What's a Mozilla?: A brief history
Mozilla (pronounced Moe-zilla) is a combination of Mosaic, the code upon which all major browsers are based, and zilla, as in Godzilla. Mozilla is a two-tiered term: Mozilla Classic is the moniker for the Mosaic-based source code for Netscape 1.0 through 4.x, while Mozilla now refers to the new source code that will be the basis for the Navigator 5.0 browser and beyond.
The Mozilla project began in mid to late 1998 when Netscape made the difficult decision to scrap the Mozilla Classic code, which is known for being bloated and overall very constraining to programmers, in favor of starting from scratch. The Mozilla code was released into an open-source agreement called the Netscape Public License (NPL), which allows any comers to not only download and work on the Mozilla source code, but also to contribute those changes back for consideration into the main Mozilla code, or "tree." Further, any company can take the Mozilla source code and make new, commercial products from it and pay no licensing fees to Netscape. In return, Netscape gets help from the developer world at large to improve and develop the code that will soon become Netscape Communicator 5.0.
In December 1998, Netscape released the Gecko Developer Preview, which amounted basically to the rendering engine for Netscape's new browser. Gecko ripped Internet Explorer to pieces for size, speed, and compliance for basic Web standards that, ironically, Microsoft developers were instrumental in writing. Microsoft has been largely silent on the subject of Mozilla.
At the beginning of 1999, the larger portion of the Mozilla browser code had yet to be written. Over the ten months since then, the majority of the work on the Mozilla browser code has been done and, a year after the initial release of the developer release of the Gecko rendering engine, Mozilla is finally in alpha, with beta soon to follow - certainly a cause for celebration, not a death knell.
How Microsoft made Mozilla
One of the most obvious consequences of Microsoft's unbridled attack on Netscape has been the company's open-source Mozilla effort - yes, Microsoft is directly responsible for the open-source Mozilla project's very
existence. By forcing Netscape to offer Navigator for free (the software used to be available on a shareware basis, with the full version costing $40) and further removing all major distribution options for Navigator, Netscape was forced to look to other avenues for revenue. Under then CEO Jim Barksdale, Netscape turned their Netcenter home page into a profitable portal, and eventually formed a 2000 member team with Sun Microsystems to work on iPlanet server software. But Communicator itself ceased to be profitable to Netscape in anything except as an integrated feature in server software and for Netscape brand recognition, and in February 1998 the Mozilla project was born.
Had Communicator remained a commercially viable product for Netscape, the company would likely never have opened up the Netscape code to the world - not if it remained their very bread and butter, as it once was - and Mozilla would not be what it is today.
