Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/920833/

Jamie Zawinski reminds
us that the 25th anniversary of the Netscape open-source announcement —
a crucial moment in free-software history — has just passed.

On January 20th, 1998, Netscape laid off a lot of people. One of
them would have been me, as my “department”, such as it was, had
been eliminated, but I ended up mometarily moving from “clienteng”
over to the “website” division. For about 48 hours I thought that I
might end up writing a webmail product or something.

That, uh, didn’t happen.

That announcement was the opening topic on the
second-ever LWN.net Weekly Edition as well.