IP: from Netscape -- Re: Netscape expiration specifics?

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Fri, 29 Sep 1995 15:13:49 -0700
From: Rick Schell <rick () netscape com>
To: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>,


Dave,


It was good to talk with you this afternoon.  As I described, we
were struck by Murphy yesterday, and you were an accident
victim.  First, we released the security update, 1.22, to the
net, and did not have adequate mirror coverage.  At the same
time, 1.2 beta expired, in an unfortunate coincidence.  And
finally, when the update notice pages were pushed out to our
several web servers, not all the web pages were pushed, leaving
several servers with broken links.  You seem to have been
victimized by the combination of this and beta expiration.
Several other people gave up in frustration when they could not
reach our ftp sites.  In any case, we were not prepared for the
volume of response and were felled by a couple of unfortunate
coincidences.  We certainly could have prevented all of these
events through more careful procedures, and will institute them
to prevent further occurances.


Your suggestion that we make our upgrade policy clearer to users
is a welcome one, and we should update our home pages to remind
people that evaluation copies are free, as is educational use,
and that evaluation copies, unlike beta copies, do not expire.
We will continue to force beta software to expire, so that we do
not have copies of the Navigator out there that are not
production-quality.  But we will put in some mechanism to
provide advance warning, so that our users are not struck by a
sudden expiration and a resulting rush to download, as you
suggested.  Any other suggestions you have for us as a result of
your recent experience (or others that you have had with
Netscape) would be appreciated.


rick.