Dear Pacific Information Exchange Customer:

Here's wishing you and yours a Merry Christmas and a great New Year, from

all of us at PIXI, pixi.com, aloha.com and hula.net.

I would like to take this opportunity to go over a couple of previously

discussed topics. The first is the recent release of the Mozilla

Foundation web browser called Firefox 1.0. We had included this on a free

CD that we were distributing at the recent Computer Expo at the Blaisdell.

The reason I am mentioning it again is because this browser is getting

very good reviews. See the attached copy of a reprint from an article in

the Los Angeles Times newspaper. You might want to try it out, go to

products that are available at no cost to you that make life simpler.

Note that we support these products should you have any questions.

The second item is a real bonus for you as it might save you some money.

I asked why the rate went up and he said that I would have to book this additional night via "hoteldiscount.com" to get the original rate.

So the lesson learned was that there was an $18.98 savings for this hotel

room by booking on-line. What if I had stayed a week? At any rate, this

is another one of our services, and I wanted to pitch you all to use it,

as it is a money saver and one of the benefits of using our services and

web sites.

Again, Merry Christmas and have a great New Year.

Aloha,

Stan Kubota

President

Pacific Information Exchange, Inc.

skubota@aloha.com

Reprint of LA Times, Michael Hiltzik Article

GOLDEN STATE

Building a Better Browser at Mozilla

Michael Hiltzik

November 25, 2004

Let's dispose first of the rather mundane David and Goliath story that has

been the focus of most recent news coverage of the Mozilla Foundation.

"We're not out to hurt Microsoft," Brendan Eich says, "so much as to help

the Web."

Eich's words might sound like mere braggadocio if not for the startling

success of the first consumer product released by the foundation, a

nonprofit descendant of Netscape Communications Corp. that he serves as

chief software architect.

Mozilla's free Firefox 1.0 Web browser, unveiled Nov. 9 to ecstatic

reviews, has been downloaded since then by more than 6 million users;

counting earlier test versions, it may already be running on more than 30

million computers.

It may also be responsible for the first recorded decline in market share

experienced by Microsoft Corp.'s Explorer browser in at least five years.

Firefox's advantages over Explorer make its rapid acceptance unsurprising.

Among other virtues, it's faster, more resistant to viruses and spyware

and full of useful features that Microsoft, complacent in its

near-monopoly, has never provided for Explorer. (Firefox is available at

Even more interesting, Firefox is the product of an informal group of

fewer than 20 programmers, many of them volunteers from around the world

working for free, assisted by thousands of technology aficionados who have

contributed ideas, identified bugs and tested interim versions on their

computers over the years. Their emotional investment in the project

resembles that of Apple Macintosh fans: Programmers have already developed

Firefox versions in 24 languages, including Slovenian, Chinese and

Asturian.

Firefox could be the most successful general-purpose program ever created

by the "open source" process, in which the programming code of a project

or system is publicly available for enhancement or extension by

programmers at large.

For all that the term "open source" may conjure an image of thousands of

programmers hacking away in isolation, Firefox - which Mozilla will soon

supplement with an e-mail program, Thunderbird - also shows that a

successful open-source project can't be merely a public free-for-all.

To be successful, it must be carefully managed, although not as firmly as

a corporate effort aimed at creating a proprietary product. "There have to

be one or two minds in charge," says Eich.

The trick is to strike a balance between authority and indulgence. Says

Walt Scacchi, a research scientist at UC Irvine's Institute for Software

Research, who has been studying open-source projects: "It's a question of

how much guidance and coordination is required to move things forward

without being corrupted by authority."

Indeed, Eich has spent years mediating among participants who work on

Mozilla projects for personal reasons and with varied philosophies.

"It's a very heterodox community," he told me in the Mozilla headquarters

tucked away in a corner of a Mountain View, Calif., office park. (The

office is dominated by a model suspension bridge, fashioned entirely out

of empty soda cans and paper clips, that once adorned the Netscape

offices.)

"Some are hobbyists who only want to scratch their own itch. Some are into

the challenge of doing complex software. Some are motivated by getting

their code out to millions of users."

In a development gratifying to Mozilla, many are engineers who have been

assigned full time by their employers to develop applications exploiting

its code.

Although Eich says that animosity to Microsoft ranks fairly low as an

inspiration, Mozilla owes its birth to the giant company's ruthlessness.

In 1998, Netscape's business of selling its pioneering browser and related

software for profit was destroyed by Microsoft's decision to give away

Explorer for free.

Forced to follow suit and thus unable to support a large engineering

staff, Netscape decided to publicly distribute its source code - the basic

programming blueprint. It hoped that volunteers would use it to develop

their own innovations, preventing Microsoft from securing an absolute

browser monopoly, while allowing Netscape to develop its own specialized

(and hopefully profitable) applications. Supervising the effort was a team

of Netscape programmers named, after the Netscape browser's code name, the

Mozilla group.

The strategy failed to save Netscape, which was absorbed in 1999 by

America Online. AOL last year donated its remains, including old Netscape

software code, to the newly formed Mozilla Foundation and donated $2

million in seed capital.

The foundation was largely the idea of Mitchell Baker, a former Netscape

lawyer who now serves as its president. Baker says she always understood

that a large-scale project aimed at producing products that would have

broad utility and require constant innovation required an organizational

structure that would give its products an identifiable brand and allow it

to employ a crucial core of personnel. The payroll now comes to about 15,

she says, most of whom are engineers supervising the open-source work.

The Firefox launch plainly has forced Baker to consider how to deal with

the attention and responsibility - and possibly the revenue - that may

come from market success, without sacrificing Mozilla's open-source

ecology. It may be tempting to bask in Firefox's rapid acceptance -

"People tell us that it's such a better Web experience that if they try

it, they really like it" - but a new set of challenges lies ahead.

"I'm not sure of all the ways the stresses will manifest themselves," she

told me this week. "We're going to be looking at the pressures of

success."