:51:00
which was the first place that I gave that paper.
:51:04
And one of the people who heard it was
Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly and Associates.
:51:09
And uh, he thought it was pretty intriguing
:51:12
and he asked me to give it at
his first PERL conference, which was uh..
:51:17
later that year, in Fall of 97.
:51:21
And apparently what happened, I was told later,
:51:23
although I had no idea that this was happening at the time,
:51:27
uh is that some people from Netscape actually
heard the paper at the PERL conference
:51:34
and took those ideas back to Netscape and
they kind of lit a fire there.
:51:39
The role of my paper was essentially
to make the internal case at Netscape, uh
:51:44
to make the business case for
why Netscape should release its source code.
:51:49
The paper was called
"Netscape Source Code As Netscape Product".
:51:54
uh.. a strange title,
essentially what the title meant was that
:52:00
In my opinion we needed to
:52:01
think of source code not just as something
that was used in creating our products,
:52:06
but as something that was a product in its own right.
:52:09
Something that customers might use, other people might use.
:52:13
I then looked at what the business models might be
:52:16
if we released source code for our products.
:52:20
How would we license them?
:52:22
How do we sell products in this environment?
:52:28
Then I looked at the competition, particularly Microsoft.
:52:32
What would they be likely to do
if we released source code?
:52:35
Was there some way they could
use our source code against us?
:52:38
I used Eric's paper as an example of
how distributed development could work,
:52:44
how a company could develop software not
just using their own people,
:52:48
but also working with people on the Internet.
:52:53
And that's why I included a reference to
Eric's paper in my paper.
:52:58
Once my paper was circulated,