Brendan Eich: evaluation

Transcript context

…Which bought Mosaic. It sort of kept iterating like it does. The first version was not real, the second version was kind of a joke, and the third version was starting to tell you where it could get to. The fourth version was quite good on Windows, pretty much only on Windows. Meanwhile, they were bundling it with Windows 95 and then 98, and they got convicted in the USU Microsoft case for this because it's not illegal to acquire monopoly through, let's say, merit or a sweetheart deal with IBM to be the OS for the PC. I don't know why IBM gave Microsoft that, it's a little suspect, but whatever. They had the windows monopoly, but what they did in tying the browser to it and threatening Compaq with revocation of the Windows license if Compaq shipped Netscape as the default browser was illegal and they got convicted for it, but it was too late to save Netscape. Yet a few executives, Marc, Eric Hahn, and others wanted to save something through open source. Commercial open source in the form of Linux was up and Red Hat was up and running. People were excited about the idea of doing a commercial open source project out of the remains of Netscape, at least in the browser team. Jamie Zawinski kind of led it definitionally and spiritually as the community manager. I did the tech side, and we had a bunch of IT and a couple of tools people who helped us build things that are now taken for granted that are now standard on GitHub. We realized there was this amazing synergy doing something like a dynamic language on the server to generate HTML that has JavaScript automating it. All that stuff was super slick to do in a full stack way and this was in '96. It prefigured everything that came after in DHTML and AJAX. It was pretty cool that you guys were doing this in open source, right?…

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