Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Why first systems stay lean
Brooks introduced the second-system effect in 1975 in The Mythical Man-Month, after watching the pattern repeat across projects at IBM. A first system is spare and clean because the builder knows how little they know. Every frill that occurs to them gets stored away for next time, and when next time arrives, all of it goes in at once without the filtering that tight time and scope forced on the first build.
Success adds overconfidence. The discipline that came from constraint gets credited to skill, so restraint fades just as resources grow.
The Netscape rewrite
Netscape's rewrite is the standard example. Work on the second-generation browser began in 1998 and shipped as Netscape 6.0 nearly three years later, slower, more complex, and less stable than the version before it. Joel Spolsky's 2000 essay Things You Should Never Do called the rewrite among the worst strategic decisions in software history. Netscape's market share collapsed while it was being built, and Internet Explorer took the browser market.
Where did Brooks see this pattern first?
Fred Brooks managed the development of IBM's OS/360 operating system in the 1960s, one of the largest software projects of its time. The experience of that project, and of the teams that followed it, is the basis for The Mythical Man-Month. The book also contains Brooks's law, which holds that adding people to a late software project makes it later.
What happened to the Netscape code afterward?
Netscape released the source code of its browser in March 1998 and started the Mozilla project to develop it. The Mozilla team built a new rendering engine called Gecko. The Firefox browser, first released as version 1.0 in 2004, grew out of that work.
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