"Gnusaic"? Why not a Gnu-Style Web Browser?

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

I'm pretty happy with Netscape 1.1N, but John Gilmore's point about NCSA
Mosaic gives me a thought:

At 6:44 AM GMT 9/21/95, John Gilmore wrote:

>>   I realize that some cypherpunks think that we should make all of
>> our code publicly available.  In an ideal world that would be great,
>> but we live in a world with politicians, crooks, lawyers, stockholders,
>> etc...  Don't expect to see us posting our entire security
>> library source code to cypherpunks.
>
>Naah.  I think NCSA should've made Mosaic publicly available, because
>they wrote it with our tax dollars.  And I hold it against them that
>they started the trend of "zero-cost personal-use binaries but no
>commercial use" that many Net users still confuse with Real Free
>Software (free as in freedom).  But Netscape owns its code, it can do
>whatever it wants with it.

Why not a Gnu-style Web browser? I don't know if the original Mosaic can be
used and added to, but I can imagine something like this could be done.

Web browsers are becoming, for many of us, our de facto interfaces to the
Net, not just the Web. A project to make a truly freely distributable Web
browser and Web server (the other part of the puzzle) could be interesting.
Strong crypto could be added by volunteers working in their specialties,
and the "Web proxie" could be put in with robustness (D-H forward secrecy,
for example).

I'll stop now, as I've never been a Gnu customer (except for Emacs), and so
I'm not really in a position to comment and speculate on Gnu.

For all I know, Stallman and others have already thought of this and are
working on it.

--Tim May


Notice: With 1000 people on the Cypherpunks list, and many on other lists I
am on, nearly every article I write generates at least one question,
request for more information, dispute with my choice of words, etc. I have
been trying to respond to these, usually privately, but the burden has
become too much, and I no longer plan to respond to trivial or ephemeral
points. If you don't hear from me, this is why. Some requests for pointers
to information will still be handled, but I advise people to learn how to
use the archives and/or search tools.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
Corralitos, CA              | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839      | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."