Comment by sillywalk
1 day ago
From both the Rational Wiki, and from vaguely remembered Slashdot comments from 20+ years ago, I thought that ESR's 'The Art of Unix Programming' was regarded as pretty good.
I'm curious if this is accurate, because it would seem to be out of character.
It's pretty clearly the best thing he's done. CATB has just not held up at all; it's actively bad, and it has a weirdly outsized reputation. But of someone posted an AoUP link instead, I'd shut up about it.
It did however persuade the Mozilla Organization to open-source their browser, and if they had not open-sourced it, then Firefox would never have been created (being a fork created by outsiders of Mozilla's browser).
At least one of the people in the room when the decision was made has said that CATB was what persuaded the execs.
1. Yes, CatB was waved around (not sure that the most ardent wavers actually read it) inside Netscape in late 1997 as a gesture to support the argument for doing mozilla dot org.
It helped get some execs on the bandwagon, but Eric Hahn was the biggest high level executive proponent, and I think he genuinely wanted an escape pod, and possibly thereby a better ending, for Netscape via open source. That's what we who actually founded mozilla dot org then did.
2. Firefox was not a "fork", it started as a new project named "mozilla/browser" built on common code. David Hyatt and Blake Ross created it from the cross-platform toolkit (XPFE, XUL) that we'd all worked on at Netscape (Hyatt was there until jumping to Apple in 2001; Blake was intern out of high school on way to Stanford).
The m/b => Phoenix team were fans of Mike Judge's OFFICE SPACE (1999); we hung out on an IRC channel named #me-in-the-ass and plotted (successfully) how to show up idiot upper management at the Netscape division of AOL, by doing a small, fast, customizable browser, while said management bloated and dithered over the "Netscape 4.5" and doomed 5.0 suite of browser/mail/news/editor/etc.
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I have no idea how true that is or isn't, but I can evaluate the document on its own merits, as I was a practitioner in 1997 and am today as well.
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