I guess this is old hat for most of you, but, anyway, here‘s a mildly amusing page by Jamie Zawinski (he of the amusing homepage) on the “sanitization” process that Netscape’s code suffered prior to its release. Says Jamie:
When we created mozilla.org and released (most of) the source code to Netscape Confusicator 4.x, Netscape’s lawyers made us go through a big “sanitization” process on the source code. [...] they also made us take out all the dirty words. Specifically, “any text containing vulgar or offensive words or expressions; any text that might be slanderous or libelous to individuals and/or institutions.”
There follows a list of heavy swearing code snippets and comments. Strikingly, one of the censored words is hack. WTF?
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