netscape to become freely redistributable

[Ross Ihaka]

Douglas Bates writes:
 > I presume by now that most everyone has heard that, starting later
 > this quarter with Netscape 5.0's developers' release, the Netscape
 > browser program and its source code will become freely
 > redistributable.  They didn't say it would be GPL'd (GNU Public
 > License) but they said their source code would be available in the
 > spirit of the GPL.
 > 
 > Initially it bothered me that the start.help() function in R tried to
 > find netscape on your system and started that to read the .html files.
 > I thought it might be better to rely on a freely available browser
 > like mosaic or chimera2 or arena.  Even lynx would have been an
 > alternative.  I find I still often use lynx for browsing when I
 > am on a a machine with 8 bit planes of color because I don't want a
 > bloated netscape eating up my color table.
 > 
 > In retrospect the decision to standardize on netscape and to use their
 > extensions to the HTML standards in the R documentation looks like a
 > good one.

Yowser!  This is very good news indeed.

However, I think we should stay away from anyone's HTML extensions.
On the Mac and under Windows, the other browser may be prefereble.

	Ross
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