A YEAR AGO Netscape Communications, losing the battle of the browser to Microsoft, cracked open its programming "source code" and offered it to the world, inviting programmers to analyze it, change it and help build a better browser than it had been able to make on its own.
The move seemed radical in an industry built on intellectual property -- the equivalent of Coca-Cola's publishing its secret formula and soliciting advice from the soda jerks of the world. Could the open source movement save the marketplace victims of Bill Gates?
One wonders. The Netscape effort, which it calls Mozilla, has been a commercial flop so far. And that offers some lessons for the tech titans -- IBM, Oracle, SAP, Intel, even the ultraproprietary Apple Computer -- sidling up to the openness movement.
Netscape had hoped its willingness to reveal design secrets would attract outside programmers and yield new features, better code and faster development. It hasn't. Only about 30 outsiders signed up for the effort, compared with 100 inside Netscape.
While Microsoft recently released a new version of its Web browser, Internet Explorer, Netscape has gone more than a year without a major release for Navigator. It's still waiting for Mozilla to give birth. A year after Netscape set Mozilla free, its founder, Jamie W. Zawinski, has just resigned.
Moral: It may be that programmers will happily craft code for open software that doesn't belong to any one company -- the Linux operating system or free Apache for Web servers -- but they balk at helping the Netscapes of the world get richer.
In a postmortem he published on the Web, Zawinski, who wrote much of Netscape's original browser, says that one of his biggest disappointments was the failure to inspire a large community of developers to join up, and that having so many Netscape full-timers on the project may have violated the dynamics of a culture that thrives on volunteer programming.
Unfortunately for Netscape and other companies hoping to get top-
notch software development on the cheap, it seems no corporation can muscle an undisciplined open-source project into the framework of a long-range corporate strategic plan.
"Open-source software morphs in unexpected ways," says Timothy O'Reilly, a publisher of open-source software guides. The red-hot Linux grew spontaneously, with programmers adding new features they found interesting and fixing problems as needed. Netscape needed a specific product and a more structured set of tasks, done in a particular order, fun or not.
"It's hard in a corporate context to create the kind of energy you have in the open-source community," O'Reilly observes. "The whole idea isn't just to get an advantage. If you're only doing it to get something, you're not really playing the game the way it's [supposed to be] played."
That casts some doubt on the idea of forcing Microsoft to reveal the code to the Windows operating system. Some state attorneys general, pursuing a separate antitrust case, even as Microsoft heads back into court to resume fighting federal charges, have advocated the open-source move as a way to tame the company.
Though Microsoft's bellicose president, Steven Ballmer, has expressed grudging admiration for open programming on projects like Linux, that is not the same as saying the approach would work for Microsoft products.
"There's quicksand everywhere," says James Allchin, the senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows 2000 project. Translation:
Open-source projects have a mind of their own.
Allchin would rather steer the industry than have a love-in with rivals. "While open source is generally very good engineering, it's also generally poor in innovation," he says. "When you're following the taillights, it's easy to make a decision on what to do next."
Tailgater though it may be, the open-source movement and its rapid rise have helped clarify what Microsoft must do next: produce software that's far enough ahead of cheap or free open-code alternatives to earn the kind of profits Bill Gates' shareholders expect. The rest of the industry has the tricky task of finding out how close it can get to open source without getting burned.
"Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea,"
Zawinski writes in his resignation letter. "You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the pixie dust of open source, and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The issues aren't that simple."
