Open Sources 2.0

Chapter 1. The Mozilla Project: Past and Future

Mitchell Baker

The Mozilla project was launched on March 31, 1998. On this date, the source code for the Netscape Communicator product was made publicly available under an open source license, the “Mozilla Organization” was founded to guide the project, and development of the codebase began to move from a proprietary model into an open model coupled with commercial involvement and management practices.

Of these three elements, the release of the source code is discussed in Open Sources. In summary, the source code was prepared for public release by removing all code that Netscape didn’t have the right to license under an open source license, and then replacing those pieces necessary for the code to compile and run. At the same time, a new open source license—the Mozilla Public License—was written, reviewed, and accepted by the open source community, including the Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org). The other two topics—the story of mozilla.org and the development of the Mozilla project—are the subject of this essay. The creation of the Mozilla Public License is generally an untold story, but it occurred during the time covered by the original Open Sources book and isn’t discussed in detail here.

Each of these three activities was a step into the unknown. Basic development principals of the open source model (“running code speaks,” peer review, leadership based on technical merit) were known. But the combination of open ...