February 2, 1998

Rather than escalating a dead man’s curve race
against its archenemy, Microsoft Corp., Netscape
Communications Corp. has made a course correction that
may profoundly affect the commercial software industry.

On Jan. 23, Netscape announced that by the end of
the first quarter of this year, it would begin giving
away the source code of its popular Communicator suite
of Internet software products, including its Navigator
World Wide Web browser.

The company also announced that it would give away the
retail version of its Communicator products and would
allow other companies to customize and distribute them
free as well. But it was its decision to publish
Communicator’s source code that stunned the industry.

In the commercial software world, source code is a
company’s most valuable property. A combination of
digital alchemy and architecture, source code is not
only the blueprint of a program’s underlying design and
structure; its prose also exposes how its programmers
thought about and built its inner workings, right down
to the digital equivalent of its plaster, plumbing and
wires.

Commercial source code is copyrighted, sometimes
patented and always jealously shielded from competitors
who might use it to create clones or to match its
functions in other programs. It is shared cautiously at
best, and usually under legal strictures.

Thus it is understandable that many people in the
software industry think that Netscape has lost its
corporate mind for posting a crown jewel on the Internet
for anyone to scrutinize, copy and modify.

But Marc Andreessen, one of Netscape’s founders and its
executive vice president for products, said that given
the company’s death race with Microsoft, it had little
choice.

“We’d much rather be able to charge for it,” he said,
but he added that Microsoft had triple-whammied them –
first, by giving away its Internet Explorer browser,
making it impossible for Netscape to keep charging for
its browsers, and second, by pressing hardware vendors
into shipping Explorer instead of Navigator on their new
computers.

Third, he said: “Microsoft has a ton more developers and
programmers. Source code is the only way we could tap
the energy of all the people who wanted us to modify it
or port to other computers or create new features. So
overnight, we got 10 to 100 times more programmers to
work on it with us.”

And while Netscape will continue to charge for its
server software — the programs that corporations and
publishers buy so they can set up Web sites — it turned
its back on commercial software for the consumer market
to join a longstanding programmer tradition — free
software.

The proponents of free software say that freedom is
about liberty, not price — free speech, as they say,
not free beer.

They believe that people who buy and use software should
be free to run, copy, distribute, study, change and
improve the software in any way they like.

Free software is especially popular with programmers who
are proficient with Unix, an operating system used to run
midsize to large businesses and the majority of
commercial Internet sites. And perhaps because it is so
easy to acquire over the Internet, free software is
becoming increasingly popular to a broader base of customers.

Though source code is freely distributed and copying is
encouraged, free-software companies do sell their
versions of the software, as well as applications,
service contracts, manuals and other accouterments.
Hundreds of businesses have sprung up around free
software — especially around a flavor of Unix called
Linux, originally created by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish
programmer.

Linux source code is freely available over the Internet.
As a result, it is gaining popularity; it is already a
strong competitor in the Unix market and is emerging as
a viable competitor to Microsoft’s Windows NT, which now
commands more than 35 percent of the sub-$25,000 network
server market, according to Kimball Brown, a senior
analyst for the market-research firm Dataquest.

Because the products can be freely copied and
distributed, the number of computers running Linux is
impossible to know for sure; most estimates range from 5
million to 10 million. And some believe that Linux is
winning many of NT’s potential customers, even though it
obviously does not come with Microsoft’s extensive
customer support and wide variety of applications.

Marc Ewing, 28, a co-founder of a leading Linux company,
Red Hat Software Inc., says that his company’s sales of
Linux are doubling every year. Red Hat sells its
customers 500 megabytes of software, including Linux and
source code, software compilers, Web servers, e-mail
clients, Web browsers and more, for $49.95.

Certainly no one is going to make their fortune at those
prices, but those who start free-software companies have
reasons for choosing the noncommercial model.

“The most visible people in the free-software world are
good, and everyone knows it and wants what they do,”
Ewing said. “It’s a meritocracy, so you end up with
great software and highly talented people.” And, he
added, making source code freely available means that
problems get fixed more quickly “and innovation happens
a lot faster.”

Many people, including Netscape’s Andreessen, believe
that the growing popularity of free software like Linux
may signal a shift in how the software industry conducts
business.

“If I’m the chief information officer in my company, I
don’t want programmers mucking around in the source
code,” Brown said. “You never know what else breaks when
they fix something.” On the other hand, he said, the
quality of Linux and its steady market growth is
“fascinating.”

Given its success, added Brown, and the obvious interest
in free software, it seems possible that “the next
iteration of Internet standards will not be governed by
people who want to make money.”

Denise Caruso

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company