On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 10:06 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
Netscape (presumably the "for-profit company" you're talking about here) spun off the Mozilla Foundation as a nonprofit entity way back when they first open-sourced what was originally the partly-completed Netscape 5 version of their browser.
Netscape formed the "Mozilla Organization", which was an unincorporated entity (if you want to call it an entity at all, it was more an open source project than an entity) much like Nupedia/Wikipedia when it was before the WMF was formed. The Mozilla Foundation was incorporated much later, after Firefox was already started.
By the way, Blake Ross was an intern at AOL/Netscape, and David Hyatt was an employee at AOL/Netscape, when Firefox was born. They didn't work for the Mozilla Foundation, which didn't yet exist, and they didn't work for the Mozilla Organization, which probably didn't even have a bank account. Moreover, I bet they had a boss, and I bet they worked under the direction of that boss. Should we call that boss the "sole founder" of Firefox?