Early developer reaction is trickling in after Netscape posted a draft version of the public license for its soon-to-be-released source code.
"Given their commercial orientation they did about the best job they can," said Keenan Ross, chief scientist of distributed systems technology at Intermetrics, a company that uses Netscape's server products to develop sites for entertainment and gaming.
The draft was posted today on its recently launched site to promote the free source code, Mozilla.org. Mountain View is encouraging developers to review the license over the next several weeks and provide feedback before the final license is released on 31 March. That release will coincide with the freeing of the source code for Communicator 5.0, which Netscape announced in January.
Eager developers have already begun visiting the Mozilla site - to download, tweak, and contribute their changes back to the "source code tree," as Netscape refers to it, so that others, including the company itself, can benefit from new renditions of the code.
The license itself is central to the grassroots effort of growing the code. Developers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the company's plan to make its underlying software code available in the spirit of freely licensed products of the past.
The company said the so-called "Netscape Public License" was drafted after a careful look at other public licenses, which encourage developers to contribute to an open pool of source code that everyone can use.
However, few developers had given the draft license a careful look within its first few hours of posting. Of a handful of developers queried for this story, only Intermetric's Ross had formulated an opinion.
A primary sticking point in the license, as far as Ross is concerned, is a section that allows Netscape to incorporate developer-contributed changes in the public code into products using the same code. Those products include Netscape's proprietary software. In other words, stuff that's not freely available to the developer community, such as its server software.
It is a point where the Netscape license diverges from the public-license spirit, and not everybody's happy about it.
"They can take [a developer's modification] and put it into their server product and release it under a very proprietary license," Ross said. He understands the company's motivation for doing so, but thinks it calls for further discussion, at the very least.
Ross, however, doesn't have an easy alternative to the provision himself.
"I think it is going to be a very delicate balance," he said. "The rest of the license walked the tight-rope very well. With some help in the newsgroup [for discussing the license], they can get over the hurdle."
Jim Hamerly, vice president of Netscape's client products division, takes Ross' point, but said the provision is only reasonable given what Netscape is trying to do: Make the code free, but still benefit from it commercially.
"It's part of the give and take of the Net," he said. "We have to preserve all the advantages of the free source initiative, but at the same time add value for commercial developers," including Netscape.
Hamerly says the draft license does a pretty good job of walking that line, but he expects the draft to evolve before the final release.
Ross agrees, and said he doesn't see his complaint about Netscape incorporating developer code into proprietary software as a fundamental flaw in Netscape's overall effort.
"The whole point of the ... [free] license is to encourage people to post changes," he said. "In general that's a good thing."
