Brendan Eich: belief

Transcript context

…Just like today or a couple of years ago with Chrome, right? It goes in cycles. We also had this boat anchor of the Mozilla Suite, because like I said the '90s had a lot of sweets. I think Netscape made a mistake in '96 when they bought a company to go after Lotus Notes because it didn't work. They took the Netscape 2 and 3, a mail reader, a newsreader, which Jamie and Terry Weissman, who I've mentioned, worked on and did a pretty good job in a very short time. They threw it away or threw most of it away and did a Windows-only groupware version that was late and delayed all of Netscape 4. That really hurt, and they were the people who didn't want to do open source either. That did not help Netscape. It did not take down Lotus Notes. Mozilla had to figure out, are we doing a Suite? Do we want this albatross of '90s suiteware? It took a while because like I said, we were underfunded at first. In fact, as AOL ingested Netscape, which at first didn't involve any digestive enzymes, it was arm's length. They started wondering what they bought and why. For the first two years, I think 1999 and 2000, the head of the Netscape division was decapitated. Somebody I liked, a nice guy mentioned, took their place, but it didn't go well for Mozilla. It meant Mozilla was considered the enemy because most of the employees initially were the contributors, and it was rare to find outside contributors. Chris Blizzard at Red Hat was a contributor. We encourage people in open source especially in Linux to work on the code and send patches or get cvs commit rights. We tried to give those away. A lot of the job in the early days was trying to build up the mostly volunteer community to countervail the Netscape employees who were not all top-notch at that point. After a year, nothing much changed. Jamie said, I give up. I consider it a failure. He wrote an essay you can still find, so he quit, but we kept going. Even though we had to be the basis for this suite, because we stripped out the ICQ and AIM buttons, Mozilla got popular. We were doing releases and binaries because we wanted testers. That was a big change too. A lot of open source projects said, there's the code, build it yourself. Right, which of course 99% of people who could use the software are immediately out right away because they're not going to compile on their local machines.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.