On Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:29:56 -0400, cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
and I think it's the same reason I wouldn't feel comfortable calling Hyatt and Ross "co-founders" of Firefox. Firefox, like Wikipedia, was a side project sponsored by a for-profit company which eventually supplanted the main project, and a non-profit organization was later formed to take ownership of it (sort of, in the sense that one can "own" an open source project in the first place).
From my own (admittedly limited) knowledge of the history of the
Mozilla project, I don't think the above is a correct description.
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. Development then proceeded as an independent open-source project with both volunteers and Netscape employees doing it as a side project, first to try to finish "Netscape 5", then to scrap that and rewrite the rendering engine as "Gecko" and make it part of a new "Mozilla suite". Ultimately, the Mozilla suite was released by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, and Netscape also made it the basis for its own Netscape 6 version (they skipped Netscape 5 for marketing reasons, though the "5.0" is stuck apparently permanently in the user agent string, while M$IE has *its* user agent string stuck permanently at 4.0, because everybody's afraid to change it due to ignorant browser-sniffing sites... but I digress).
Then, later on, a side project spun off of Mozilla to create a "leaner, cleaner" browser without all the application-suite stuff; this was first called Phoenix, then Firebird, then (after name conflicts with both of those names) Firefox. At some point the Mozilla foundation (which pre-existed Firefox) decided to make this the primary browser of their project, so that's the point where a "side project" became the "main project" for them. But that's within the context of a nonprofit operation.
Still later, the Mozilla Foundation decided to launch a wholly-owned, for-profit Mozilla Corporation that's in charge of actually releasing and marketing products based on what is developed by the project, and trying to make money on it to fund the project.
2009/4/19 Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name:
From my own (admittedly limited) knowledge of the history of the Mozilla project, I don't think the above is a correct description. 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.
No, they started using "mozilla.org" as a domain name, but it wasn't a nonprofit until AOL dumped it in 2003 and supplied $2m for them to form the Mozilla Foundation.
Development then proceeded as an independent open-source project with both volunteers and Netscape employees doing it as a side project, first to try to finish "Netscape 5", then to scrap that and rewrite the rendering engine as "Gecko" and make it part of a new "Mozilla suite".
No, Netscape heavily directed the development. Being a good independent developer was a good way to get hired by Netscape, too.
- d.
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.
I just recently read a great story about the birth of Firefox (by Ben Goodger, one of the lead developers), which unfortunately seems to be the only insider perspective in existence: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009698.html
Good reading if you are interested in the history of the Mozilla project (it only covers a narrow portion of the topic, but it does so well).
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?