ago especially because building a browser was much easier than now. The features were so much more limited in 1995. No JavaScript, no CSS, the only one that mattered was loading and displaying text and images on the page without blocking until everything was downloaded. The Mosaic browser was blocking. Minutes staring at a white page waiting for something to appear...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator