Letter to AOL:Press Releases

An Open Letter to AOL

Earlier today (25 Nov 1998) Marc Andreesen of Netscape requested
from OSI's president, Eric S. Raymond, a perspective on the future of
Mozilla in connection with the AOL/Netscape/Sun negotiations. This is
our response.

We in the Open Source community have followed the smoke signals emanating
from the AOL/Sun/Netscape negotiations with great interest. The strategic
motivations of the proposed buyout/alliance/stock-swap seem fairly clear to
us, as we think they must to most observers.

We, too, have recently been forcibly reminded (by the Halloween Documents) that we have been
targeted for destruction and dirty tricks by the Microsoft monopoly.
We too are aware of the need to forge alliances and work together as
never before to avert this threat. We have a common cause with you.

In this connection, we urge you at AOL to consider carefully your
future relationship with Netscape's Mozilla project and with the
open-source community in general.

The Mozilla project proceeded from Netscape's understanding that
Internet Explorer threatened their server business. If Microsoft were
able to establish a monopoly lock on the browser market, they could
leverage that into effective control of the HTTP/HTML protocol; from
there it would be a short step to effectively crippling any
competitor's web servers.

The same logic that made IE a threat to Netscape's server business makes
it a threat to yours. Netscape responded by launching the Mozilla effort
in alliance with the open-source community. Their strategy has proven
effective (recent surveys show IE losing business market share relative
to Netscape) and we urge you to continue it in cooperation with us.

Netscape understood that trying to monopolize or replace the Web
itself was not a viable option. Nobody plays that game
better than the Borg of Redmond; to try is to play straight into
Microsoft's strengths. Recent stories suggesting that AOL plans to
move away from proprietary protocols towards HTML suggest that AOL,
too, has grasped this truth.

Instead, by freeing the source Netscape created an open standard
browser that could survive even the worst case, predatory capture of
Netscape's own intellectual property. By enlisting the
open-source community, Netscape ensured that Mozilla would evolve and
improve faster than any proprietary competition. Mozilla's success
would deny Microsoft even the possibility of monopoly control over the
Web; to use Microsoft's own language in the Halloween Documents, it
would "commoditize" the infrastructure.

As a company whose core business is content and media, AOL should have
an even stronger interest than Netscape in seeing that infrastructure
become a commodity, because it moves the competition from places AOL
doesn't want to be (technology) to places where it wants to be
(content and media).

This harmonizes with the open-source community's goals perfectly. We
are technology specialists. We know all about building software and
communications infrastructures around open standards. We are the Unix
and Internet hackers. We are the people who spun the World Wide Web.
Our culture (of which the Linux community is just the most recent
phase) has been doing this sort of thing for thirty years, and (as
Microsoft admitted in the Halloween Documents) we're better at it
than anybody.

We don't want power and we don't care much about money per se. What
makes us run is solving problems and inventing things. All we want is
to be able to keep innovating, keep playing our game, without monopoly
interference.

What's good for AOL and us, in this case, is good for the consumer
as well. Open standards increase competition and lower prices, and
they create more niches in which new ideas and services can flourish.

Accordingly, we urge AOL to continue to support the Mozilla
development, and invite AOL to continue Netscape's productive alliance
with the open-source community. This will best serve all of AOL's
interests, ours, and the consumer's.

The Open Source Initiative, and its allies, stand ready to help.

Issued by and for the Board of Directors of OSI
by Eric S. Raymond, President
25 November 1998