On Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:29:56 -0400, cimonavaro(a)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.
--
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