[15858] in Athena Bugs
Re: sun4 8.1.16: help
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Mon Mar 23 22:23:14 1998
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 22:22:58 -0500
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Petr Adamek <adamek@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[15849] in Athena Bugs"
> I was prompted to accept Netscape's licence agreement. Yuck.
Unfortunately, a number of critical pieces of software on Athena are
commercial. The moment you log in, you are using a commercial
operating system (Solaris or IRIX), a commercial filesystem (AFS), and
possibly a commercial window manager (mwm). While we generally prefer
free software to commercial software, there are areas where free
software offerings just don't measure up for one reason or another.
Web browsers are one of them; Mosaic is not undergoing active
development and is really quite substandard compared to netscape in
this day and age.
Perhaps some time after Netscape releases the Mozilla source code,
some free software product incorporating the Mozilla source base will
be available and we will be able to use that as the default web
browser, without making users agree to the Netscape licensing terms.
We'll see.
