To Free or Not to Free the Code in Question
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Part VII - Desktop browser infection 1993 1993 was a pivotal year in the Internet's young life - perhaps its onset of adoloscence. Turbulence was on its way, with a healthy dose of spots. The 386 PC with faster 14K4 dialup modems was opening up the home desktop market. The exponential expansion of the x86 install-base would not cease, ever the instant hit. New software titles would ride this wave sky-high. The received version of the story goes like this (research pending): Young operating system company Microsoft retained the lucrative IBM contract. They were funded to develop a desktop GUI. The project ran something like twice over time and budget. Why? MS were building two desktop GUIs at the same time. The stalling allowed MS to get their product to market first, completely surprising IBM and trumping their new product, OS/2. Home/business market success would be Microsoft's. The product - Windows 3.1. |
"In September 1993, the computer systems industry, in the form of a group of 75 leading system and software vendors, agreed to back an initiative to ask X/Open Company to standardize the specifications of the UNIX operating system. In a parallel move, Novell, Inc. announced that it would transfer the UNIX trade mark, which it owned, to X/Open Company Limited (now part of The Open Group). In a few weeks and two announcements, the computer industry put behind it over 25 years of policy and technical differences to concentrate on delivering a single specification for the UNIX system to the market with the aim of creating a consistent volume market for UNIX systems." Novell retained the UnixWare source code and product implementation, for now. [Why This is Different The Open Group unix.org]. All in all, access to a new market was reshaping the computer industry - the consumer appliance market. There was no looking back. The home desktop was the new territory for proprietary software competition, and MS was winning. Initially they saw the Internet as inconsequential. However that was where the competition was taking shape, around *nix and the Mosaic-Netscape Web browser. Waking up to the situation, the response appeared - as MS Internet Explorer. Proprietary software competition was now including Web browsers. [Draft 26Jul05 - to be cont'd..] |