Readers Sound Off On Communicator Code

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April 07, 1998 (9:20 AM EDT)

By Malcolm Maclachlan,

Netscape never promised a rose garden when it offered its Communicator 5.0 source code to the developer community, according to feedback from TechWeb readers. More than 100 readers wrote in response to criticisms of the code by some developers and analysts, as reported on TechWeb. Most of these responses centered on what Netscape (company profile) promised and on the status of open-source software.

The code Netscape released, known as Mozilla, is in alpha. Mountain View, Calif.-based Netscape said the newest Communicator source code would be not be in its final form when made available, according to the Mozilla.org website, which distributes the code along with hundreds of mirror sites.

"From the very beginning, the Netscape people have been very up front about the fact that they were releasing development code, not a polished final product," wrote reader John Trowbridge. "They knew they were releasing buggy code, they said they were releasing buggy code, and they released buggy code."

This is part of the open-source-code development process, Trowbridge said. Netscape released the code so a community of developers could help create something better, cleaner, and more powerful, he said.

Netscape had considered putting out a version of the Communicator 4.0 code, but rejected the idea, said Tom Paquin, a Netscape fellow who manages the Mozilla.org site.

"We decided what that would do was get a lot of people working on a stale code base," Paquin said.

A number of readers also took issue with the idea that freeware or open-source software was inherently buggy. Among these were Linux evangelist Eric Raymond.

"As a matter of actual tested fact, open-source software is, in general, more robust than closed commercial software," Raymond wrote.

Readers cited the Apache Web server, the Perl programming language, and the Linux operating system as examples of reliable outcomes of open-source development efforts.

"Perhaps the poor image free software gets is from the general mindset of 'release early, release often,' " wrote reader Geoff Baskwill. "Commercial software doesn't get out the door without [theoretically] going through a rigorous verification cycle, while it is not uncommon to see a free software package available for download that is marked 'version 0.0.1 - ALPHA - this may break!' "

Many said some critical developers were looking gift code in the mouth. "It sure seems to me that Bigfoot is trying to blame Netscape Communications for the fact that they misunderstood that the Mozilla code release was simply a code release to developers and not the release of a stable working version," reader George Bonser said.