From: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)
Date: Sat, 2 Dec 1995 08:39:01 +0800
To: semper.fi@solutions.apple.com
Subject: Attribution: GAK, Netscape, CyberDog, and you.
Message-ID: <v02120d09ace5250c303d@[199.0.65.105]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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In the heat of the moment, I failed to attribute something to someone who
you all should know about: Tim May, one of the founders of cypherpunks, and
the person who used a greatly expanded form of this argument yesterday on
that list.

While I'm not a journalist, I did violate the rules of "News 101", and did
not attribute the source of this excellent argument. Heavy lifting, indeed.

Of course, that's nothing new. I don't believe I've ever had an original
thought in my life...

;-).

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

P.S. Sorry, Rich, but I just had to do this one...


>Netscape's Jim Clark has quite a tightrope act going. He has a stock price
which gives Netscape a P/E ratio of something like 7,000 (the S&P average
right now is about 14), which means he really ought to get some revenue in
the door, or his investors are going to have his hide. The next thing is,
the government is a *really* big customer, and *they* want GAK, in case you
haven't noticed. ;-). Couple this with the fact that Netscape is pretty much
replicable by concentrated developer effort because its underlying
technology is an open standard, *and* the fact that any significant attempt
by them to create any real proprietary standards on the internet is
practically impossible in the long run, unless they get a whole lot of very
big customers in a hurry.
>
>Now, it looks like that's what happened already, because a lot of very
large companies have signed on to using Netscape servers, but you can also
see how really weak Netscape's position is when Uncle Sam knocks on their
door and asks for a key escrow "bug" in every "secure" Netscape web session.




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-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com)
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA (617) 958-3971
"Reality is not optional." --Thomas Sowell
The NEW(!) e$ Home Page: http://thumper.vmeng.com/pub/rah/
>>>>Phree Phil: Email: zldf@clark.net  http://www.netresponse.com/zldf <<<<<