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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

Netscape thought that open sourcing their code will save them but it didn't.

I wasn't party to the discussions so I don't know, but I think it's unlikely this was the idea. More likely the open source pivot was a way to preserve the product, which it did, since Firefox still exists.

Didn't they pretty much start from scratch after open sourcing?

Not sure what was left of the older (pre-open source) Netscape code in Firefox 1.0.

Not my product, but I believe I've been in this argument before, and went to check the Firefox source code, and found files that were in the original Netscape code base. So I'm going to say: no it wasn't a from-scratch re-write even for the Firefox fork. The actual 1998 open source event was totally the Netscape code, fwiw, with some stuff removed to comply with commercial licenses, build process decoupled from the corporate network and so on.

There is absolutely no way it was from scratch. Phoenix and Firefox both had XUL. It was a derivative of Gecko from Mozilla.

This sounds totally ridiculous now, but at the time there was a lot of hype about Linux / open source, a sense/possibility that it could overcome microsoft/sun/ibm/hp etc, some big IPOs like VA Linux Systems. Keep in mind that IE was a second-rate browser then, no chrome or serious rivals to Netscape/Mozilla at the time.

Looking back, it was a bit reminiscent of the bitcoin / ai bubbles, where every company desperately rushes to jump on the bandwagon.

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