Following the successful release of its Navigator browser source code six weeks ago (CI No 3,380). Netscape Communications Corp announced today that it will publish the source to its Messenger email client on www.mozilla.org this week. Netscape has promised its unpaid developer community a new user interface, better IMAP integration and improved performance. Mozilla director and Netscape Fellow Tom Paquin says the move reflects the browser giant’s confidence in its source-available software business model. He points to hundreds of bug fixes and many valuable suggestions as the immediate, concrete benefits of having given the source away. With the publication of Messenger, all major modules of Netscape’s Communicator suite are now open. Paquin hopes this will encourage much stronger integration between mail, web and news clients through the resource description format (RDF), a kind of metacontent. Code-named ‘Aurora’, this initiative should give users a single tool to find all email messages from mom, for example, or all web and local Word files mentioning Paris, France. Paquin says that managing such a complex project in a free software community is not as difficult as it sounds. The signal to noise ratio is surprisingly high, he observes. The net is a very strong meritocracy.
