In article <390DF15E.233B7D1E@online.no>,
  "Tarjei Tj�stheim Jensen" <tarjei@online.no> wrote:
> Ted Dennison wrote:
> > If I was looking to start one today, I think I'd go for a web
> > browser. I know there are tons of them, but there aren't that many
> > out there that are fully open source. Even fewer are cross-platform
> > and GPL. The only one I know of is Lynx.
>
> I think there is at least two web browsers for gnome. There is at
> least one on kde.

But those aren't cross-platform, right? There are a couple out there for
the Amiga too. That's not my point.

Suppose I want to use only a GPL or LGPL web browser for
philisophical/self-preservation reasons. Further suppose that I want one
that I can use on my Win2k system, my wife's Win98 system, and a SunOs,
HP/UX, or SGI box I use at work. It might even be nice if my parents'
iMac can run it. Is there anything out there that does that? I'd
honestly be interested in finding out about it. Netscape comes close,
but its license is right on the edge of OpenSource, making it really
just a big commercial product in OpenSource clothing. For instance it
tries to integrate functionality that has nothing to do with web
browsing (eg: email, newsgroups, chat, streaming news or whatever's
fashionable today) that should properly be handled by the separate
external application of my choice. Why does Mozilla/Netscape integrate
this? The same reason Microsoft integrated their web server into the OS:
business positioning. But why should *I* be inconvienced to help improve
AOL's business position?

> I think the web server bit would be more profitable nut to crack.
> Apache and perl is the main competitor. Zope and python may be coming
> attractions.

Apache is sort of the model I'm thinking of here. Apache is dominant as
*the* GPL solution. I use it at home on my Win2k box to proxy web
accesss to my home LAN, and am quite happy with it. I'd like to see a
project (done in Ada) that has a chance of acheiving that kind of
dominance. I don't think web servers are the place to look for that
because there already *is* one. But when I look for something similar in
a browser, its very tough to find.

But then, I'm probably not a typical Apache user, and you seem to know
way more about web servers than I do. So perhaps there is a niche there
that I'm blind to. (AWS seems like a credible start in that direction.)

As programmers we all have our own itches to scratch. At the moment *my*
biggest one happens to be web browser (as you can no doubt tell from the
diatribe above).

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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