[WikiEN-l] Lies, damned lies, and statistics

[Anthony]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at 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).