The Mozilla Story
In the late 1990s, Netscape was facing a serious problem. Its browser, the Netscape Communicator, was rapidly losing market share to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and it was difficult for them to define a competitive business case to justify ongoing development and licensing of their proprietary browser. Rather than simply shut down development, however, Netscape decided to turn it into an open source project and to license their software to the public under an open source license. But which license?
Netscape resisted using an academic license because, in the company's opinion, such licenses don't go far enough to return certain modified code back to the community. (This history is discussed in much more detail at www.mozilla.org ...
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