Code Rush

Last updated
Code Rush
Code Rush cover.png
Directed by David Winton
Release dates
March 30, 2000 (TV)
April 25, 2000 (VHS)
Running time
56 minutes
LanguageEnglish

Code Rush is a 2000 documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape's last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last-minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31, 1998, and the impact on the engineers' lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.

Contents

After Andy Baio uploaded the documentary to his personal website for the release of Mozilla Firefox 3 in 2009, director David Winton requested it be taken down, pending his decision about future distribution under a free content license. It has since been released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 US license. [1] [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bugzilla</span> Web-based general-purpose bugtracker

Bugzilla is a web-based general-purpose bug tracking system and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Netscape Navigator</span> Web browser by Netscape released in 1994

Netscape Navigator is a discontinued proprietary web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its user base had all but disappeared. This was partly because the Netscape Corporation did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation in the late 1990s.

Netscape Communications Corporation was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent in 2006. An early Netscape employee Brendan Eich created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages and a founding engineer of Netscape Lou Montulli created HTTP cookies. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.

Jamie Werner Zawinski, commonly known as jwz, is an American computer programmer, blogger and impresario. He is best known for his role in the creation of Netscape Navigator, Netscape Mail, Lucid Emacs, Mozilla.org, and XScreenSaver. He is also the proprietor of DNA Lounge, a nightclub and live music venue in San Francisco.

<i>The Cathedral and the Bazaar</i> Book by Eric S. Raymond

The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary is an essay, and later a book, by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. It examines the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design. The essay was first presented by Raymond at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 in Würzburg (Germany) and was published as the second chapter of the same‑titled book in 1999.

Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla. It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Netscape Communicator</span> Discontinued Internet software suite

Netscape Communicator is a discontinued Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, and was the fourth major release in the Netscape line of browsers. It was first in beta in 1996 and was released in June 1997. Netscape Communicator addressed the problem of Netscape Navigator 3.x being used as both the name of the suite and the browser contained within it by renaming the suite to Netscape Communicator. It included more groupware features intended to appeal to enterprises.

An end-of-life product is a product at the end of the product lifecycle which prevents users from receiving updates, indicating that the product is at the end of its useful life. At this stage, a vendor stops the marketing, selling, or provisioning of parts, services, or software updates for the product. The vendor may simply intend to limit or end support for the product. In the specific case of product sales, a vendor may employ the more specific term "end-of-sale" ("EOS"). All users can continue to access discontinued products, but cannot receive security updates and technical support. The time-frame after the last production date depends on the product and relates to the expected product lifetime from a customer's point of view. Different lifetime examples include toys from fast food chains, mobile phones and cars.

The Netscape Public License (NPL) is a free software license, the license under which Netscape Communications Corporation originally released Mozilla.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Netscape 6</span>

Netscape 6 is a discontinued Internet suite developed by Netscape Communications Corporation, and was the sixth major release of the Netscape series of browsers. It superseded Netscape Communicator (4.x), as the release of Netscape Communicator 5 was scrapped. Netscape 6 was the first browser of the Netscape line to be based on another source code: Mozilla Application Suite, an open-source software package from the Mozilla Foundation, which was created by Netscape in 1998.

The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird. The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of both open-source and proprietary developers; it is distinguished from others as a middle ground between the permissive software BSD-style licenses and the GNU General Public License. So under the terms of the MPL, it allows the integration of MPL-licensed code into proprietary codebases, but only on condition those components remain accessible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SeaMonkey</span> Internet suite

SeaMonkey is a free and open-source Internet suite. It is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite, based on the same source code, which itself grew out of Netscape Communicator and formed the base of Netscape 6 and Netscape 7.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mitchell Baker</span> Chairwoman and CEO

Winifred Mitchell Baker is the Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation and former CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser. She left the CEO role in February, 2024.

The history of the Mozilla Application Suite began with the release of the source code of the Netscape suite as an open source project. Going through years of hard work, Mozilla 1.0 was eventually released on June 5, 2002. Its backend code base, most notably the Gecko layout engine, has become the foundation of a number of applications based on Mozilla, including the Mozilla Foundation's flagship product Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. While the suite is no longer a formal Mozilla product, its development and maintenance is continued as the SeaMonkey community project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Netscape (web browser)</span> Family of web browsers

The Netscape web browser is the general name for a series of web browsers formerly produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, which eventually became a subsidiary of AOL. The original browser was once the dominant browser in terms of usage share, but as a result of the first browser war, it lost virtually all of its share to Internet Explorer due to Microsoft's anti-competitive bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows.

License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.

Companies whose business centers on the development of open-source software employ a variety of business models to solve the challenge of how to make money providing software that is by definition licensed free of charge. Each of these business strategies rests on the premise that users of open-source technologies are willing to purchase additional software features under proprietary licenses, or purchase other services or elements of value that complement the open-source software that is core to the business. This additional value can be, but not limited to, enterprise-grade features and up-time guarantees to satisfy business or compliance requirements, performance and efficiency gains by features not yet available in the open source version, legal protection, or professional support/training/consulting that are typical of proprietary software applications.

Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.

Software relicensing is applied in open-source software development when software licenses of software modules are incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as copyrightable works, in source code as binary form, can contain contradictory clauses. These requirements can make it impossible to combine source code or content of several software works to create a new combined one.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jim Roskind</span> American software engineer

Jim Roskind is an American software engineer best known for designing the QUIC protocol in 2012 while being an employee at Google. Roskind co-founded Infoseek in 1994 with 7 other people, including Steve Kirsch. Later that year, Roskind wrote the Python profiler which is part of the standard library. From 1995 to 2003 he was chief architect at Netscape during which time he developed Netscape's Java security module.

References

  1. Baio, Andy (2009-07-31). "Code Rush in the Creative Commons". Waxy.org . Retrieved 2019-10-04.
  2. Koten, Jake. "Project Code Rush". Archived from the original on 2014-08-09. Retrieved 2019-10-04.